I will never “mistakenly” torture a dog. I will never “mistakenly” be racist. (I will never intentionally do either of those things either.)
I do, of course, make mistakes. Like stepping on a dog’s tail or the equivalent transgression to a person. Those are mistakes. They are not racism (or dog-ism). They are not motivated by racism. The fact that I make mistakes doesn’t make me a racist, it makes me a human.
The problem seems to be that SJWs are quick to label otherwise normal human behavior as ____-ism or ____-phobia when it isn’t. Which is why this thread it titled as it is.
I realize that–like people fighting Alanis Morissette defining “irony” and the people who use “literally” when they mean “figuratively”–I may be in a losing battle here, but I do think making words less precise and less–well–definitive hurts communications and has more potential for making enemies than friends.
The fight over the word “racist” is little more than a semantic argument, the kind that arises as the common language evolves or degrades, depending. Racism is only one variety of unjust and inhumane prejudice, there are many.
If we adopt “furnogism” to mean any of the varieties of unjust biases, the thing itself is unchanged, we just call it “furnogism”. Semantic arguments that arise from the evolution of language itself are trivial and unworthy. We needn’t waste our time with them.
Brown people of all varieties have a legitimate beef with white America. Our challenge is to change that, as much as we can, as soon as we can. Taking a lot longer than we thought. But whether we call if “racism” or “furngoism” or “Fred” doesn’t mean shit to a tree.
Nearly 2 decades ago, I was at a friend’s house, playing some games.
One of my acquaintances there had recently gotten a new ear ring that he was showing off. It was a 5 or 6 karat “diamond”.
He was asking me if I thought it looked real, and I said that cubic zirconium looks pretty much indistinguishable to the naked eye from diamond, so it looked real to me, but, I added, that it did not look real, because it didn’t look like he could afford such a thing.
Now, I was judging that on the fact that a diamond of that size would be tens, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars, and I knew what kind of car he drove, and I saw the clothes he was wearing, but he asked, “Is that because I am black?”
Well, that made me step back a bit. I don’t think that that was one of the things going through my mind, but, even to this day, I cannot rule out that his skin color, and therefore the perception of his likely wealth, did not factor into my comment.
I am not sure whether or not it was a racist comment, because I do not know for sure whether any part of it was based on his race. I know that I did not mean it as one, but just as sure as I am that I did not mean it that way, he was fairly sure that I did.
I could have gone defensive, and been indignant about being called a racist, but instead I tried to see my words from another perspective, and saw that yeah, what I said could very validly be considered to have been a comment based on his race.
If I was as good as you, then I would never need to worry about such inadvertent comments, but us mere mortals do make mistakes sometimes, and say things without thinking of the entirety of the situation and how it could be perceived. Sometimes, we may even be influenced by the systemic racial bias in our culture and our media to make these sorts of judgements based on another’s appearance without even thinking about it.
Once we have achieved your level of perfection, then such things will no longer be an issue, but in order to reach your level, it will take some amount of learning and maybe even mistakes on our part.
Well, maybe, but maybe not. Pretty common to form an offhand opinion of somebody else’s economic status, lot of folks spend a good portion of their money just to let you know they have it.
In the same situation, I probably would have answered “No, I just assumed you were too smart to wear thousands of dollars on your ear as a bummer lure.”
Let’s invent another situation. Now, a cannibal is a person who eats other people. Let’s say PETA decides to redefine “cannibal” as a person who eats any animal. Let’s say that definition becomes popular among PETA members, leaks out to vegans, and starts making a beachhead among vegetarians. But then one of those people runs across someone In Real Life eating a hamburger and starts calling them a cannibal, telling how awful it is to be a cannibal, and insisting that they change their cannibal ways. Do you think that would be a productive line of conversation, leading to increased understanding and dialogue? Or do you think the accuser would face someone confusedly and angrily defending themselves?
A stilted, complex and silly hypothetical. Shirley you have better things to do?
Do I approve of aggressive, self-righteous hectoring? No, in my experience, it is almost invariably a natural born asshole masking his aggression with presumed virtue. But even when they are right, the vice of aggression overwhelms whatever virtue there is in vegetarianism. And, of course, far more likely to provoke enmity rather than sober assessment.
If this does not answer your question, I’d prefer not to answer another. Pointing out the bleeding obvious is tiresome.
No, it isn’t. A word is only useful if the definition of the word is known by both sides of the conversation. And the expansive definition of racism is a niche “in group” definition. You may be so deep inside the in group that you don’t realize it, but it is.
If we, as a society, chose to give animals all the rights of a human, then they would be right in that accusation.
Peta does not get to make that determination that animals get equal treatment, just as abolitionists in the 1870’s did not get to define whether or not people could be considered to be property.
Society decided that people should not be treated as property, and that all people should receive equal treatment under the law, and by implication, should receive equal socia treatment as well, but that part’s not by law. It is perfectly legal to be a racist, pretty much the only time that anti racist efforts are enforced by law is when it deals with public accommodation. You are perfectly legally allowed to put up a sign on your house telling whatever ethnicity you do not like exactly how you feel about them.
So, to complete your (rather silly) hypothetical, you would have a society in which animals are treated as people by law, but it is still okay to eat them. In that case, the only way to get people to stop doing what society allows but wishes to discourage is through confrontation when they perform this action.
Otherwise, if peta simply decided to send out people calling people cannibals for eating meat, then they have no basis whatsoever to make that claim.
No. Words have meanings. Changing the meaning to fit your argument isn’t semantics, it’s disingenuous. Broadening the definition of racism until it encompasses potentially everything and anything both trivializes actual racism and criminalizes (figuratively) normal behavior.
You only think it is a silly hypothetical because you totally missed the point. It wasn’t about the rights of animals, it was about an insular subculture redefining an established word then facing problems when they try to use that word in the greater culture. I could have said that they decided that “apples” also included “bananas and oranges” or that “today” also includes “yesterday and tomorrow” or any number of other examples. When you try to apply a in-group jargon to the general population, don’t be surprised if there is poor communication.
Because the definition of “cannibal” the hypothetical PTEA is using has been torturously (see what I did there?) redefined by them to mean something they can use to attack others. Kind of like “racist” and “racism” has been torturously (I’m on a roll!!) redefined to mean something other than it actually is. And for the same reason.