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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   27731 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 23, 2023

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Motivated by a Manifold market on whether racism is bad [1], I thought it might be profitable to argue the opposite. Alas, having drafted my argument, I don't think it is appropriate to post in a place where my ID is tied to my real name. So here is an argument, advocatus diaboli:

Racism is just the expression of an ingroup bias for one's ethnic group, like an ingroup bias for one's own family. What I discovered living in a foreign culture is that people tend to have an ingroup bias to their own ethno-cultural group, and Westerners call this racism. It is easier to communicate with people of shared language, and people of the same cultural background will have shared interests. People of shared ethnic group are more likely to share values, and more likely to agree on topics political and personal. This isn't even a conscious thing: in my experience people of a shared ethnic group are even more likely to make strong eye contact with each other.

The bias is similar to how (most) people have an ingroup bias for their own family: I don't see my siblings often, but when we meet we connect strongly, and discover inadvertently that we face similar challenges and overcame them in similar ways. If my sibling confesses to me of a misdemeanor, I am not likely to hold it against them, and if they confessed to me a felony I'm not sure I would report them. If they are in need, I would help them with minimal complaint, and although we disagree vehemently in politics, we still love each other. My family is my ingroup. This is not a bad thing, it is just the way things are.

Now at the social level, that ingroup bias for family has its drawbacks: nepotism is common and harms society as a whole, and as I would be willing to help my sibiling get away with a crime, so does that closing of ranks around family horrific enable horrific acts, domestically, in the wider society, and even at the level of public policy and the economy. However, on balance the ingroup bias for family is a great thing (there is a reason why evolution has selected for it!). People take care of each other, they love each other, loneliness is diminished, and we trust each other more.

This is also what I see as an outsider in the foreign culture: people take care of each other, they love each other, they find companionship with each other, and they trust each other more because they share ethnic and cultural bonds. And while those bonds disadvantage me as a foreigner in their society, they have provided an evolutionary advantage, and I can't deny envying them life in the hamlet their forefathers made.

[1] https://manifold.markets/levifinkelstein/is-racism-bad

Racism is an overloaded term, and thus impossible to discuss without first clearing a whole lot of semantic debris.

I'd be doubtful of racist statements like "This race is objectively inferior to that race". I'd be doubly doubtful of racist statements like "and that's why we need to do X to them in their own countries", unless backed by mountains of evidence and very strong arguments.

I'm neutral on racist statements like "race X seems to display trait A" or "race X disproportionately behaves in manner B" or "countries of race X tend to develop in way C", so long as some evidence can be summoned.

I'll happily endorse racist statements like "people of race X are overwhelmingly likely to be recent arrivals in my country" and "race is an excellent proxy for culture" up to the racist statement "and that's why we should severely restrict immigration" or the similarly racist "I prefer to interact with people of my own race".

And finally it seems to me that what many terminally online or very leftist people mean by "racist" is "whatever white/european/biodeutsche people do".

The case for why, even if racism is good in principle, it's still bad: racism (proper racism) seems to lead, say, right-wing right people to despising intelligent Indians or Arabs or Africans for a long series of bizzare and contrived reasons. Smart people will have a lot more animus against smart Indians to them than randomly chosen white people, even when said smart indians have much more in common intellectually, politically, or whatever with them. "Race" clearly isn't a good boundary to determine things off of if you're already farther into the tails of some distribution than race differences describe.

Yeah. Cultural bias is probably a human universal. You can have (say) black and white living in perfect harmony and ganging up on those other group of bastards over there. "I don't give a fuck what color his skin is, he's not one of those X's from over the hill!"

Racism is a magical word that literally has no meaning in 2023. First of all, there is no agreed upon definition of it and this would be the case even if it wasn't abused by left wing activists. But it is abused by left wing activists and it means anything that has racial implications or even just the appearance of them that the left doesn't like. There are a bunch of others like woke, antisemitic, socialism, capitalism, neoliberalism, far-right, postmodern, critical race theory, Nazi, etc. and I could go on. These things had meanings at one point, but now they just mean my in-group or ideology thinks this person or thing sucks and we're going to call it one of these magic words so you know it's bad.

I sort of disagree, I think they usually have a specific and constrained meaning to the people saying them.

The problem being that the people they're being said to are often hearing a different meaning, and the people they're being said about have a vested interest in making sure that they have no reasonable meaning at all.

