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Notes -
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.
I'd probably be fine calling him a racist but this really is hinging on what your definition for racism is. It doesn't appear that he has a deep seated hatred or irrationality based on race and some people might reasonably require that. It's one of many reasons we should probably taboo our words more often. If we're determining whether to call him a racist because when we apply that label it means we'll engage with his ideas differently(or not at all) that seems like it's removing and not adding to our objectivity. If we're doing it because we want to have a neat taxology of who the racists are then I question the purpose.
I'm honestly really fine dismissing what he says because it's an anecdote and he seems like the kind of edgy person to exaggerate, hell I'm engaged and deeply in love with a "Hanoid" or whatever he called them. But I don't need to do this based on some weird label technically.
As I said in my comment above ( https://www.themotte.org/post/812/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/176997 ), I respect that this is a consistent definition of “racism”, but I think that it is miles away from how people actually use the word, because it implies that large swathes of the most aggressive supporters of eg segregation and slavery did so for non-racist reasons. If you’re deeming the Cornerstone speech non-racist because it doesn’t specifically have “I do not like black people” in it, for example… I don’t think the definition’s very useful.
It’d be like having a definition of “totalitarianism” so strict that the fact that it calls itself the democratic people’s republic of north korea, and didn’t explicitly say “we do not respect democracy or individual rights here” on the tin, was enough to muddy the waters for me.
Sure, it's not quite the definition I use, but I'll point out all definitions have problems like this because people genuinely differ on how wide of a scope they want "racism" to cover. I frankly just try not to use the word because it's heat strength outpaces any useful light application. Of course people have always sought to weild heat where ever it can be found.
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