For years, I’ve been seeing the argument over the definition of racism – as in, “there is no such thing as reverse racism, by definition only White people can be racist, because racism is prejudice plus power, here look what this sociologist says” versus “the dictionary says ‘poor treatment of or violence against people because of their race,’ it doesn’t say anything about only White people being racist” over and over and over and over.
Whichever definition you prefer, the other definition is not “wrong.” Words mean what people use them to mean, and can have multiple meanings. If fluent English speakers have for years been using the word “racism” to mean X, then that is one correct meaning of racism. If another group of fluent speakers has for years used it to mean “Y,” then that is another correct meaning. If a specialized group – like sociologists – use “racism” as a term of art meaning “Z,” then that is yet another correct meaning. That’s just how English works.
I prefer one definition over another, but I recognize that both definitions exist in modern English and are used by English speakers.
First time commenter here, but long time lurker. I love this site and the discussions it generates. Thanks to everyone.
I hate when good discussions turn into needless semantic disputes over word definitions. My rule is this: If someone objects to my definition of a word, I listen to their concerns, and use an alternative word or phrase if possible. This keeps the discussion going, and helps to ensure that my ideas are being expressed clearly. I always true to avoid the use of the word “racism” unless it is qualified with another word like “structural.” For example, if I’m discussing stereotypes applied to white males, I would use the phrase “collective responsibilty,” rather than the words “sexism” or “racism.”
It seems to me like the entire debate over the definition of “racism” is really a territorial dispute over the negative connotations of the word. By using different or more precise language, we can avoid these pointless disputes.
Long time commenter here; insufficient time lurker:
What Jeffrey Gandee said.
The way it’s used is mainly as propaganda (see below) or as a debating trick. If you’re arguing with someone with an incohate idea that racism is ‘poor treatment of or violence against people because of their race,’ and you can smuggle in ‘racism is prejudice plus power’, then you can win the argument by switching meanings and without bothering to back up your view. If people push back you get a definition argument.
The definition ‘poor treatment of or violence against people because of their race,’ can’t be wrong. It’s just a description of behaviour and a motive. But ‘racism is prejudice plus power’ can be. You’ve got a very specific psychological theory and a very specific theory of society lying behind that, both of which are extensively laid out in critical race theory. (And also a definite agenda, as it was introduced as propaganda for use in anti-racism indoctrination in “White Awareness: Handbook for Anti-Racism Training”, not as a sociological term of art.) These theories and the definition can absolutely be incorrect, in the same way that ‘heat is the amount of caloric in a substance’ is incorrect.
Amp,
In general, I agree with you, but it seems to me that the people on “your” side (definition-wise) seem to get more exasperated at people on “my” side for not accepting the “prejudice plus power” definition (which I think is “your” definition), while the people on “my” side are more puzzled at the people on “your” side for trying to change the definition.
In other words, the P+P people say “I am so sick and tired of having to explain to people that there is no such thing as reverse racism that I am just done talking to them.” In contrast, I think Robert (maybe it was RonF; I just can’t tell my conservatives, or whatever they are, apart) commented here to the effect of: “I get that you have a different definition, but we think you are changing the definition of the word to make it something different than what it has typically been understood to mean.”
-Jut
By the way, I am only begrudgingly stating I am not a robot, but I will NEITHER CONFIRM NOR DENY the accuracy of that statement.
Actually, that’s not the definition I prefer, although like Jeffrey I’m willing to adjust my usage in some contexts.
I’ve seen people on “your” side get exasperated, too, but I agree that I’ve seen it happen more often on “my” side. I’ve also seen plenty of people on “your” side claim that it’s a conspiracy of some sort, or a delibherate bad-faith strategy (see Pete’s “propaganda or debating trick” comment earlier this thread). In all cases, though, it’s something I wish people on both sides would do less of.
Racism may be prejudice plus power for all I care. When a group of people spends fifteen minute kicking a group of other people in the head, shoots them a few times, and throws them on the railroad tracks, because of the color of their skin, I think that the first group had enough power to back its prejudice up.
Unless you have sufficient localized power you cannot express your prejudice enough for it to hurt your victim. If you do have enough power to do harm, and you are targeting people because of their race, you are a racist in my book.
As for those who say “He is not a racist because he is Black”, I have exactly as much respect for them as for those who say “She is a murderer because she had an abortion”
You can redefine words to help your arguments, or to make yourself feel better about what you are doing, or to confuse the enemy, or to change the language so that it is clearer and serves its purpose better. How I feel about it depends on how much I agree with your goals.
The goal does justify the means, but you still pay the price for the means to which you are resorting.
I not saying it was bad faith. I’m sure when Katz wrote “White Awareness: Handbook for Anti-Racism Training” I’m sure she was absolutely sincere and trying to build a better world.
What I am saying it was absolutely propaganda. She literally set about to write a book and design a course on making white people better citizens and anti-racists. P+P was introduced for the specific purpose of doing this – mainly to foil reverse racism accusation (which when raised in a course basically derail conversation away from how white harm blacks). If you read the book it’s literally Q. How do you make people anti-racists, A. Get them to internalise P+P. It was introduced as a functional tool for creating anti-racists. (And as we can see she’s been massively successful).
If I said “Gravity is actually the result of massive objects shaping the fabric of spacetime around them,” and you said “no no, it says right here in my dictionary that gravity is a force between massive objects” I could argue that my definition is better than yours, because my definition explains phenomenon that yours does not.
I think that the anti-racists who use the newer definition of racism see their definition much the same way. The trouble is, unlike my gravity example, the older definition of racism described a real phenomenon just fine, and on top of that, almost everyone agrees that anything falling under the older definition is morally indefensible, so naturally, many people get upset when their innocent behavior is labeled as racist.
I’ve had the accusation lobbed at me for the crime of buying a house in a gentrifying neighborhood. My accuser probably wanted to bring institutional racism to my attention, but at the same time, she concluded that I shouldn’t have purchased the house because it was racist to do so. The descriptive became prescriptive.