So conversations break down into people talking past each other, either accidentally through divergence of perspectives and filter bubbles between people on the same 'side', or through intentional malicious misinterpretation (either immediate, or mediated through 'elites' pushing the narrative of confusing definitions) between people on opposite 'sides'.

It's true that, if you listen to 5 different people using these terms, they might be using them to talk about subtly or not-so-subtly different concepts, and they might not all apply the same term to the same situations. It's true that, on the macro scale, that makes it seem like they have no specific or coherent meaning.

But I think it's a thought-terminating error to jump from that appearance of incoherence on the macro level, to assuming that individual people who use them are not trying to say anything specific or meaningful or insightful or useful, and are just spouting random sneers.

Usually the individual does have something cogent they're thinking and trying to convey with the term, even if the state of the culture war makes it hard to convey these types of ideas effectively. You'll fail to learn something if you look at this difficulty and place the error in the mind of the speaker, rather than the sorry state of the language and culture.

Ideally, this is where we start asking each other to taboo our words, to make communication more clear.

Agreed on most of these, but I think the terms "woke" and "capitalism" have retained fairly clear definitions even when used by their detractors.

I disagree pretty strongly, 'woke' is applied by someone to almost everything non-conservatives do or say these days, and 'capitalism' can mean anything from 'any form of trade or private property' to 'a system with a specific ruling class of capital-owners that is distinct and privileged from workers'.

I do expect that you may personally have extremely clear definitions of those terms in your head, and be in a filter bubble where most people use the words that way pretty consistently.

However, I think this state of affairs is true for most of the people who use all those other terms, as well, and they have equally good reason to think their words are fairly clear and consistent.

I disagree. I've seen so many different things be called woke and I haven't seen anyone give it a good definition. I think my definition of it being the inverse of historical American values is a pretty good heuristic though. You take whatever Americans traditionally thought before the 1960's (or what wokes think they thought) and invert that and you get the woke position pretty reliably. For example, Manifest Destiny -> Stolen Land or We're a Christian Nation -> Christianity is oppressive or capitalism is good -> capitalism is bad.

For capitalism, I see leftists and socialists blame everything on capitalism. So you get stuff like the problem with X is actually capitalism for literally everything. So crime or inequality are apparently caused by capitalism even though they existed before capitalism.

For capitalism, I see leftists and socialists blame everything on capitalism.

If you lived in North Korea or the USSR why would "Communism" or The Party and the society it created not touch nearly everything politically wrong? Capitalism is responsible for the life we live. If it's not the best of all possible worlds, a society of angels, then yes some level of blame should be left at its feet.

This is especially true for the Marxist and therefore often socialist conception of Capitalism and society. Where everything flows downstream of economics as a first mover, including things like religion, romance, and local custom.

So crime or inequality are apparently caused by capitalism even though they existed before capitalism.

Just to note, the same outcome can have different causes under different circumstances.

EG flooding can be caused by torrential rain or by tsunami, but it wouldn't be wrong for someone in a torrential rainstorm to say that the rain is causing the flooding they are currently experiencing.

Are the Proud Boys woke? No. Is BLM woke? Yes. Are the Proud Boys racist? Arguably yes. Is BLM racist? Arguably yes.

I can think of a few other things that are woke or not. I'm having trouble thinking of anything that is clearly and inarguably not racist.

That's not true, racism has a very clear definition.

A collection of racist policies that lead to racial inequity that are substantiated by racist ideas

If it quacks like an animal-that-quacks, then obviously it is an animal-that-quacks.

By your definition of racism, saying "I hate niggers" is not racist.

EDIT: I'm stupid and did not realise I was replying to sarcasm.

sarcastic quoting of kendi.

Who defines what a racist policy is and what racial inequality is though? There is a lot of subjectivity in there.

/u/PierreMenard is sarcastically quoting Ibram X Kendi's famously circular and incoherent definition of racism.

Yes, up to a relatively low point, but we get into definitional territory around such a flexible term as "racism". As others have noted, noticing reality isn't racism, and neither is normal ingroup behavior.

Personally, I don't consider normal ingroup bias, nationalism, regional bigotries etc. to be "racism" proper, even if they map onto particular races. Nor do I consider stereotypes, insofar as they reference real phenomena, to be racism. I know many people disagree with this, but since everyone else gets their own bespoke definition, I might as well use my own.

If we define "racism" strictly as the belief that a particular race has less moral worth as a group than other groups, I don't support or advocate it.

