It’s like claiming that you’re not in any way influenced by Christian theology. You may not realize that you are. You might be an avowed atheist who has never stepped foot in a church. But the reality of living in a former Christian nation shaped by the western canon is that you just are deeply influenced by Christianity, whether you know it or not.
It’s like claiming that you’re not in any way influenced by gender. Or claiming that you’re not in any way influenced by capitalist ideas about property and individual merit. It’s just preposterous on its face for anyone in such societies to claim. You just can’t grow up in societies shaped by huge overarching social forces, like racial hierarchies, without being influenced by them, including by the ideologies they create and reinforce.
That’s all true regardless of your race, I would add–though generally being the object of racial hierarchies makes it easier for you to identify the parts of your ideas and behavior that are shaped by them, and you are certainly more motivated to do so.
Well now, I’ll leave it up to you to re-read what I actually said. My words are there for all to see but nowhere will you see the phrase “irrational dislike”. What you’ve written above is not relevant to my point.
Dr. Strangelove (to whom I was responding) gave a very clear example with regards to treating a particular group with preferential freindliness based on past experience. That is what I responded to.
In what way does any of that relate to “baser impulses”? (which I’m assuming to mean an instinctive and inherent behaviour). I don’t think anyone is born christian or capitalist so I don’t see the relevance.
Baser impulses is a red herring. Your claim is that “I don’t think I’m in any meaningful way racist.”
But even if that red herring were important, “instinct” it’s a perfectly satisfactory shorthand for the kind of less-than-conscious premises people hold or biases they have as a result of these big social influences.
I do not see much of a qualitative difference between ‘preferential friendliness’ and ‘irrational dislike’. If you feel a ‘preferential friendliness’ to people who don’t wear kilts, you are being prejudiced against people who do wear kilts.
The way you set it up gives nobody any possible defence against a charge of racism, (clearly only a racist would deny that they are racist) and I think that is shortsighted, divisive, unhelpful and dilutes the charge of “racism” to be meaningless.
Now you must think that I am racist in some meaningful way. That can only be manifested through something I think, say or do, so how have you come to that conclusion?
whenever someone comes up with a new measuring device, I and a lot of other folks think first “so, what’s he going to use this for now?” A few people alluded to it, but it should be spelled out directly.
the Richter scale for earthquakes is based around how earthquakes affect human habitats, as described. Is this racism scale supposed to describe racism in a similar way? it doesn’t seem to. It’s not based on how much the racism affects the subject of the racism, it’s just based on how significant one observer thinks the various prejudices are. My thinking here is, that it matters very much who has what feelings, and also how they decide to apply them. After all, a guy who thinks all members of a group are horrible, but who lives alone and never does anything to or about anyone, is a lot less harmful than a person who has a mild predilection against a group, is in a position of power, and decides to make important decisions about the fate of others based on it.
I remember well, in the 1970’s watching as the various civil rights movements all foundered for the same basic reason: people leading them getting too caught up in chasing minutia. Unwilling to stop at getting rid of ACTIVELY DAMAGING racism, they indulged in self righteous posturing and protests, eventually, over anything that made THEM think that someone MIGHT have been thinking obliquely about someone ELSE who had a bias. Games were played about naming conventions for each group, and you had to keep up with the changes week to week, or be shunted out of the “free society” club. The ultimate was declaring that if you are black, you are NOT racist, and if you are white, you ARE, by definition. That’s when most of the American society just got tired of listening to the concern altogether.
A left over of those days, is seen above, in the form of the person who is sensitive about being told that “everyone is racist to a degree.” And I agree with his objection. Few things in the world more useless, than declaring AS YOU ARE SORTING, that all your categories are ultimately meaningless.
what do you do with the people in each category? Again, back in the day, some people actively wanted to “re-educate” everyone out of being racist. Repair us all, so to speak. I saw eventually that that is a ton harder to do than the eager teachers of those days seemed to be aware. Not because racism CAN’T be overcome, but because it’s so easy to cause MORE racism, and even BE RACIST about how you try to do that.
one of the other mistakes I saw in the past, was to misidentify various biases and prejudices. People who didn’t like kinky hair, even if they didn’t like it on ANYONE, was said to be anti-black, because more blacks had kinky hair than didn’t. And blacks who wanted straight hair, regardless of why, were told that they were racist against their own race, whether they showed zero such bias anywhere else in their life or not.
Anyway. If the goal is to have a scale so as to bring resources to bear, or to decide who to act on, and who not to, then the scale should probably be based on how much effect each individual has on others, rather than on what bothers them.
Charges? Defense? This isn’t court. You’re not being hauled in on First Degree Anti-Blackness. I am simply observing the truth that you can no more easily be free from racialized ideas than you can be free from ideas of gender. What you can do is minimize them, root them out, and make sure you’re conscious of all the ways, obvious and subtle, that these ideas influence your behavior. If you refuse to acknowledge this pervasive influence, you’re probably not doing a good job countering it.
As for what is more instrumentally productive, I think you’re wrong too (though that’s a different debate). Defining racism up, as you would prefer, both makes it harder to get rid of the kind of racism that has the most influence in 2017 (the kind that causes a job applicant not to get an interview because of their name, say), and also makes people more defensive when you try to talk about that racism because they react like you have here–as if you’ve been charged with a crime.
