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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.
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 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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