I do think every culture needs a bit of ingroup bias if it is to continue, and that a well-functioning society of any sort will be somewhat skeptical of outsiders. This does not mean pogroms are ok, but a little light shit-talk is nothing to soil one's trousers over.

I think it’s a sort of dose-makes-the-poison thing for me. Being biased towards your own group, whatever that group might be is actually not only normal but healthy in normalish amounts. There’s nothing particularly wrong with preferring your own tribe or your own culture above others. In fact I think there’s something pathological about antipathy towards your own tribe, your own religion or culture.

I guess my gestalt image here would be either the Otaku or the Wigger— a white person with so much interest in another culture that it becomes a joke or a meme. They rejected everything white in favor of being something else. They spend time and energy and lots of effort to become a superficial version of a member of that culture without really understanding that those cultures will never truly accept you as one of them. At best they see it as cute, at worst they see it as a derogatory LARP.

The same could be said of the anti-racist penchant for declaring things to be the result of white supremacy and making huge grandiose public statements in apology and self-degradation. It’s not really as impressive as it’s made out to be, at best it’s cute, and at worst it comes off as a cringy LARP.

On the other hand being discriminatory in your behavior, or actually getting in the way of others getting a fair chance at living a decent life, that’s too far. Like Europe and North America are Christian civilizations there’s nothing wrong with promoting that heritage through art or music or literature or whatever else you want to use. Italy is Italian and I see little wrong with Italians embracing everything it means to be Italian. To me I find that to be much more respectable— even if I practiced a different religion or came from another culture, finding that the natives are not afraid to practice their religion or culture in public, that they actually like their people, country, and so on. Self-respect is something that other people will respond to with respect.

In fact I think there’s something pathological about antipathy towards your own tribe, your own religion or culture.

It is sad in some ways, but also admirable in others. It's what cultural diffusion looks like. One culture can definitely be better adapted to an environment than another. It's like the old saw about who would win a fight: a lion, or a shark?

Pretty much all legitimate justifications for racism rely on inaccurate proxies for other things we actually care about. I think you can make arguments in favor of using it in the absence of better knowledge, but once more direct signals have been acquired the race no longer serves a useful purpose.

Since I am white and was raised by white parents among mostly other white people, I can reasonably expect that the average white person is more likely to be similar to me than the average black person. We'll be more likely to have similar cultural knowledge, values, habits, etc. But my black neighbor who I actually know and happens to be a christian pastor has way more in common with me than the average white Californian.

In the past race was a very strong proxy for nationality, culture, and loyalty. In modern times it is a weak signal unless you live in a predominantly monoethnic country.

I think you can make arguments in favor of using it in the absence of better knowledge, but once more direct signals have been acquired the race no longer serves a useful purpose.

This is true in principle, but in practice, you will never get enough of more direct signals to completely discount the priors coming from the race, and this is if you even get a chance to collect more direct signal at all: collecting signal itself is not free, you cannot run background checks on every passerby on the street.

The race is a sort of highly universal prior, and it carries immense amount of residual predictive value even after controlling for more direct predictors.

All priors collapse towards each other in the face of increasing amounts of evidence. Maybe you start 7% vs 33% that a random white vs black man is a violent criminal, and then if you learn they dress well and speak proper English it drops to 4% vs 5%. Or if you learn they have anger problems and are covered in tattoos it might go to 55% vs 60%. Given that genes have no almost direct causal impact on behavior except indirectly through other means such as IQ, personality, and cultural upbringing, it seems pointless to consider them when those things can be observed directly.

I agree with you that for random people on the street signals are more costly than they're worth and race can be useful as a quick hack to ballpark guess, I said as much in my previous post. But none of this implies that it

carries immense amount of residual predictive value even after controlling for more direct predictors.

It only serves value in that it lets you guess at the direct predictors more quickly and easily than costly signals would. No priors carry immense amounts of residual predictive value even after controlling for more direct predictors. That's what makes them priors. The direct predictors are what we actually care about, and race is only useful in-so-far as it might be a faster way to guess at them if you don't already have them and don't want to spend the time and effort to acquire them properly. Which sounds reasonable for strangers, but less so for people you actually know.

All priors collapse towards each other in the face of increasing amounts of evidence.

Yes, but this does not address my argument that in practice you don’t get to have enough evidence to ignore this prior, because evidence is not free.

