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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 just think racism as a moral failing is just not that important. I think there are probably a lot of truly shitty people that aren’t racists and some nice people who are racists.
Generally, I’d care more about whether someone is generally nice to other people, are they hospitable, do they actively create harm for others, are they a narcissist, etc compared to racism.
Well, famously, racism has led to a lot of “actively create[d] harm for others”, so stances like this seem poorly thought out when latent racism at an individual level can and does turn into actual discrimination and much worse at a societal level.
To invoke Godwin, there were so many “generally nice” Germans in 1936. They just were specifically not as nice to a certain minority, widely persecuted for some centuries such that it was considered normal in polite society (and still today on certain college campuses).
Sure. It can. But so can people who believe in the government control of the means of production or people who believe in say Islam.
And right-thinking people/societies should also frown upon those things. We can even agree that racism (even the 1995 version) is overrated as a terrible thing, compared to say Marxism, in Western culture.
I’m just pointing out you can’t defend “individual cases of racism aren’t so bad really” very well without ignoring the piles of skulls, ancient and modern.
Many people in this thread are proving the point that the Left torturing and drastically overextending “racism” as a term wielded as The Worst Argument in the World has largely backfired as far as improving racial issues. Some in this thread go so far as to say Classic Racism is/was fine actually, and some of us are pushing back on that.
I’m not saying it “was fine actually.” I’m saying if someone is classically racist, they are pushed out of polite society in a way that wouldn’t be the case if they had larger moral failings. See for example Michal Richards v. Mike Tyson. One said “nigger” and was pushed out of polite society. The other is celebrated whilst being a rapist. I think we have our priorities mixed up.
Fair.
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