I have a friend - let’s call him “D’Brickashaw” - who likes to pull a racialist bait and switch on me. We have had many conversations on race before, so all of our conversations on race carry with them content from previous conversations.
D’brickashaw has socially conservative leanings. Like many social conservatives, he thinks people like me are naive, dogmatic, and closed to the truth. And the truth is that different racial groups are innately different.
I’m not, in fact, entirely closed to the idea that different racial groups could have genetic differences, on average. I find it really hard to account for the preponderance of amazingly successful Jewish scientists through some sort of cultural explanation, for example. I do think, however, that judgment should be withheld until a large amount of data has been gathered, that cultural explanations can account for many differences in average racial differences, and that such explanations should always be understood as referring only to the average member of a certain racial group.
In previous conversations, D’Brickashaw has brought up the idea of innate racial differences, and I’ve agreed that it is possible that they could exist. I’ve also stated that, if they exist, I think that the differences aren’t as huge as people think they are.
But D’brick is not just looking for me to agree with this relatively mild (though still controversial) stance. He doesn’t merely want me to admit that Kenyans could have a hereditary advantage in long-distance running or that there could be some heredity in the figures for Jewish Nobel Prize winners. He wants to make statements that one would generally interpret as having a racist meaning, and he wants me to not have any objections.
D’brickashaw likes to use derogatory terms. He sometimes refers to a woman as a “bitch” not because she actually is a bitch, but just because she’s a woman. He uses the word “gay” to mean “bad” or “stupid”, and sometimes makes fun of homosexuals. Once, when he was drunk and making too much noise, I told him to quiet down. He told me to not “be such a Jew about it”.
D’brick is one of those people who likes to make ridiculous statements and, when you object, defensively explain them away. “No, I was just kidding,” he might say, “you know black people call themselves ‘niggers’ too, it’s not hateful.” He never really means to insult any particular group - if you take his word for it.
Last night, I had him and two other friends over to watch some soccer videos. At one point we began to talk about how soccer was on the rise in Africa, and he said something along the lines of “once the niggers start really playing soccer they’re going to beat the white people for sure”. He went on to talk about how “black people are athletically superior to white people”. Then he targeted me, saying that I was the kind of person who wants to shut up people who say the sorts of things that he says.
He was obviously trying to bait me. The bait works like this:
- Either establish, or understand that the other person believes, that innate racial differences could exist.
- Make statements that go well beyond what one could reasonably infer about certain racial groups given the available evidence. Make sure they sound bigoted.
- When the other person objects, say that they’re denying that racial differences can exist and call them dogmatic.
- Twist your own bigoted statements so that they actually sound reasonable, ie “when I say niggers, I just mean black people, I was just talking about black people”.
He would make fun of me by saying things like “yeah, uh-huh, I’m just a racist white guy, oh racist me”. He tries to portray himself as the victim of some vast liberal conspiracy (of which I am a member) to quash social conservatives. I’m just calling him racist for daring to say that black people are innately better at sports than white people.
I don’t know if D’brickashaw really hates any particular racial group, but he’s obviously a weak asshole who is just out to bait me. He wants to make ridiculous statements and defend them with obviously manipulative tactics.
Oh, and he also asked me how many black friends I have. Turns out he has more black friends than I do.
I could describe things further, but for the sake of brevity, I’ll stop. It is hard for me to decide whether to put this in MPSIMS, IMHO, or Great Debates. I’m going to put it in IMHO because I’m not really interested in discussing race and hereditary ability (my position has been stated: differences could exist, but let’s not jump to conclusions). I want to know this:
Has anybody else faced the racialist bait and switch before?
