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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 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:
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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.
"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.
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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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