Read the book. It isn’t a conspiracy theory, there was no conspiracy. There was an open plot. She openly wrote and published a book which was a step by step guide to indoctrinating people and making them anti-racists. Now go on Tumblr. Were a bunch of white people fighting for social justice using exactly the language she advocated? I’m guessing yes. This is an open and shut case.
The problem I have with this sort of definition is that there is already a perfectly good term for the “(racial) prejudice plus (institutional) power” concept and that is “institutional racism”. Insisting that this be reverted to just “racism” comes across as either laziness, ignorance or a conscious choice to minimize other forms of racism.
Jeffrey Gandee:
This pretty much points at the issue. It’s not so much a disagreement over the definition of a word. It’s (mostly) a proxy fight over the morality of particular actions by certain groups of people. One side is trying to defend those actions, the other thinks racism is always wrong.
Well, that’s how it “comes across” to you – but since you rarely give feminists and leftists any benefit of the doubt, I don’t think that’s a very meaningful opinion. It’s sort of like when a Yankees fan says the Red Sox suck. There’s nothing we could do that you wouldn’t interpret as a sign of poor character in one way or another. (And I’m not saying this is at all unique to anti-sjws. Plenty of folks on the left are the same way.)
“Institutional racism” and “prejudice plus power” are overlapping terms, but not interchangeable terms. If a white person crosses the street to avoid an old black man in a suit, that’s racism in the “prejudice plus power” sense, but I’m not clear that it’s “institutional racism.”
Plus, saying or writing “racism” takes a lot fewer syllables than saying or writing “institutional racism.” I think shortening phrases is a very common thing for groups that frequently discuss a topic to do. If that’s what you mean by “lazy,” then I think most human groups are lazy.
In my experience, people tend to bring up examples of “racism against whites” to change the subject when trying to address racism against people of color. It is a classic deflection technique. That’s usually the source of my exasperation, not the semantics.
Except for the gotcha-words “propaganda,” “plot” and “indoctrinating”, I’m not seeing what the problem here is.
Kate, right. What’s the downside of personally being an anti-racist? I could see why racists would be unhappy about a reduction in their numbers (less cover for racist behavior and institutional racism), but where is the harm I’m meant to fret over? Calling it a “plot” (book tells you how to apply its principles, if you want to!) doesn’t make it seem any spookier or more urgent.
“Plus, saying or writing “racism” takes a lot fewer syllables than saying or writing “institutional racism.” I think shortening phrases is a very common thing for groups that frequently discuss a topic to do. If that’s what you mean by “lazy,” then I think most human groups are lazy.”
That doesn’t make sense if you later want to say that racism against the wrong people doesn’t count. It is fine to talk about racism in the US as shorthand for white on black prejudicial action. But if someone wants to talk about the racism in a black person attacking a Jewish person for being a Kike, you are wrong to say that isn’t racism. You might say that it isn’t the kind of institutional racism that you were talking about at the time. But it is still racism.
If the confusion were really just shortening, the people doing the shortening wouldn’t have such a problem re-lengthening when it was appropriate. That is why it comes across as trying to propagandize.
Doesn’t this depend on what definition of racism is being used?
Sometimes, people on the right will argue that “the real racists!” are people on the left who “make everything about race,” in other words, self proclaimed anti-racists are actually the racists, which would make anti-SJ types “the real anti-racists.”
Likewise, if someone on the left defines racism such that capitalism fits under the category “racist,” then the real anti-racists will also necessarily be anti-capitalist. I don’t want to be labelled anti-racist in that case.
I think there is also a case to be made for good rational debate, devoid of dishonest tactics, even if those tactics appear to aid “your side” of the debate, and help create more anti-racists. Insisting on rational debate is a good first step in the never ending battle against bias.
Heck, the term “reverse racism” itself is a propaganda term. It’s use intends to communicate that “racism” itself means racist thoughts or actions by whites against blacks, and thus we need to modify the term “racism” in order to communicate racism by blacks against whites. How one would define racism by Hispanics against blacks or vice versa isn’t clear to me under such a concept.
Racism is a scalar quantity, not a vector one – the direction in which it is exercised is immaterial as to whether it is racism or not.
“Derailing for Dummies,” though you don’t see direct links to it that much in the last couple of years, is another big source of the kind of heads-I-win-tails-you-lose debate conventions you see in the progressive world. It cements the semantics, if you will.
You know, the “if I tell you you’re *ist and I posses the right set of oppressions, you are – and if you point to someone else with my set of oppressions and they disagree with me, you’re just derailing, even though they were born into their credibility the exact same way I was” kinda thing.
If you want to have your own rules on your own blog, messageboard, student group, whatever, go for it. There’s certainly nothing magical about Robert’s Rules of Order.
But where it really fails is when formerly safe-spaced people try to go out into the wider world and engage with voters, elected officials and other people outside their orbit who don’t share their premises.
Witness this in action during the BLM meeting with Hillary. They had an audience with the (kinda sorta) probable next president, and all they could muster was a jargon-y word salad. They managed to accuse her of “victim blaming” without asking about any particular policy.
Then there’s the terrible optics of the Wesleyan newspaper situation. Anyone constricted by these discussion rules could tell you that it’s not a good idea to threaten to physically destroy newspapers until they get their demands met. But if, in the D4D-age, any criticism of methods is verboten tone policing … well, you see what happens.
You can define words however you want for whatever reason you want, but if that makes it impossible to engage with the outside world, you’ve failed as activists.
And though wildly successful in bullying each other, Obama-era progressive activists have been reliable only in their inability to effect electoral politics or judicial philosophy on any level.* The academy is a consolation prize.
* Yeah, I didn’t forget gay marriage. Which many of the self-styled “real” progressives relentlessly hammered for being lead by and conducted on behalf of rich, white gay men.
I didn’t see it before making my last post, but Popehat nails it on the prejudice plus power thing:
I strongly recommend reading up on the idea of the “persuasive definition” (a term coined by Charles Stevenson in the 1930s), which is what this entire debate is really about.
The “persuasive definition” refers to situations where a word has a certain emotive punch (“racism”, “freedom”, “culture”, etc.) and people try to incorporate a set of concepts into that definition in order to harness said emotive punch. Philosophers dispute whether this is necessarily foul play — it seems that something akin to persuasive definition concerns inheres in any definitional dispute (otherwise we wouldn’t debate over the meaning of racism, we’d just come up with a new term “bracism” and use that) — but all agree it is at least something to flag.
