Hmmm. “Terrible at flirting” is such a benign example I’m not sure I can extrapolate from it.
I know Chronos has his own take on my hypothetical FBW’s motivations/reasoning, but let’s stipulate that her thought process really is “I’m going to keep helping SBW, and not CWD, because even though he needs help more, she deserves it more.” (Let’s also agree that no white dudes are going to step up and help CWD, or at least that FBW has no reason to expect they will and is not factoring that into her decision.) Is deciding that someone who needs your help less, still deserves it more, a value judgment? Is it bigotry? Is it justifiable in this case?
I don’t know what “deserves it” means. Depending on what it means, it’s a value judgment or a recognition of external factors.
If it means, “She deserves it more because White men are trash and fuck 'em,” sure, that’s bigotry. If it means, “She deserves it more because as a Black woman the deck’s stacked against her, so for her to have made it here, she probably has a kickass work ethic,” that wouldn’t seem like bigotry.
If you’re not dating him because he’s Belgian, you’re bigoted. Period. You’ve made a judgement about an individual based on the characteristics of a group, not of the individual himself. That is exactly the definition of bigoted.
Bigoted comes in lots of gradation of social harm. Some examples feed into social oppression, and some, such as affirmative action, push the other way. They’re all bigoted. But if you’re making individual decisions based on group characteristics, you’re engaging in a bigoted thought process.
It sounds to me like you’re really struggling to come up with ways to define both positive beneficial bigotedness and negative harmful bigotedness. Which may be as simple as whether or not it feeds or opposes existing systemic oppression.
But IMO we need to get this mess out in the open and de-stunk before we’re going to get much farther.
I don’t see that, but whatever. Replace “flirting” with “coding,” and replace “date” with “hire.”
If I say, “He’s terrible at coding,” that’s a value judgment. If I say, “I don’t want to hire him,” that’s not a value judgment.
"He’s terrible at coding,” while a value judgment, isn’t based on an irrelevant characteristic, and so it’s not bigoted. “He’s terrible at coding because he’s Belgian” is, so it’s bigoted. “I don’t want to hire him because he’s Belgian” is gonna raise some eyebrows and questions, but it’s not a value judgment, nor is it (to the best of my knowledge) feeding into a system of oppression, so by itself that decision is neither bigoted nor oppressive.
Not at all. There can be many legitimate reasons not to date someone who’s Belgian that don’t involve value judgments, from the common to the rare.
Common: I live in NC, and don’t ever want to leave my community; I worry that someone from another country is going to want to move back to their country at some point, and since I’m looking for something long-term, I’m looking for folks with deep family ties to my own community.
Rare: My brother was eaten by a Belgian cannibal last year, and although I know #notallBelgians, the grief is too fresh, and I don’t want to be reminded of my brother’s grisly death every time I smooch my sweetie.
Your examples disprove, in my view, your case. In the first example you don’t want to marry someone who may want to leave NC. That’s not about Belgians. that’s about anyone not from NC. You took a specific criteria: Local community ties and then said “I’m not marrying [name] because they lack community ties because they are from Belgium, not NC” And frankly, until you know whether any particular Belgian does have strong family ties to NC, you’re doing the standard bigot thing: substituting the assumed parameters of the average group member for the actual parameters of the actual person you’re judging.
If you’re not getting this I may have to simply disengage because the way you and I slide from the particular to the general and back are nearly orthogonal to one another. Which will be unproductive. I’m struggling in a different way with @Esprise_Me’s perspectives, so I’m certainly willing to admit I’m the one lost in space here w oddball personal definitions of commonly terms.
My goal here is not to “win”, the goal is to learn and explore together. But when all our shoelaces are tied together, we just end up in a heap on the floor.
Okay, sure, fine–I’m not interested in debating the definition of “Belgian” here. My point is that there are sometimes legitimate reasons to make decisions about relationships with someone based on facts about their life experiences. Lumping those all in with bigotry seems like a dangerous overbroadening of the term.
I really don’t think that’s the standard bigot thing. Thinking that someone with a specific life experience is likelier to make a specific decision isn’t bigotry. It’s not bigoted to think someone from community A has stronger ties to community A than to community B.