Given that genes have no almost direct causal impact on behavior except indirectly through other means such as IQ, personality, and cultural upbringing, it seems pointless to consider them when those things can be observed directly.

It’s the other way around. When you use race as evidence, you don’t do it by sequencing the DNA of the subject. No, what you do in practice is precisely using a socially constructed race as a proxy to make predictions IQ, personality, and cultural upbringing. You can’t cheaply get a lot of specific evidence about the latter, but you can use race stereotypes (which are pretty accurate) to infer these quite cheaply.

The direct predictors are what we actually care about, and race is only useful in-so-far as it might be a faster way to guess at them if you don't already have them and don't want to spend the time and effort to acquire them properly.

Which is exactly the case in majority of the situations. Indeed, you apparently agree:

Which sounds reasonable for strangers, but less so for people you actually know.

So where is the disagreement, exactly?

So where is the disagreement, exactly?

The way you phrased things, and still to some extent now, seems to be implying that race is always useful because information is too costly. My premise is that information is costly up front for strangers but accumulates automatically over time such that race becomes less and less useful the more you interact with the same individuals. If you agree with that entirely then I guess we don't have a disagreement other than with phrasing of things, but the fact that you phrased it the way you did makes me suspect that there is some underlying disagreement even if I'm not sure what it is. Because I wouldn't say that the existence and importance of friends and coworkers whom you can accumulate significant amounts of information on over years are compatible with

in practice you don’t get to have enough evidence to ignore this prior, because evidence is not free.

The usefulness of the prior asymptotically approaches zero over time such that, although it might never literally reach zero, after a couple years of knowing someone it's probably close enough to ignore (though this will vary by how much you actually interact with the person, since knowledge is not gained via the literal passing of time.)

Or maybe we both entirely agree on its usefulness in both the stranger case and the friend case but you are considering the stranger case to be "typical" and I am considering the friend case to be "typical" and we are each dismissing the other as an exception to the rule.

This is true in principle, but in practice, you will never get enough of more direct signals to completely discount the priors coming from the race

Can you give an example where the race prior isn't mostly insignificant? "Avoiding black guys more than you would white women when walking down the street" - justified or not, doesn't matter that much either way - violent crime against random people is pretty rare, and avoiding black people a little more does basically no harm to them. Hiring someone for a job, in an ideal colorblind world you can just give them an IQ test or judge how intelligently they talk.

The race is a sort of highly universal prior, and it carries immense amount of residual predictive value even after controlling for more direct predictors.

Of what? If I meet a black pathologist, knowing that they're a pathologist tells me much more about them than knowing that they're black.

Likewise, if I see a white junkie, knowing that they're a junkie tells me much more about them than knowing that they're white.

By “residual value after controlling for other predictors”, I meant something like, if you have two pathologists, one of them being black tells you something additional on top of the fact of him being a pathologist, eg. that they are likely to be less competent at their job than their white counterpart.

Sure, it tells you something "extra", but it's something both immoral and, while perhaps it might in a very localized way be a net benefit in terms of information gain, it's long-term super unhealthy and harmful. I mean, if we're leaving the immoral part to the side and talking about pure utility, making a habit of utilizing those residual values (even assuming they are reliable) is problematic both for you and for society both in the medium to long term. Why? I don't think I need to explain the societal part, as societally accepted racism even when used as a background process rather than a primary process is a significant evil and limits overall prosperity and tends to hinder interpersonal and economic interactions in disproportionate ways - but personally there's harm too. Racism has such a virulent and problematic history that I don't think we can rely on ourselves to "limit" racism to merely residual value only. It's a pipe dream. Our brains simply don't work that way.

There is little substance in your comment other than repeatedly claiming that racism is bad because it’s immoral, and it’s immoral because it’s evil, and it’s evil, because it’s problematic. If taking race into account when making consequential decisions about reality is considered racist, even if we only do it to the statistically justified extent, then I simply don’t agree about it being gravely immoral, because we do the exact same thing with hundreds of other characteristics all the time without an ounce of queasiness, eg. cultural origin, or education history, or density of facial tattoos, or clothing worn.

Your best argument here is where you claim that it’s too easy to assign more weight to this piece of evidence than it is actually warranted. This is true, but this is also true about other characteristics, discriminating based on such does not get such a privileged treatment, so why should I care much?

This sort of stuff makes me feel bad for all the competent black pathologists, they have to pay the price for their affirmative action'd racial bretheren (who if they are a different type of African than the pathologist may well be just as genetically different from the pathologist than your average white pathologist).