On the racism question, we see this on both sides of the equation. Conservatives will say that “racism” has serious emotional punch because of its association with brutal, deliberate practices of intentional racial domination (slavery, Jim Crow, etc.), and that when one tries to incorporate things like microaggressions or unintentional biases into the term “racism” there’s a sleight-of-hand going on: trying to lasso the emotional punch of “just like slavery/Jim Crow!” to things that are not, in fact, anything close to slavery and which there is certainly no agreement that they are as viciously wrong as slavery/Jim Crow (which is where the emotive punch derives).
Liberals, for there part, can lob the same charge back along two dimensions. First, “reverse racism” engages in the same gambit: It wants to associate things like affirmative action with the raw emotional badness of slavery/Jim Crow, even though few would actually argue that they are morally on par (again, that affirmative action displays the sheer viciousness that underlies the emotive power generated by slavery/Jim Crow. And second, there is another sleight-of-hand wherein conservatives use the emotive power of a word as a trump card over content: “racism means abject evildoer [has that emotive connotation], I am not an abject evildoer, hence, any definition of racism which implicates me is necessarily false.” Of course, it is not writ in stone that “racism” needs to be restricted to abject evildoers, and indeed I have long argued that presenting it as such is a defensive move meant to narrow the ambit of “racism” as a term and ensure it only covers a small slice of behaviors which might otherwise be implicated in racialized hierarchies and injustice.
I’m more sympathetic to the liberal position here, but I do think conservatives have one valid point: it is not fair pool to expand the definition of racism to include, say, subconscious biases not consciously endorsed and simultaneously try to preserve the raw emotive charge of “racism” as akin to a Bull Connor type. For my part, I prefer to sacrifice the emotive power in favor of the expanded definition (and many liberals agree — “Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist” is all about deflating the emotional weight of “racist” while expanding its reach). But some liberals do, I think, want to have their cake and eat it too on this issue, and I think there are valid criticisms of that move.
Nice comment David. I pretty much agree with all that, but I’m left with one question that kinda relates to RonF’s popehat article.
Does it really benefit anti-racist advocates to adopt a definition of racism that is so broad that it is no longer prescriptive? In other words, is anyone going to care if their behaviors are labelled racist under an expanded definition where everyone is racist?
Depends on why they might care. If they only care about avoiding stigma, then no.
But if they actually care about drawing accurate and appropriate conclusions from evidence, then yes. That is, people might be motivated to avoid racist practices not out of fear and shame, but out of a self-interested desire to better understand the world and function more ably within it.
I imagine a world in which people might acknowledge that their perceptions are distorted by bias just as they might acknowledge being nearsighted or bad at math: ruefully, but without defensiveness.
– “If there’s no further business, this luncheon is adjourned. We’ll get the check this time. Julie, would you calculate the tip? You’re good at that stuff – and it’s probably better that I not be the one evaluating the waiter’s service, if you know what I mean….”
– “This is a make-or-break project for our firm; we need our best people on this – so I’m delegating staffing to you guys. You know what’s at stake for all of us. You can’t let anything — including me – get in the way of our success….”
To probably misuse a religious argument, since I’m not religious myself:
Is anyone going to care if they sin once everybody’s defined as a sinner?
The stigma against racism isn’t (or, I should say, shouldn’t be, and isn’t in some communities) because it’s rare, but because it’s wrong. American society* is pretty good with levels of wrong: shoplifting and murder are both illegal, but we don’t treat shoplifters and murderers the same, though we do prosecute them both when caught. Likewise, a microaggression isn’t as harmful as refusing to hire nonwhite people for a job opening, but both should be avoided.
This is related to David Schraub’s point, too, I think, about making racism less of a hot-button word if we want to use it to describe anything that includes racial bias, severe or not. And I think it’s probably also related to Jay Smooth’s bit about calling an action racist and not a person: by limiting the scope you also limit the reach of the negative connotations.
*others too, probably, but America’s the only one I know well enough to say for sure
I find the idea of a world in which people are literally too anti-racist to function as some sort of comedy version of a Twilight Zone episode.
I picture the famous episode with the all-powerful kid all the grown-ups have to make happy, except that the kid isn’t a six-year-old but a college sophomore who read a few books and a blog post on the implicit association test and thinks he understands everything.
I have to say that I don’t really get the question about whether people will care if their behavior is labeled racist. I mean, do people care if their behavior is labeled selfish or mean or any other negative term? Some people do, and if someone tells them that they’re being one of those things, then they’ll reflect on it and possibly apologize and make amends and try not to do it again. Other people don’t care, and if so, then there’s not really any point in trying to get them to change, unless you can find a way to phrase it in their own self-interest.
I mean, I’ve been in that position several times. I said something, someone else commented that what I’d said was racist, I got a bit bristly at first (which I’m not proud of), then I examined what I’d said, and in some of the cases, I realized that the person was right. And I apologized, and tried to think about what thought process had brought me to say the thing I’d said, and to identify what biases I had that influenced it, and to be aware of that in the future. And other times, I examined what I’d said, and ran it by a couple other people to make sure, and decided that I didn’t see any need to apologize for what I’d said, and then I shrugged and went on with my life.
Here’s an example of where the P + P definition of thinking can lead:
Did she send a “threatening” message, as the charge implies, or are the messages described in this article what she was charged for sending? Because asking white people to “not attend the event for black and ethnic minority women” hardly seems like a threat, whether or not you agree with it.
Yeah, I agree with this completely. I work with tools for a living, never having to put my ideas to paper unless they are in the form of a drawing, so I often struggle communicating in writing. What I was trying to ask was this:
Is it a good idea for racism’s definition to include actions that many people (perhaps most?) do all the time, AND don’t think are wrong?
I realize that at one point in US history, hardly anyone thought racism was wrong, so this may be a really stupid question.