Think about classic examples of bigotry. They don’t really hew to this format. They hew to the idea of making a value judgment about someone based on their irrelevant characteristics.
-“a value judgment or a recognition of external factors”-- are those mutually exclusive? I would think a mere recognition of external factors would be very neutral and fact-based, e.g. “as a black woman she may have faced obstacles related to racism that a white man would not have faced.” Once you add “that means she deserves X,” you’ve wandered into value judgment territory, no?
-“because white men are trash and fuck 'em”–well, yeah, calling an entire racial group “trash” makes it pretty easy for a bigotry accusation to stick. Can you try toning it down to see if you can find the threshold? “Because white men have enough advantages already, so I’m going to purposefully withhold anything I don’t have to give them, in order to level the playing field.” “Because white men don’t do enough to combat racial injustice, so I’m going to focus all my efforts on helping my sisters.” “Because white men’s talents are automatically suspect due to the effects of privilege. Just as I have concluded that SBW must have a kickass work ethic to overcome having the deck stacked against her, so it follows that CWD must have just failed upward into this job, and he needs to get fired to make room for a TBW.” What do you think? Bigoted?
-“as a Black woman the deck’s stacked against her, so for her to have made it here, she probably has a kickass work ethic”-- I’m struggling to find the line here especially. It’s true that racism is an obstacle. It’s true that generally people who face obstacles have to work hard to overcome them, and it’s certainly a justifiable viewpoint that working hard means you deserve… something good. But this chain of inferences is rather pat. We don’t know what obstacles CWD has faced. It’s possible, IMO, that he might have had to overcome more, and might be working harder, than SBW. It’s still a step removed from “people of X race are/aren’t hard workers,” but only a step.
Interesting question, and no, I don’t know that I can. There are going to be edge cases where decisions and observations bleed into judgments; it’s probably going to be something of a spectrum, not a “threshold” situation.
I still don’t know that “deserves it” is a cogent enough thought to categorize, though. That’s why I tried to give examples that explain it.
Again, I don’t know that observing someone’s identity in a society, and making inferences about how society has treated them, is necessarily bigoted.
That said, I think that a huge part of the problem is that the examples we’re using are really vague, and while I think this framework can be helpful, the devil’s gonna be in the details. The framework depends on folks’ actions and the reasons behind them, as well as on their beliefs and value judgments about others. An example that leaves any of that out is going to be hard to talk about successfully.
Most definitions of bigotry are subjective in the same way that I convinced you to make the definition of systemic oppression subjective. “Unjustly deny or diminish”. “mistreating anyone”. And now you may be forming a definition of bigotry that includes the words “illegitimate reasons”.
You will find that any term you want to define such that it is always wrong is, by its very nature, subjective.
It is tempting to argue an act is wrong because it is racist and racism is wrong, but this is a circular argument. A person who thinks they are doing the right thing will necessarily conclude they are not being racist. Sure, you can redefine racism to remove subjectivity. But then racism is no longer necessarily wrong.
You have to get to the core of the matter… why isn’t reverse racism as bad as traditional racism? Why is it more wrong to contribute to systemic oppression against women than it is to be openly bigoted towards men? Why is racism wrong in the first place? What makes one act more wrong than another? The answer isn’t to be found in semantic debates about what is or isn’t bigotry or oppression.
There is an answer, and I suggest that for you it has to do with quantifiable harm.
I hope you’ll try rereading Max’s post, perhaps after a good night’s sleep, because it makes some cogent points.
Again, I don’t think your inability to craft a facially neutral test for whether something is bigotry and/or bad is a semantics issue. No matter how you phrase it, there isn’t a decision tree or purity test that allows you to just analyze act + intent + impact to get a bad bigotry score. Rather, as I mentioned before, I think a more useful framework is competing rights. I have the right to mentor whom I want. My potential mentees have the right to a workplace free of discrimination. There may be some overlap where those rights clash. Best we can do is analyze each claim on its merits and reluctantly break ties.