Essentially: it's the asterisk on the Harvard degree.

"White and Asian medical school applicants discriminated against; black doctors most affected."

I don't feel bad, especially since most competent black pathologists were likely able to attend a more desirable medical school than they would have in the absence of affirmative action. I feel bad for the Asian and white applicants who had to attend a less desirable school as a result of affirmative action, or didn't get into one altogether. I feel bad for patients roped into getting treated by affirmative action doctors, except those patients with in- or out-group preferences for groups that are affirmative action-beneficiaries.

I think you're not reading the parent's comment correctly.

Race carries an immense amount of residual predicting power. Example: Compared to a white pathologist, a black pathologist is less likely to enjoy country music.

The parent never said anything about whether race or profession has more predictive power, only that race continues to have predictive power even after we've corrected for everything else.

Racism is just the expression of an ingroup bias for one's ethnic group,

Except, of course, that classically it isn't; rather, it the expression of outgroup bias against particular groups. And, a particular outgroup bias at that: the belief that said outgroup is inferior, or polluting, or both. Laws requiring the segregation of water fountains was not simply an expression of ingroup bias. Nor were laws requiring segregation of cemeteries, nor were laws that excluded members of certain groups from state institutions of higher education, nor laws that, when those higher ed exclusions were held unconstitutional, "required [students who were members of a certain race] to sit apart at a designated desk in an anteroom adjoining the classroom; to sit at a designated desk on the mezzanine floor of the library, but not to use the desks in the regular reading room; and to sit at a designated table and to eat at a different time from the other students in the school cafeteria.".

Except, of course, that classically it isn't; rather, it the expression of outgroup bias against particular groups.

I think the point is that the outgroup bias follows the ingroup bias: "In order to protect/provide for my ingroup, it is useful to stigmatize the outgroup."

I don't see where OP says that, but besides, ingroup bias is essentially universal, but outgroup hostility is much less so

You are very much giving a 'Motte'/steelman version of 'racism' that bears little resemblance to the actual concept in practice, and bears more resemblance to other more appropriate words such as 'kinship'.

In practice, racism obviously is not just positive feelings/actions towards your kin, but (centrally) negative feelings/actions towards others, including everything from mistaken beliefs about their attributes and capabilities to denying their fundamental human rights and dignity to slavery/mass murder/etc.

Inherently, I think that if something doesn't bias you towards inaccurately negative beliefs or unendorsedly negative actions towards members of an outgroup, it is non-central to call that something 'racism' (of the individualized type you are describing here, leaving aside systemic definitions).

Racism is just the expression of an ingroup bias for one's ethnic group, like an ingroup bias for one's own family.

Except when it's an ingroup bias for people who share superficial characteristics with your ethnic group (e.g. skin tone).

I know the definition has been tortured into an inch of its life but that classic element is still a thing and is not covered by your 'social capital' defense.

"Racism" is an anti-concept. It is a word of activist power. It groups a whole bunch of unlike phenomena together, and then the people who can use the word can equivocate on the definition in order to target the people they want to target for shaming and cancellation.

An example of the game plan is:

  1. Create an association in the public between the word "racist" and images of white people throwing stones at black children and calling them horrible names.
  2. Include in the definition of a racist "a person who believes in the superiority of one racial group, such as a group being more intelligent"
  3. Then using that definition, call people like Charles Murray or Steve Sailer "racists" since he arguably fits definition 2) even though they are the farthest thing from definition 1).
  4. Cancel Charles Murray and Steve Sailer, since their ideas are a huge threat to the $2 trillion dolllar education-industrial complex.

Another way of saying this is that "racism" is any idea that opposes the current left/center-left establishment ethnogensis or ethno-preservation projects. So if you are against busing ethnic Polish and Irish white kids to black neighborhood schools, you are against a certain ethnogensis project, and therefore racist. If you are against historically black universities, or against a law making certain hair styles a protected characteristic, you are against a certain ethnology-preservation project and therefore racist. If an asian-American mom wants her daughter to marry an Asian guy, that is irrelevant to any establishment plans, so the establishment does not care and does not consider the mom a racist.

A function mirrored by terms like 'woke' or 'socialist/communist' on the right.

I think that we should not be so quick to throw out the useful-definition-of-the-term baby with the misuse-by-cynical-activists bathwater in each of these cases.