I suppose I was thinking of an even broader definition of racism when I posed that question. For example, if I’m a banker, and I’m lending money at the lowest interest rates that will keep me in business and pay my wage, calculating the risks as accurately as I can for each borrower, more likely than not it will appear that my lending practices are racist according to the broadest definitions of racism I’ve heard.
Looking back over the conversations here, it appears no one in this discussion has actually endorsed such a broad definition, though.
Amp @27 – Popehat went into more detail on this.
It wasn’t about the invitation to the meeting, but the #killallwhitemen tag that went along with it.
I’m puzzled by the timeline in that article. The article was published today, October 6.
And an article linked within that one, about the failed vote of no confidence, is from May.
@Ruchama
“do people care if their behavior is labeled selfish or mean or any other negative term?”
Yes, a lot of people care about being insulted. Especially when those insults are not just individual opinions, but part of a world view that is shared by many people.
A lot of people also don’t like being told they will go to hell for not believing or for having the wrong faith. Keep in mind that conservative religious people have implemented very restrictive laws and enforce(d) norms harshly, which hurts people.
This silly anti-racism movement is very similar in many ways and is thus not innocent. The idea that you will be safe by having a thick skin is rather naive, IMO.
I’m not sure what you’re responding to. I asked that as a rhetorical question, and answered it immediately — some people do care, and others don’t. Though if someone cares only because they see it as an insult, then there’s probably not going to be much chance of any sort of productive conversation with that person.
(Now I’m starting to wonder if I’m coming at this from a Jewish point of view without totally noticing it. I mean, a lot of this stuff is taking me back to elementary school discussions about Yom Kippur.)
” I asked that as a rhetorical question, and answered it immediately — some people do care, and others don’t.”
And I explained that these insults often demonstrate an underlying bigotry that has other effects, which cannot simply be ignored (at least, when these people get into power).
A lot of people get insulted by words for the world view that underlies those words, rather than the offensiveness of the words themselves.
So that is why I find your answer unsatisfactory, since you just look at those words and their plain meaning, not the world view and it’s noxious consequences.
I hate the definitional arguments, and the discussions where people aren’t aware that they’re using different definitions. What makes them so bad, and so likely to degenerate into messes of outrage and defensiveness, is that the P+P definitions is colloquially racist and vice versa. It’s obviously colloquially racist to say that white people are innately prone to a certain sort of evil, and it’s clearly racist in the P+P sense to ignore the structural factors that make up the bulk of modern oppressive forces.
As you say, widely used definitions can’t really be wrong in the sense of being incorrect, but I think part of the problem with these conversations is that people using the other definition aren’t considered just wrong (incorrect) but also wrong (immoral). I think that adding clarifiers to the word “racism” to avoid confusion can be helpful, but that it’s not enough to solve the problem where using a different definition is considered evidence of moral turpitude.
By the way, I’d just like to say that those cartoon monsters around the borders look really cool.
Perhaps it is important to define what racism is NOT. That might help you all come to some sort of agreement.
Racism is not when I do not get what I want 100% of the time with minimal effort. Racism is not when I am not automatically treated with deference, love and respect 100% of the time by every single person I come into contact with however briefly.
Racism is not about a person’s belief system. People choose a belief system, and with very rare exceptions you cannot decide to choose your race.
No one is entitled to immediate preferential treatment, no one deserves immediate abuse. All one human “owes” another is indifference until proven otherwise.
Consensus possible for a moment?
That’s fine, then. In that scenario, you no longer are comfortable identifying as “anti-racist.” Done and dusted. The question was, what’s the downside for people choosing to be anti-racist (according to whatever is the prevailing definition)? It’s been suggested in this thread that there are serious consequences to being the subject of “anti-racist propaganda” and brainwashing. Wondering what those might be, beyond Tumblr.
The problem is that anti-racism generally results in judging people by race, assuming bad faith (micro-aggressions), the claim that race determines people’s ability to judge reality, wallowing in a self-destructive victim mentality, excluding white people, etc, etc.
Note that I’m not talking about people who get upset at Trump for his remarks or people who are against the KKK, but those who follow a certain script where they judge all white people for perpetuating a racist system, irrespective of their actual actions.
This ‘anti-racist’ script separates people by race and breeds a ‘no can do’ mentality, which perpetuates the problems, rather than properly address them. The BLM meeting with Hillary is a very good example. The campaigners were only interested in making a white person feel bad about her race. They had no positive goals, no image of a just society, just a general anger at white people. People like that are just the mirror image of certain people who spend their life blaming another race group for their troubles.
‘We’ call that last group conservative bigots and the other progressive liberals. Yet they actually behave very much alike in reality (but with a different group they judge to be victims of the other group).
So when you ask about the ‘serious consequences,’ I find that a bit silly, as they perpetuate the exact same serious issues they purport to address. There are quite a few people with good intentions who cause more harm than good and I see anti-racists as being like that.
That doesn’t entirely answer my question, I’m afraid, Aapje.
To clarify, I’m asking: what is the harm to the individual when the individual identifies as anti-racist?
If I’m understanding your response, the harm is that the individual no longer has a “can-do” attitude, speaks on a script, doesn’t address racism in a way that others (who?) would prefer, and is too wallow-y. Anything else?
Two people here have now cited the BLM meeting with Clinton as an example of how unproductive current Black activism is. And yet, BLM pressure on Clinton and on other Democratic candidates has produced a big change in how the candidates are addressing BLM’s issues – not least of which is, they ARE addressing BLM’s issues. (There is no chance that Clinton’s website’s page on criminal justice would look like this if BLM hadn’t been a factor.)
Is BLM getting everything they wanted? Of course not – and there is no conceivable approach they could have taken which would have led to that outcome by this point. But they’ve been effective, and I don’t think any of the concern trolls actually are suggesting any approaches that would have worked better.
How Black Lives Matter activists are influencing 2016 race – CNNPolitics.com
‘Black Lives Matter’ makes its mark on Democratic campaigns – The Boston Globe
Bernie Sanders Black Lives Matter: White Americans ‘Not Sensitive’ To African-American Struggles, Presidential Candidate Says
This is an astoundingly wrong thing to say.
