Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
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User ID: 863
This is a post that's been floating around in my head for a while that I finally wanted to get out. Apologies if this is a little rambling.
There's a phenomenon I observe on both the left and right that is a little mysterious to me and I'm interested in hearing people's thoughts on it. There seems to be a tendency to take the actions of particular individuals and ascribe some kind of moral responsibility for those actions to demographic groups the perpetrator is a part of. Such and such man/woman/white/black/migrant/christian/etc did a bad thing and, actually, all men/women/whites/blacks/migrants/christians/etc are in some sense responsible for it. Such that it is reasonable to think less of or perhaps take retribution against all members of whatever the relevant demographic group is.
I don't think it's too hard to come up with examples. I'm confident a lot of innocent Jews or Palestinians have caught strays from people mad at the Israeli government or Hamas. There was that unrest in the UK after a Sikh Northern Ireland after an African man stabbed a guy to death. Go to probably any dating forum and you can find men and women generalizing about the evils of the other gender based on their dating experiences.
I think of myself as having an essentially liberal individualist view of moral responsibility. People are morally responsible for the things they actually do and not the things that other people who happen to share demographic characteristics with them do. This makes arguments or actions of the above kind feel alien to me. I don't see the logic, the reason, that connects "Person A of X demographic did a Bad Thing" to "Therefore it is justified for me to do a Bad Thing to Person B of demographic X." I also observe deployment of arguments of this type seem to have a whiff of hypocrisy. People who deploy these kinds of arguments about demographic X they are not a part of would ~never accept similar generalizations about demographic Y that they are a part of.
I should also mention that I sometimes see a reverse of this. People of a particular demographic want credit for the good things other members of their demographic have done, regardless of what they themselves have done. The examples that come to mind here are all right-coded to me ("men built society so I, as a man, should get credit for what those other men did regardless of what I personally have done". s/men/whites) but that is probably just my bubble.
I guess I'm trying to understand if there's some underlying logic, some theory of demographic-based moral responsibility I'm missing? Or is this all a kind of pre-rational responsibility assignment?
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
1d ago
Well, the author in question (in an actual article) did make some comments structured similarly about black women. From page 25/26 of the arbitration PDF:
Ms. Attiah herself routinely wrote about the way in which race influences the discourse around politics and violence. Indeed, the Post published her column in 2024 under a headline chosen by her editors: “Harris and Black women are face of Biden administration’s ugly Gaza policy.” The piece was highly critical of “Black women,” stating, among other things, “Black women are both enforcing U.S. complicity in this atrocity and attempting to soften its appearance.”
Is it racist against black women to describe them as "enforcing U.S. complicity in [an] atrocity?"
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
1d ago
Do you think this is a just outcome for this incident?
I think the arbitrator makes a compelling case.
If you think this is a just outcome, are you comfortable with people generalizing the logic behind this outcome into a set of rules you will then accept living under?
I am not even sure what this means. I expect we disagree about what the rules are here that you are suggesting generalizing.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
1d ago
As best I can tell from reading the decision the incorrect quote of Kirk didn't come up in the firing context at all. There were two posts cited to, allegedly because they disparaged white men on the basis of gender or race, but the arbitrator ruled that was not supportable by reference to the post themselves (Page 30, Section C The Record Does Not Establish That the Grievant Disparaged White Men). The posts themselves are:
Refusing to tear my clothes and smear ashes on my face in performative mourning for a white man that espoused violence is … not the same as violence
Part of what keeps America so violent is the insistence that people perform care, empty goodness and absolution for white men who espouse hatred and violence.
As a white man myself, I don't feel disparaged by either post.
The only other basis given for the firing was the alleged security threat due to other people threatening Attiah for her posts on the topic. I generally think it would be a bad precedent to set that you can get fired because other people communicate threats against you. If people had sent threats to Google over Damore, would they have been more justified in firing him?
More generally, I think this illustrates the advantage of having a union! If there wasn't a CBA I'm skeptical Attiah would have won a more general employment discrimination lawsuit from this set of facts.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
1d ago
The survey doesn't have a break out for "ethnically British", whatever that means. But it does break the survey down by people who do/don't consider themselves British and by White/Other Ethnicity. In both cases the numbers are pretty close to the population numbers. Among Whites, 59% think it is important to have been born in Britain (vs the population 55%) and 41% think it is important to have British Ancestry (vs the population 39%). Among those who identify as British the numbers are 59% (the same) and 40% (1 percentage point lower) respectively.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
1d ago
I suppose I am with @Crowstep. Phillips just has a difference conception of what it means to be British than people like Tomlinson. It seems like she's hardly alone in this. According to the British Social Attitudes survey:
Over the last ten years, there has been a decline in the proportion who regard birth or ancestry as important for being ‘truly British’.
The proportion who think that to be ‘truly British’ it is important for someone to have been born in Britain has fallen from 74% in 2013 to 55% now.
Similarly, the proportion who believe it is important for someone to have British ancestry has dropped from 51% to 39%.
In contrast, 86% say it is important that someone respects British political institutions and laws.
It appears that quite a lot of British people agree with Phillips that being British is more rooted in adapting to British institutions and laws than having a particular ancestry. To the extent the British people are the authors of what it means to be British they seem to be moving more towards a Phillips definition than a Tomlinson one.
This is my fault. I inadvertently conflated the Henry Nowak murder with a different stabbing that did lead to more general anti-migrant violence in Northern Ireland.
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