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Can I just take a moment to say:
Racists do not describe themselves as racists. They always have beliefs that re perfectly reasonable and normal from their own perspective, and generally have either sources of evidence they consider authoritative or arguments they consider persuasive to validate those beliefs.
That being said: are we all ok with calling BAP a racist, after posts like this?
And if not, who in the world could we call a racist, then?
I worry a lot that people in spaces like this one get blinded by the aesthetics of intellectualism and academic rigor. But it's actually not very hard to use big words and phrase thing in empirical framings. It's not even that hard to do a literature search and find the one paper out of 5,000 that has some stats supporting your view which you can cite.
But in many cases, it's pretty easy to tell when that stuff is all happening above someone's bottom line. This also relates to epistemic learned helplessness, with people being rightly skeptical of arguments and citations that seem persuasive but are highly optimized to seem that way by lots of distributed effort in some cases, but being more amenable to those types of arguments when they come from certain people/groups or support certain things they're disposed towards.
No matter how many epicycles go into justifying the position and adding layers of nuance to it, there has to be some point where you take a step back and notice that the only thing they care about is vilifying racial minorities, blaming all of our problems on them, and advocating for policies against them. There has to be a word for that position regardless of the aesthetics that it is cloaked in.
This statement is odd. When racism had a socially dominant position, racists did in fact openly call themselves racist, and made lots of statements that very explicitly endorsed racism. And in fact, the majority rejected this state of affairs, and took concrete steps to minimize their influence on society
Why not try it, and see if anyone disagrees? Here, I'll do it myself. Ahem:
It seems obvious to me that Bronze Age Pervert is a racist, and I would be quite surprised if either he himself or any of his supporters or admirers would disagree. Further, I think it unlikely that anyone here disagrees, and I think the likelihood of disagreement would be negatively correlated with level of participation.
Is it fair to say that your general thesis here is that either this community or society generally err on the side of avoiding false accusations of racism, with the result that actual racism goes unaddressed? If so, were it to be demonstrated that your chosen example openly identifies and is commonly recognized as a racist, and suffers the attendant consequences of being so identified, wouldn't this rather undermine your thesis?
If you want to argue that racism is "cloaked", it would help to provide an example of actually cloaked racism. The problem here, obviously, is that unambiguous racism isn't cloaked, and sufficiently cloaked racism appears indistinguishable from non-racism. Especially in the modern context, where we have purported "white supremacists" of Black, Asian, Hispanic, Native American extraction, and the argument is that their fellow "white supremacists" are just refraining from discrimination on the basis of race to better hide their single-minded devotion to racial discrimination.
Is this actually true? I'd agree that many people openly stated beliefs that we'd label as racist, but I am curious if there are examples of "mainstream racists" (e.g. Wilson, segregation-era Southern elected politicians) openly describing themselves as racist.
Looking into the term, it seems to have originated in 1902 by Richard Henry Pratt, who said:
It doesn't seem to be something originating as a positive self-descriptor.
Ironically, he is better known for this quote:
Contemporary times would give him a certain label.
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