They did clearly want her to specifically rebuke policies that she’s supported, and to admit that those policies have had bad and specifically racist outcomes. Here’s part of what they said:
Do you honestly not see the difference between trying to make Clinton own up for policies she’s been involved with versus trying to make her “feel bad about her race?” (And remember, you claimed that was their ONLY interest.)
Here’s more of what they told Clinton:
The claim that the BLM activists “were only interested in making a white person feel bad about her race” is so obviously factually false, and so obviously a case of someone bending over backwards to assume malice of people he disagrees with, that it calls into question whether or not talking to you is a good use of my time, or the time of anyone else here on “Alas.”
Anaxagoras:
This seems pretty accurate to me.
Thanks! :-D
Thanks for the Popehat link. But according to Popehat, it didn’t “go along” with the invitation to the meeting; it was a hashtag she used on her personal twitter account:
Ruchama:
There’s been a recent update in her case – she was just “summoned to appear in court,” and will appear in Court on November 5. So I think that’s what caused Popehat to post about it at this time.
I doubt people would be so indulgent of a #killblacks hashtag if it failed to specify time, place, target etc, let alone if its originators claimed that its use was “ironic” or a “joke”.
I don’t actually support people being charged for this kind of thing, but given that so many of the people defending Mustafa do support the law in general (just not in its application to her), I think their hypocrisy is worth noting.
White men are, of course, killed in fairly large numbers in the UK and elsewhere. Not as often as black men or white women, it’s true, but that’s fairly cold comfort to a white man reading about how he should die.
White men are killed more often that white women in the US and UK, at least. (Men of any race are ~2/3 of murder victims in both countries.)
I really have no idea, and I don’t think very many people mean to use the “prejudice+power” or “structural” definitions of racism as propaganda. I dated a woman for a year who would make arguments much like those of Bahar Mustafa from the popehat link, and I know she wasn’t trying to be malicious, she just wasn’t very good at reasoning. Hanlon’s Razor applies here.
I do wonder if it makes sense to define “anti-racism” in such a way as to decrease the number of people who would be open to it. I know a similar debate surrounds the word “feminist,” and who gets to be a feminist, or a “good feminist.” I do believe that by framing certain perspectives as “feminist perspectives,” the movement is pushing people away, and the result is a whole bunch of Jezebel articles calling out celebrities who don’t want to identify with their movement. I think anti-racism is going down this same path. I’m open to the idea that this sort of gate-keeping may be in the interest of those within the movement, though.
The “plus power” dodge is just that–an excuse for declaring that your racism is unacceptable, but my racism is perfectly okay and justified.
Just fix the phrasing and parse the definitions, and any measure of hypocrisy can be justified. They’re your terrorists, but they’re our freedom fighters. “A rebellion is always legal in the first person, such as “our rebellion.” It is only in the third person – “their rebellion” – that it becomes illegal.”
Tamme:
The person quoted, Popehat, would (I’m fairly positive) say pretty much the same thing about a #killblacks hashtag, if it was similarly situated. Do you have ANY reason to say otherwise?
Or perhaps you were accusing me, since I was the one who quoted Popehat. So: Would I think it was funny? No. Would I call for the person to be hauled before a court, if that’s all it was? No, of course not.
Do I think that blacks and whites occupy the exact same position in society, so that if we just reverse the nouns we have two situations that are substantively equivalent in every way? No, I don’t think that either; that would be ridiculous, because it would ignore both the present context and centuries of history. Yet this is the first and only analysis of racism that many people here ever perform. Their arguments do a lot more to attack Black people (or, at least, with attacking anti-racists) than they do to actually oppose racism in any substantive way.
Who are these “so many” people? Are we talking about a random comment writer on some blog or college newspaper, or someone who actually is known or in a position of power?
[Edited to make it less snarky.]
But what’s the alternative? If feminism doesn’t have any perspectives at all, then maybe it would push fewer people away – but it also wouldn’t stand for anything.
Copyleft:
I’m really not interested in how your magical mind-reading powers let you know that everyone who disagrees with you is a bad person whose arguments are made in bad faith.
” so that if we just reverse the nouns we have two situations that are substantively equivalent in every way? ” I agree that a simple reversal is not always useful, but I think in this case it is a productive exercise. The relevant question is, does the lack of institutional power make somebody’s speech less harmful? Violence is something that is accessible to those without any institutional power, so I don’t think this is the case. #fireallwhites or #refuseloanstoallwhites or #trapallwhitesindebt would be substantially different to my eye.
Conversely, a woman tweeting #killallmen is relatively unthreatening since female-on-male murder is so rare (I’m not counting self-defense as murder here). On the other hand, #enslaveallmen is a different matter, because when slavery existed, it was very common for women to have male slaves.
Huh? Was it uncommon for men to have female slaves in whichever version of slavery you’re referring to?
I’m totally confused by that statement and I’m unsure what questions I can ask to get clarification. I guess getting the time period and/or specific type of slavery would be a start.
Yeah, I get that. I just think social justice gatekeeping, including the definitions of racism and feminism, have gone too far. I mean, it seems to me like anti-racists are trying to marry a not-widely held theory to a widely used word, much like some feminists wish to marry their own not-widely-held gender theories (and sometimes ecomomic theories!) to the word “feminism.”
Concerning perspectives, the atheist movement is a fun one to examine. I’m an atheist. I like some of the things Dawkins has to say, but when he calls it child abuse when a parent raises their own child into the family’s religion, I think he does a disservice to the movement. That is bad rhetoric in support of a bad agenda. I’ve heard people say that they are reluctant to label themselves as atheists because of comments like that. I do think the atheist community has done a pretty good job countering some of Dawkin’s misstatements, and to his credit, Dawkins has changed some of his more controversial opinions (though I think he’s holding on tight to his “child abuse” opinion)
Dawkins has done much good for the atheist community, but he’s becoming more of a liability. I think the same kind of thing is happening among SJ advocates right now. Too many advocates, people who are respected bloggers and leaders within their communities are starting to sound like parodies of feminism and anti-racism. Bad reasoning within the community should be called out, but instead, I see a lot of high-fives and “plus 1’s.” I know there are some really great feminists and antiracist blogs (this is one of them, no doubt) but the most visited and well known feminist blogs are drowning you guys out. This fall, South Park is having a field day with it, and people are laughing. Article’s like popehat’s are becoming more numerous, and the people writing them are no longer just voices from the right.