It's true, on the one hand, that 'racist' gets used inconsistently and imprecisely by activists on the left to smear opponents or apply 'the worst argument in the world' to things they dislike.

It's also true that there are a specific set of well-defined and useful meanings of the term, that are used honestly by many serious people and are important tools in the intellectual toolbox for anyone who wants to discuss these topics.

In general, if we threw away every term or philosophy or position that was misused or misapplied by cynical activists, there wouldn't be anything left to talk about in the Culture War Thread at all.

It is rather annoying how certain activists have destroyed the meaning of the word. I used to really dislike being called racist, because I had the association with item 1. Now I just kind of sigh and think to myself "welp I guess they wanted to end the conversation". For many non-leftists the term has basically come to mean "a person the left doesn't like". I suppose your definition is more nuanced, but it amounts to the same thing.

It does make me a little more hopeful in a weird way. Language can only be abused so much, and only for relatively short term gains. And often at the expense of long-term progress. Genuine "I hate X race" type people can now get relatively far in politics, either by hating the correct race, or by the fact that the accusation of racism has been so overused that no one treats it seriously anymore. For anyone who actually cares about racism this is undeniably a bad thing. For anyone that was just using it as a weapon to bludgeon their opponents, well they probably benefited overall, but the weapon has become more and more useless. No one even bothers calling Trump racist anymore, but for anyone that doesn't remember it was thrown around quite a bit back in 2016.

I had Belisaurius accuse me of being an anti-Western racist recently.

The outrage, can't anyone with eyes see I'm a pro-Western racist? Can't really help it, there's no way I'm being convinced that HBD isn't true without brain damage, for much the same reason I believe in the existence of the chair I'm sitting on.

Yeah, people can call me racist all they like, I don't particularly care, and at least in India most people would react to such opinions with a "duh" rather than controversy.

Language can only be abused so much, and only for relatively short term gains. And often at the expense of long-term progress.

I think this is the reason "white supremacy" became such a common descriptor in the 2010s: activists recognised that there was no alpha left in "racist" as a term of abuse, the word having become as inflated as a Zimbabwean dollar.

The problem for them now is that accusing someone of being a "white supremacist" is heading the same way (doubly so now that it's become so obvious that even being Indian offers no protection against the accusation), and woke people are fast running out of words with which to tar their political opponents that inspire the same level of outrage. "Racist", "Nazi", "fascist", "white supremacist" - are there any such descriptors left which haven't been rendered meaningless through overuse?

I think it was more an issue of conceding to right-wing complaints about 'individual bias' and 'systemic inequity' both being refereed to with the same word ('racism'), and trying to actually separate the two by calling individual beliefs that one race is superior or individual efforts to intentionally favor one race 'supremacy' instead of 'racism'.

Which of course didn't work at all to mollify conservatives who claimed to hate how the same word was being used to refer to different things. What they actually hated was just being smeared in general; the fact that the terms used to do so were being used confusingly was never more than a 'gotcha'.

No, I don't think that's remotely true. When have woke people ever made "concessions" to conservatives of any kind?

I didn't say 'woke people', and I don't know precisely who you would or would not include under that classification.

I'm talking about major media outlets and politicians and the like who were using 'white supremacy' for a while. They make concessions to conservatives all the time

Thanks for clarifying.

It is rather annoying how certain activists have destroyed the meaning of the word....Genuine "I hate X race" type people can now get relatively far in politics

Eh, good riddance. Anyone who has is acting in morally deplorable ways relating to race can be condemned in language and terms and concepts that long predate the word "racism." Just call out what they are actually doing that is bad -- whether it is being slanderous, committing detraction, or covetous or whatever the bad thing actually is.

Meanwhile, as I read more history, I find that a lot of the "classic" racism that was universally abhorred before the "great awokening" (for instance school segregration) was not as clearly wrong as I thought it was. Read for instance Wolter's The Burden of Brown. I don't blame the white parents of any school district from using whatever laws they had at their disposal to keep their school from being overrun by a population with much higher rates of committing assault and with entirely different cultural norms and with incompatible levels of pedagogical needs.

I think people are too often conflating morals with fact.

