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It's a bad look, for sure, but how is this not just run-of-the-mill drunken disorderliness? "Racism" is not really the same thing as racial epithets. If you get drunk and repeatedly call a man a "dick" we don't generally run a story about a "sexist outburst." This strikes me as a wild exaggeration:
Extreme drunkenness can happen among younger generations, for sure. And when your drunk brain looks for the most offensive thing it can say to someone, and your social milieu is one where a racial epithet is the most offensive word you can think of, then the more strongly we disapprove of racial epithets, the more often we're going to hear them from angry, irrational people. Calling that "racism" seems like rhetorical sleight of hand to me.
Imagine a student getting plastered and, noticing her RA's MAGA cap, calling the RA a "Nazi" two hundred times. I can't imagine students putting together a petition demanding the drunk person's expulsion--it would be ridiculous. The drunk girl clearly has some problems, but none of them appear solvable by either tarring her as a "racist" or by expelling her from school.
In your hypothetical, the student is characterizing being a Nazi as detestable. In the real-life event, the student is characterizing being Black as detestable.
I'm skeptical of widespread American anti-Black racism narratives, and I don't think this case supports them (except weakly at the margin). I think it's possible (although unlikely) that the White girl doesn't harbor meaningful animus towards Black people, and that she was just grasping clumsily for an epithet that carried a powerful valence. I also assume the White girl has some fairly serious emotional problems (as do many people, such as myself) which were exacerbated by alcohol use.
Nevertheless, the White girl's behavior was grotesque. I have no objections at all to expelling her from school.
Exactly. The fact that you reach for a racial epithet when you're trying to inflict pain says something. Racism by the classic definition is thinking that someone is inferior or hating them because of their race.
Analogy, a man can't get it up, he's impotent after an accident. His wife says to him, over and over, "Honey it's fine I love you, not your dick, I don't think any less of you at all! You're still just as much a man as you were the day I married you!" Maybe he even believes her. Then she gets drunk one night, and they get into a fight, and she screams at him "You're not even a man, you can't even fuck me, you're a pathetic eunuch, half a man at best!"
Which is the truth? The polite bromides mouths when she's sober, or the hurtful epithets she reaches for when she is drunk? If someone brings it up when they want to hurt you, whatever they say sober you know they think it but they're too polite to say it sober. It's pretty obvious she does think less of him, and that she thinks he ought to think less of himself.
That said, this kind of incident is beneath notice.
I've never really understood this line of thinking, that the "real you" comes out when you're inebriated. Couldn't both sides of her - drunk and sober - represent what she really thinks, such that one could just as well say that when she's drunk she's being too impolite to say the truth?
Taggin @PutAHelmetOn as well, because this relates to his point about the "sacredness of race."
In Vino Veritas.
For a bigger exploration see several chapters of Slingerland's Drunk or listen to him on Rogan, but at core alcohol weakens your ability to suppress impulses you had already. It does not create whole-ass new impulses.
An analogy:
I might get drunk at a party with my wife and hit on one of her female friends (or worse, one of her female enemies!). I might do 8 shots and tell her friend Brittany that she has great tits and we should hang out some time. Afterward, when my wife and/or Brittany's boyfriend confront me, I might say "I'm sorry, I was really drunk, I never would have done that sober." And everyone will understand that what I'm saying is that I wouldn't tell Brittany that I wanted to fuck her if I were sober; it's understood that my urge/impulse/desire to fuck Brittany exists when I'm sober (I'm a straight man after all!) but that absent alcohol I am capable of suppressing that urge in polite society. No one would think that meant that when I'm sober I don't think Brittany has great tits, that would be stupid.
On the other hand, if I get drunk at a party with my wife and I hit on one of her male friends, if I did 12 shots and walked up to Craig and said that I wanted to take him home and bend him over my Eames lounge chair, no amount of pleading about the top shelf tequila would convince them that I'm heterosexual. I might once again plead that I wouldn't have tried to hit on Craig if I were sober because I would suppress the urge to fuck Craig with my full-powered prefrontal cortex, but I couldn't argue that the bourbon created the urge to fuck Craig and I wouldn't have any homosexual impulses if I were sober. That homosexual urge necessarily already existed, before I started drinking, the drinking merely brought it out, suppressed my ability to suppress my urges.
Alcohol causes you to pursue your desires, it does not create those desires.
Same with any other urge I might or might not have. Alcohol doesn't produce new thoughts, just reveals old ones.
So you don't think the prefrontal cortex contributes meaningfully to who you are as a person, and that judgment and reasoning aren't part of your personality? I think this is a strange way to understand the human mind.
I mean, isn't what anti-racists want is for people to use their moral judgment and reasoning abilities to suppress impulses to act racistly? Or is the goal to eliminate every racist urge in all human brains, no matter how deep it's buried?
I wouldn't label myself an "anti-racist" I'd label myself a "non-racist" if forced to. But I don't think
Is as crazy as you think it is. You could get me as drunk as you want, I'll never hit my mother or my wife, or really any woman. That is ingrained in me at a deeper level. One might achieve a similar degree of non-racism with proper cultural upbringing.
Maybe I'm phrasing my argument poorly. Let's use the old Freudian division: in my view the drunk you is your id, your deep and base desires; the sober you is id managed by superego, societal training and politeness, producing the ego. Which we call "you" or your personality is a secondary question, "then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes;" if you yell slurs at black people when drunk your id is racist. It's possible for a person to have a non-racist id, to genuinely not see race as a valid category for insult and negative judgment.
If you believe something inside, but your judgment tells you not to say it out loud, we call that political correctness. If one thinks Black people are inferior, but doesn't say it out loud sober because of political correctness, I'd call that a belief in racism. I think fat people are ugly and inferior, I don't say that out loud because of political correctness, it's a belief I hold, if you get me drunk and in an argument with a fat person I'll probably call him a whale.
What if you don't think Black people are inferior, but the particular person in front of you, who happens to be black, is inferior?
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