But maybe this is all for the best. It’s possible that more moderate feminists and antiracists benefit by appearing much more moderate in comparison. Perhaps the most radical feminsts and antiracists make it easier for moderates to reach people they otherwise couldn’t. I don’t know much about movements or how they work, so that’s why I ask these things.
I guess I don’t understand the goal of defining institutional or power + racism as all of ‘racism’.
(‘You’ and ‘your’ to follow is just shorthand for people defending the narrower version of racism)
If it is a shorthand, I get it, but I don’t understand why in pushback situations you don’t just describe it as shorthand for a particular kind of racism.
If it is meant to keep the emotional valence of ‘racism’ but exempt your side from the possibility of racism, I question the rhetorical value of it. It won’t ever work except for people already REALLY on your side, and it will make you look like an enormous hypocrite to people who might sort of lean your way but aren’t fully invested in your side.
If it is meant to help people understand the existence and importance of positional power or institutional arrangements in racism, you would do better by drawing attention to it directly (say by modifying the word ‘racism’ as ‘institutional racism’ or ‘power + prejudice’) rather than concealing it in a way that might make people think they know what you’re talking about but actually they don’t understand you at all.
There also seems to be some weird notion of ‘power’ in some of the proponents of the narrow view which seems to fail to note the fact that power is a relative term. For some conceptions of ‘white’ and some conceptions of ‘power’, white people may be generally more powerful than black people. But in some circumstances, individual white people may experience power + prejudice at the hands of black people with local institutional power.
Jeffrey:
I agree with you that feminism and SJ advocacy has too much high-fiving and too little rigor.
(I don’t really see that as making feminism and SJ advocacy any different from other popular political movements, though. Is there a movement without high-fiving and memes with big type? Is there a movement where moderate and careful voices drown out the people yelling slogans? Also, is there really anything that can be done about this problem, if we assume that free speech is good?)
So on a general level, I agree with some of what you’re saying.
Beyond that general level, I can’t tell, because of the lack of specifics in your post. I mean, who are the best known and most popular feminists? I’d guess that in the US it’s Hilary Clinton and Ellen DeGeneres, but obviously that’s not who you mean, since both of them are as moderate and inoffensive as they can be. (And not very involved in social media, except as far as their jobs require).
I see the feminist blogosphere – and, actually, feminism in social media writ broadly – as more of a vast mosaic than a hierarchy with leaders. Sure, some of the tiles are bigger than others, but in the end we all blur into the larger pattern. The biggest feminist on Tumblr – I have no idea who that even is. I do know who (say) Katha Pollit is, but there are probably lots of Tumblr feminists who haven’t heard of her.
For me, the most important and interesting anti-racist writer working right now is Ta-Nahisi Coates. And he’s undeniably a big name. But I’m sure that there are anti-racist hip-hop artists I’ve never heard of who are much more famous than Coates is.
(It occurs to me that I actually have no idea how Coates defines “racism.”)
Also, this is besides the point, but I’ll say it anyway: Just by being a blog I’m being drowned out, because blogs are irrelevant. :-) I mean, blogs are really yesterday’s news, if by “yesterday” we mean “at least five years ago.” (Did people see that Amanda Marcotte just retired her long-running blog “Pandagon”?) I keep the blog going because it’s fun, and also because it’s a habit, not because I think it’s an effective way of broadcasting my voice.
(That’s too bad, btw, because at their best blogs can be really good. But the best bloggers tend to be sucked up into working for big websites or magazines, because they understandably want to earn a living.)
@38 Mookie
I explicitly said that the movement perpetuates racism and racial separation. You keep missing my main point and turning my argument into a caricature. I treat you with respect and would request the same in return.
@40 Ampersand
I was talking about a quote from the Popehat blog post. I didn’t read the full transcript and you are right that they also blamed her personally. But they keep avoiding the issue of actual new policies and pivot to blaming racism by white people in general:
“speaks that truth to White people in this country so that we can actually take on anti-Blackness as a founding problem in this country”
“It’s just going to morph into something new and evolved.”
“lessons for all of America for a moment of reflection on how we treat black people in this country?”
The clear world view that the BLM advocates were working from, was collective guilt of white people and collective innocence of black people. This is racist and counterproductive in general & especially silly when engaging a policy maker.
I never assumed malice, Ampersand. This is a mistake you keep on making and it is very destructive to the debate.
I don’t think the BLM advocates had any malicious intent when they pushed their narrative on Clinton. I think that they are misguided, blind to the inherent racism in their belief system and genuinely believe that their strategy helps their cause. In general I do not think that the people I disagree with are evil. Very few people truly are. But you can have the best of intentions and yet believe or do very noxious things.
Similarly, when you responded to the claim of propaganda by claiming that this was an accusation of bad faith, that was also wrong. It’s pretty clear to me that a lot of anti-racists believe that white people are fundamentally unable to grasp the extent of racism against black people. Since these people often cannot convince people of their truth by logic, they resort to these propaganda techniques. The intent is not bad-faith/to deceive, but rather to make people see their truth, by framing reality in a particular way. However, mankind is far from rational and we have a tendency to start believing in our own framing. Especially in an echo chamber. So I think that pretty much all P+P advocates now believe that nonsense, but that doesn’t mean that it isn’t propaganda.
PS. We all engage in propaganda anyway, so if using it is considered malicious, then we all act in bad faith.
@55 Ampersand
Every movement has its bad eggs, but I don’t agree with you that every movement is equal in its silliness. The Climate Change movement clings to proper science like a hawk and responds to criticism honestly. The anti-death penalty movement seems very rational and reasonable. The pro-gun control movement generally argues on real facts and asks for changes that may work.
I’d respect the feminist and SJ movement more if they would try to be more like those movements. But here we are on probably one of the least echo chamber like forums on these issues and yet you still spin the ‘we are no worse than anyone else’. This is defensiveness that comes from a desire to protect your movement(s) from criticism, rather than engage with criticism and IMO, it is the main thing that is holding ‘you’ back. This defensiveness and the general unwillingness to see good faith in critics is at the core of the echo chamber that just leads these movements further and further into the rabbit hole.