Take "discrimination", in my opinion a superior word to racism alone, though I might accept "vanilla racism" or depending on context its weaker cousin "stereotyping": when someone is treated different because of their race being used as a primary differentiator. We've become so distracted as a society arguing about whether or not it's accurate or occasionally acceptable to make judgements or get caught into debate about if it was really discrimination or some other cause that we forget to say what really needed to be said because the rest is just window dressing: It's morally wrong, all the time, in every society, to treat people worse for some arbitrary reason before you get to know them. Whether it's even possible to do this, or what counts as getting to know them, or any other derivative question is irrelevant. It's morally wrong not from any practical perspective, but rises from basic human dignity and fairness.

The parents in your example, I might initially be tempted to say, are acting logically -- but only to an extent. They are treating school decisions as very short term, zero-sum games which in a sense they are. However, with longer time horizons and a bit of agency, it's harmful to assume it's all just zero-sum and instead should be seeking out more effective solutions. We live in a society, as they say. But this is all beside the point. The real point is that we seem to have inadvertently de-emphasized and cheapened our definition as well as understanding of human rights. The right to be treated equally is one of the absolute fucking basics, and is not worth fucking around with just because we're tempted to get some short term benefits.

It's morally wrong, all the time, in every society, to treat people worse for some arbitrary reason before you get to know them.

This statement is wrong on so many levels.

You conflate treating someone differently with treating them worse. It can actually treat them better on average if the needs of members of the group differ from other groups. The entire idea that something is always better or worse is silly black/white thinking anyway. If you ask a person whether they eat pork before setting up an event with food, you treat them worse if they do eat pork, because you are wasting their time. If they don't eat pork, you probably treat them better if you do ask. And it is perfectly plausible that asking by default is a net-negative for let's say a church event, where the main groups that don't eat pork are self-selected out, but it is a net-positive for an event where the group that you ask contains a certain number of Jews/Muslims.

You also beg the question by assuming that race or other differentiators are arbitrary, even though they clearly are not. Culture differs by race. Biology differs by race. Stereotypes typically do reflect actual statistical differences. Very often, people consider actually it morally wrong if you don't treat them according to their stereotypes. Try treating women like you treat men. It offends them.

You also ignore that getting to know people and tailoring policy to them personally has a substantial cost, may not be possible and can be open to abuse.

They are treating school decisions as very short term, zero-sum games which in a sense they are.

It was actually a negative sum game. Especially by the 70s, the whites were not actually hoarding any resources. So when you forced integration you made schools terrible for the whites because the kids were getting assaulted and the teachers were distracted by teaching students who were at a lower grade level, and you made the schools no better for the black kids. The forced integration made things worse for everyone in ways that were obvious and predictable, but the people pushing it were so inflamed by self-righteousness that they did not care, it was those leaders pushing integration who were morally in the wrong.

harmful to assume it's all just zero-sum and instead should be seeking out more effective solutions.

Like what? You don't just get to advocate for a situation where girls were getting sexually assaulted in the halls and then say, "well, they should have figured some other solution and then we wouldn't have to forced integration" and then get to take the moral high ground. Let's be very clear here because the rest is just window dressing: deliberately creating a situation where education is impossible because of kids constantly being assaulted and bullied is morally wrong, all the time, in every society. The situation created by forced integration was worse, and the people responsible were morally in the wrong, far more in the morally wrong than the people who supported the segregated status quo.

It's morally wrong, all the time, in every society, to treat people worse for some arbitrary reason before you get to know them.

"Arbitrary" and "treat worse" are tricky here. It is morally wrong to overtly mean or aggressive against someone who has not wronged you. However, it is morally permissible to withhold charity, or withhold generosity, or withhold sharing, or withhold your friendship, or withhold permitting someone to migrate into your terrirtory, or withold wanting your children to raise my children (which is what school is) based upon limited, imperfect information -- such as ethnicity/race, or religion, or politics. Race, like family, or like in many cases religion, is not something a person chooses to be born into, but it is not exactly arbitrary either. Race is tribe, it is a measure of closeness of blood relations, it is not arbitrary, and something that is quite often relevant.

I mean, I also don't blame individual parents trying to privilege their own kids at the expense of other people's kids.

I don't blame people for acting rationally under situations of conflicting interests or coordination problems, in general.

That's most of the reason we need a government and public policy in the first place, to try to push situations like that towards global optima that can't be found from individuals acting in their personal interest.

It's far from obvious that it's globally beneficial to create a situation where two groups are both underserved and where they each form negative opinions about members of the other group.

Sure, public policy is difficult and complicated.

I was talking about the structure of the overall system, not the details of a specific policy.

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