Well, no. He’s missing the central thesis of what I’m getting at, nitpicking at the edges (as though it’s crucial to point out that oppression involves unfair treatment and as though is was some kind of concession for me to admit that), and criticizing me for not establishing the objective basis for a moral system in a manner that has vexed philosophers since Socrates. Those criticisms are not especially interesting, nor do they indicate awareness of the basic idea of the OP.
Again, phrased slightly differently in case that helps: there are different behaviors and thought processes regarding racial, gender, class, and other groups. People sometimes incorrectly conflate these behaviors/thoughts to treat them all as equally bad; other times, people distinguish between them, and incorrectly claim that since a behavior/thought doesn’t fall in the most harmful category, it’s just peachy. Recognizing that these categories exist, that they’re not all equally bad, but that they’re still worth avoiding, is helpful.
Nitpicking whether “oppression” involves harmful behavior? I suppose that’s helpful for someone who’s not me.
In other words, there are two significant camps that disagree with the premise:
Folks who say “Hate speech is hate speech” and the like, eliding differences between oppression and bigotry and jerkiness in this manner.
Folks who say “Human males are a failed experiment” and the like, and defend their words by saying that men aren’t victims of oppression for being male.
The idea of a framework is to help these two groups understand how wrong they are; and the idea of putting this here is to engage in debate with these two groups.
The idea is not to debate where the line is between rational beliefs and bigotry, or whether acts that treat two groups differently in a fair way comprise oppression. Those are tangential subjects.
I will admit in an instant that, after two failed guesses, the basic idea of your OP eludes me.
Helpful for what purpose? Convincing someone to avoid certain behavior?
I suggest that categorizing harmful behaviors the way you have is useless for the purpose of convincing someone to personally avoid such behavior.
Any individual who thinks such categories of acts are not categorically wrong necessarily has a different approach to ethics and categories are not helpful in persuading them to avoid certain behavior.
Any individual who thinks such categories of acts are categorically wrong, but of equal wrongness, will already avoid such behavior. Therefore in that situation the categories are not helpful.
Any individual who thinks such categories of acts are categorically wrong, with different levels of wrongness, who also thinks a particular behavior is unjustified, will not need any persuasion to avoid that particular behavior. Therefore in that situation the categories are not helpful.
Any individual who thinks such categories of acts are categorically wrong, with different levels of wrongness, who also thinks a particular behavior is justified, will necessarily disagree that the categories apply to this particular behavior. Therefore in that situation the categories are not helpful.
I can’t prove a negative, so the burden is on you to demonstrate how your categories are helpful. Especially so if helpfulness is the main question for debate.
I continue to suggest that there is a reason (harm-avoidance?) you find systemic oppression more wrong than personal bigotry, and in turn find personal bigotry more wrong than mere jerkishness. This rationale would be helpful for the purpose of persuading an individual to avoid any particular behavior.
The divisions in this thread were a useful point of view to use when reading an article about the school district my kid attends.
Black and Latino kids are disciplined and suspended at a much higher rate than white kids, even when matching on the severity and type of infraction, the punishment Blacks and Latinos receive is more severe.
The district viewed this as a problem of systemic racism, and they streamlined their punishment guidelines to make them uniform and consistent, and implemented staff training to avoid the necessity of punishment in the first place. The parents of the punished kids see it as individual bigotry, “that vice-principal suspended my kid because of his skin color.”
Both of them are right, of course. This is a case of systemic racism arising as an emergent property of individual bigotry.
Be that as it may, I still don’t see how it is helpful to distinguish personal bigotry from systemic oppression. It doesn’t sound like there was much daylight between the parents of the punished kids and the district. Those parents probably wanted to can the vice principal.
At a more fundamental level it is agreed by all but the most vile racists that it is unfair to inflict greater punishment on a child due to their (perceived) race. Anybody presented with objective data where Blacks and Latinos face more severe punishments for the same infractions as Caucasians must admit there is a problem, without distinguishing between systemic oppression and individual bigotry. Any solution can be presented and even justified just based on fairness, without clearly distinguishing systemic versus individual racism. I just don’t see a good reason to get into categories of racism in the first place.
There’s an ongoing thread about Incels, and I think I’m seeing some of the confusion between systemic oppression and bigotry over there, but I’m not sure I want to wade into that.