I feel like I’ve missed a step. Which Popehat post are you referring to, specifically, please?
At least two of those three things are commonly associated with the Social Justice Movement, no?
Ampersand:
I’ll agree that my initial comment was a bit too critical in making assumptions about the use of the P+P definition of racism. I think a lot of the push back against the P+P definition is that it’s being used in ways to defend morally questionable behaviour, such as with the way Bahar Mustafa defended her acts of racial and gender discrimination.
Also, while I can understand seeing me as being sceptical of feminism, if we discussed other topics (e.g. economics, labour rights, environmental issues, property rights, etc) you’d probably see me favouring the left and being far more sceptical of the right.
Jake Squid (quoting Aapje):
I think many people are using “Social Justice” as a term to refer to (leftist) “Identity Politics”. It’s the topics of race, gender, sexuality, fat-acceptance, disability, and so on that form a strong part of people’s identity that seems to bring out the extreme views.
If you look at the those opposed to gun control you get a lot of people who identify as “gun users” and they tend to be the type that put forward more extreme views. Similarly, where those on the right derive their views from their identity as “Christians”, you get a lot of extreme views.
Many of the feminists you are debating here are men; as far as I know, most of the anti-racists you are debating here are white. (I know enough personal details about some people to know–others I’m not sure of.) It seems like your theory implies that the men would be less extreme than the women on feminism, since they are not deriving it from a personal identity, and likewise that the white people would be less extreme than the nonwhite people, on average. That seems counter to the positions I see held by the commenters here. So either I am misunderstanding your theory, or you disagree with my assessment of the arguments here, or something about your theory is incorrect or incomplete. May I ask where you would put the error? (I suspect it’s obvious where I would. :) )
Also, of course, “more extreme” is not necessarily synonymous with “less correct,” nor with “less rigorous.”
Harlequin,
Strangely enough, one of the reasons I comment here and not elsewhere is that the people here seam to be “less extreme” yet still strongly pro-feminism/anti-racism/etc, in comparison to other online communities that are strongly pro-feminism/anti-racism/etc.
That said, one aspect of it is that the identity-politics based social justice advocates are going to be promoting ideas that they see are in defence of an identifiable group of people. The opposing ideas are often seen as defending abstract goals or an amorphous majority. While men/white-people/etc might not take feminism/anti-racism/etc personally, they may still see it as an issue of empathy and be driven more by emotion than reason and hence potentially arrive at a more extreme position.
I’ll extend my theory to include a second aspect of identity the fact that “feminist” is probably the identity most analogous to “Christian”. In the sense that some people consider themselves Christian because they were brought up in their religion and its never clashed too seriously with their own sense of morality. They make judgements on right and wrong, good and bad, based on their instinct and on reflection might observe that their own judgements are more or less aligned with Christian teachings. Others are Christian in the sense that they identify with Christianity and see Christianity as the sole (or dominate) source of goodness and that to be the best person they can be they have to be the most Christian they can be. In order to make judgements on right and wrong, good and back, they turn to Christian teachings and apply the teachings in a strongly dogmatic way.
I’m suggesting that it’s the feminists that “identify” as feminists in this second way that will hold the more extreme views. These people would be the ones who are concerned over whether such-and-such celebrity has called themselves a feminist. The same could be said for people who “identify” as other sorts of social-justice advocates.
I’m not sure which views or commenters you’re referring to here.
By “more extreme” I guess I mean more willing to take action to apply radical or strongly dogmatic solutions and less willing to discuss issues or consider alternatives or compromise.
@58 Ampersand
See @29
@61 Harlequin
Can you explain why you see the resident anti-SJ commentators to be more extreme? I strongly object to almost all race and gender specific policies & laws. I object against judging people by and holding them accountable for their gender or race. I’m against excusing bad behavior due to people’s gender or race (when they belong to a Victim Group™).
In general, I advocate an even-handed approach to all, which I feel is missing in most of feminism/anti-racism/SJWs.
You can argue that I’m pretty extreme in that I want very large reforms of the police, drug laws, welfare system, tax law (greatly increasing taxes on the rich), ability to evade taxes, etc, etc. Yet somehow I don’t think this is the extremism you are referring to.
IMO, most feminist theory and the P+P type of anti-racism is very extremist, but works from (false) premises that makes that extremism seem logical. These believe systems tend to frame things in such a way that the extremism is not visible to the believers and the dissenters seem extremist.
Of course, conservatives do the exact same things. The people who believe in ‘traditional marriage’ also feel that equal marriage advocates are extremists and they aren’t extremist themselves.
Very well said, Aapje. I noticed the knee-jerk defensiveness as well, and it was disappointing. It’s sad that I have to attach the descriptor “rational” in describing myself as a rational liberal, but far too often the left abandons reason in favor of ideological frenzy. Since the right (in the U.S.) has already declared war on science and evidence, where does that leave the evidence-favoring person to turn?
Copyleft:
As always, where the evidence leads. Evidence-based practices like the scientific method are not for choosing sides or finding the best social group or philosophy; they are for better understanding what is most likely to be true, and keeping your mind open to the possibility that more and better evidence will change your conclusions.
Grace
You’re right of course, Grace. I just wish the Left would do a better job of embracing reason and evidence, especially with the bad example from the Right of what happens when you abandon them.
Sure you’d say that; you’ve been inoculated. That’s one of the well-known side-effects of inoculations: They warp your brain into believing all that crap about reason and evidence. You won’t catch me falling into that trap, no sir.
Unbridled paranoia is the price of liberty!
Confirmation bias is universal. One side doesn’t do it more than the other. The best we can do is be conscious of it and try to counteract it. None of us will be 100% successful, but trying is better than not trying.
So, yeah, I wish the Left would do a better job of embracing reason and evidence, too. I also wish that the Right would do a better job. We’d all be better off for it. Sadly, most people aren’t aware of confirmation bias so they can’t even begin to try to overcome it.
desipis: thanks for the response, that makes sense.
