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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.
What you are trying to do here is to use “racist” as a thought-terminating cliche, which eradicates the need to address the arguments being made on their merits. It is not surprising that you do it, as this strategy has worked amazingly well for last 60 years. The problem is that this only works if all sides of conversation share the same assumptions, that being racist is the worst thing ever, and it automatically entails you are wrong. Overusing this strategy has led to many people rejecting this assumption, and being much less impressed by the “racist” card.
Yes, BAP is racist, but the real question is, is he right or wrong?
What if, hypothetically, the consensus position - and I do want to stress consensus, this is not some far-left opinion, this is an opinion that the vast majority of Americans would agree with - that there do exist at least a certain number of people who have a certain kind of bias that makes them dislike certain racial groups, and who either hide that or are not aware of it themselves, is just true as a matter of empirical fact?
You seem to be saying “even if it’s true, you’re not allowed to Notice the Racism”. If I were talking to someone who openly admits to being disgusted by interracial marriage and wants to outlaw it, you want me to engage with their abstract arguments as to why it should be banned, and you want me to not acknowledge at all the hypothesis that their opinion might have something to do with the fact that it disgusts them.
I would hope you don’t this tack when it comes to other cognitive biases. If there were a left-wing poster who always defended the Democratic Party at every single juncture, like they clearly compromised their own stated principles over and over to desperately defend the Party’s actions no matter how much of a hypocrite that made them, would you really argue that pointing this out should be completely haram? I agree that engaging with their object-level arguments also is good and necessary, but do you really think that pointing out this pattern of behaviour over time is not acceptable?
It’s not “what if”, as this is clearly true. The question is, rather, so what?
No, feel free to acknowledge it, but so what? People are free to form their opinions based on disgust, and this is not considered to be any sort of demerit to their position, except in a couple of progressive hobby horses. For example, most gun control advocates are disgusted by guns. Should we discount their opinions based on that?
I don’t understand the point you are trying to make in this paragraph.
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