I come to that conclusion the same way I know you probably unconsciously believe tall people are leaders. The same way I know you probably value loss slightly more than equivalent gain. I know these things because I know, in a general way, the society you grew up in. That same society means I am fairly safe guessing that, for example, you overestimate the age of black teenagers. Along with a million other ways you are influenced by the society and culture in which you live.
So you are prepared to admit to ‘preferential friendliness’ but not its corollary, ‘irrational dislike’? If you judge someone on the basis of kiltwearing alone, you are guilty of prejudice. This may seem banal to you, but the kiltwearer is being unfairly dismissed on the basis of appearance.
The acceptable level of crime, government corruption*, etc is also zero. But those are things which we measure. So I don’t see the reality that racism isn’t going to be eliminated as a reason in principal not to measure it.
The problem is that phenomenon is so much more subjective than the other examples I gave. This is illustrated even in the exchange between Novelty Bobble and Richard Parker. I think Richard’s gambit that Novelty is being ‘too sensitive’ is a hollow debating tactic. Accusing other people individually of ‘racism’ is a major power game in public debate in US society (saying it’s a power game doesn’t exclude it being true somethings BTW). But OTOH Richard is reduced in addressing one other person with the construction ‘you probably’. How do you get a specific scale rating from the ‘you probably’? Or there’s only a scale rating for the whole society?
It’s too subjective to break down into neat categories, and especially along a single axis where ‘preference’ seems the only measure for non admitted ‘racists’. That axis for example doesn’t include anything about what rating people would get by taking a position in one of the frequent debates here about whether group ancestral background is any way a predictive factor about any important human ability, or absolutely totally not. Does taking the position ‘absolutely totally not’, which is not a scientifically proved fact, count towards a low ‘racism’ rating, where taking any other position (also not scientifically proven facts, there is no absolute scientific answer to that as of now) gets you a higher rating? That would be just BS.
*there are holes in crime measurement stats, and room for debate about ‘widely accepted’ corruption indexes by ‘watchdog groups’, but in the big picture both are reasonable indications.
And again, there you go. You’ve set the argument up in such a way that no contrary opinion is possible. Worse, inaction or refusal to admit it on my part means I am even more guilty of the charge. Being aware of racialised ideas or gender automatically means that I must be doomed to abide by them, I don’t buy it and don’t accept it. It is, as I said before, a counsel of hopelessness and despair.
I don’t know what you mean by “defining racism up”.
Racism is a charge that costs jobs and ruins lives. If you throw it around at people like me (the non-racist person in any measurable way) then you are going to get push-back and you diminish the power of the concept.
And you have no way of knowing whether any of that is true for me far less whether such influences affect my judgements in any meaningful way.
Let me ask you, is it possible for anyone to resist or reduce the effect of societal influences to the point where their effect is not measurable?
If societal influences are so powerful is it possible that a societal pressure can exist to not be racist? Could that unconsciously influence non-racist behaviour to the point where it is not expressed to any meaningful extent.
I disagree, obviously. But don’t you think it’s odd that your response here is entirely instrumental? Have you noticed that you haven’t tried to respond to the substance, and instead you’ve switched to how this mode of discourse won’t persuade people like you? Why do you think that is?
What’s not clear about it?
I do have a way of knowing. It is called sociology. People who claim to be free from the influence of their societies and cultures are categorically wrong in that judgment.
In some theoretical world? Sure. In our actual world, that has not happened with respect to race.
In some theoretical world? Sure. In our actual world, that has not happened with respect to race.
I’m pretty sure this is not what he’s saying. It’s a difference in definitions and on what’s the best way to describe these various societal phenomena that are strongly influential on people.
If Richard Parker is right (and I think he is), then it’s your definition and usage that “diminishes the power of the concept”, IMO, because it distracts from the most influential ways that bias exists in society and harms people. Outright personal hatred is bad, but the wide and underlying biases that exist in society can affect even well-meaning and entirely non-hateful people, and because they can be so subtle as well as ingrained in daily life, they’re that much harder to identify and eradicate.
I don’t think it is all that helpful to think in terms of racist people. It is both more accurate and more effective to think in terms of racist ideas and behaviors. In particular, it makes people unhelpfully defensive.
The objection was raised to the original scale that some people don’t harbor any racist ideas or engage in any racist behaviors. I find that exceptionally doubtful. We have lots of evidence that racial categories are very salient to our thinking and affect the thinking of every cognitively typical person to a greater or lesser degree. That alone is enough to create differential behavior on the basis of race, even if it were not for all the active construction of racist ideology in many societies and cultures (but especially in the US).
In all cases, what is almost certainly happening in the mind of someone who asserts that they are free from all taint of racism is that they have a definition of racism that is very restrictive. We can debate whether that restrictive definition is good or bad, but we should acknowledge that it is actually a different debate from where the whole thing started. And it is not all that helpful, I think, to disavow all racism but then use a definition of racism that doesn’t include lots of stuff many people consider racism.
It is not a slur on your character to observe that you are influenced by your society. The mark of character is the work one puts into overcoming those negative influences.