Most comment sections here, generally speaking, can be divided into “people who regularly agree with the authors of the posts” and “people who often push back against the authors of the posts”–I was talking more about the first group. Sorry I didn’t specify further. (Aapje, hopefully this addresses your point as well–I was comparing what you would call the SJ commenters amongst ourselves, not making any judgment about the level of extremity of the other “side”.)
Also Aapje:
We may be working under different definitions of extreme here: I’m perfectly aware that a lot of the things I think are true are well outside the mainstream opinions on those things, but I still think I’m right, or I wouldn’t hold those opinions.
(I admit to some curiosity on what you think my false premises are, but that’s not appropriate to this thread–do you have a blog or something where I could ask you for more detail, or somewhere where it’s already written down by you or someone else?)
It seems like either definition prompts a whole lot of, “No, I’M not racist!” responses. I’ve seen a lot of discussions where one person is using the prejudice plus power definition, and the other person is responding, “No, I’m not racist — I’m not going out lynching people or burning crosses or anything like that.” (I had a particularly eye-roll-inducing example of that on my Facebook page a few years ago, when I posted an article along the lines of “If someone says that something you said was racist, then stop and think for a moment before getting all defensive,” and one of my old high school teachers, who was about 86, responded in exactly the “I’m not racist, and how dare you say so, and why do you hate white people so much?” way that the article said not to respond, and this wasn’t even after anyone had said anything directly to her. And I was biting my tongue SO MUCH to not go and find all the stuff about “those people” that she’d posted on other things.) (I ended up unfriending her about a year after that, when she accused me of being brainwashed by Obama because I corrected, with links to reputable sources, something that she’d posted that I knew was false.)
@70 It seems that, by far, the most important element of any definition of racism is that it does not implicate me. I’ve sometimes called this the Bender Theory of Anti-Discrimination: If the “worst kind of discrimination” is “the kind against me”, then the “worst kind of anti-discrimination” is “the kind that encompasses me.”
I’ve said that the best answer I can give to the question “Are you racist?” is “I try not to be,” and I know that a lot of people I know (who would probably be considered SJWs by a lot of people) would answer in the same way.
David, what Ruchama said. Although I’m sure the Bender Theory of Anti-Discrimination describes a real phenomenon, I don’t think it’s as encompassing as you suggest. There really do seem to be a significant number of people who are willing to admit that they are racist in some ways, and that this is a problem they are trying to address.
I think the problem is politics is going to get really factional. If instead of universalist messages (“don’t be sexist”) the left factionalizes things (“only women can experience sexism”) when the right responds it’ll accept the framing and push back though identities. So as the identities of women, gays, blackpeople, transfolk are pushed into the political sphere, so will MRAs, white nationalists, christians, etc. I think things are going to get really ugly.
In my experience, when some anti-racist advocates “correct” people about The (usually, P+P) definition of racism, they do so out of a sense of frustration that a debate participant is trying to morally equate institutional racism with individual racism and/or racism experienced by people of color with that by white people.
Consider the conversation:
Person A: “People of color disproportionately experience racism via the prison-industrial complex in the US.”
Person B: “Well, sometimes black people are racist to white people, so whites have it bad too.”
This is a simplification, but using the same word, racism, in both of these instances does not adequately convey that the racism experienced by black people in the US has been/is qualitatively and quantitatively different than that experienced by whites. I often see the word racist/racism used in a “both sides are just as bad” kind of way that suggests that the racism experienced by white people has/had had the same consequences as the racism experienced by black people – and so I think that’s why many people jump in with the “racism = prejudice + power” argument.
Anyway, my overall point is that when such conversations are had, I think it’s therefore important for participants to talk about and clarify their definitions, and see what points of agreement/disagreement they actually have on the issue.
Christian identity has been part of the political sphere for decades, at least. And the other two might not have always used those terms, but they’ve been there for a long while, too.
Referencing a conversation from above that may, at this point, be a derail
(Aapje
Your word choice is respectful, but ignoring my question while answering one of your own — and then insisting I’m disrespecting you or missing a point I didn’t solicit — isn’t. I’m not interested in what someone thinks about an anti-racist movement. That wasn’t my question.
Framing objections to anti-racism as harmful to the individual is an interesting idea that was briefly introduced. My question refers to people critical of anti-racism who think self-interest should inform, and sometimes preclude, alignment with anti-racist principles or identification as an anti-racist.)
/derail
“Huh? Was it uncommon for men to have female slaves in whichever version of slavery you’re referring to?”
No, not at all, and that’s not my point. I’m simply saying that people defending #enslaveallmen as a joke rendered harmless by lack of female privilege should take into account the fact that men being enslaved by women is a very real historical phenomenon.
Mookie:
It was an idea you introduced back at comment #14. I’m not sure anyone is actually making that argument. It seems like a bit of a straw-man.
Its a bit like asking how people are individually harmed by being convinced by the propaganda of climate change denialists. It’s an idea that seems to miss the point and rather distracts from the more concerning outcomes of the propaganda.
Hillary Clinton Tells Black Lives Matter She Wants To Eliminate Private Prisons
@75 fannie
The problem with that stance is that racism against blacks is also not equal. A black person in NY will have a different experience from a black person in Alabama, who will have a different experience from a black person in London. Even two people from the same place can and often will have different experiences. How can you morally equate all these different experiences (where you don’t know what each of these people experience) and then exclude white people (whose different experiences you also don’t know). It’s all based on separating people into racial groups and making broad statements, based on simplistic statistics.
Furthermore, discrimination of white people can be pretty strong. A ‘trailer trash redneck’ is probably going to face a lot more discrimination in a rich progressive neighborhood or at a progressive university than an affluent looking black woman. Now, I’m not claiming that this makes the discrimination that these people face equal (a belief often falsely attributed to me), but rather that you cannot simply dismiss discrimination of people you classify as a group based on their race. This dismissal of serious discrimination even being possible, based on nothing more than race is…racist.
The entire idea that only PoC can face institutional discrimination is in itself a clearly false premise and one of these insidious beliefs that poisons P+P theory at the core.
BTW, you use the word ‘People of Color,’ which obfuscates the issue even further, by somehow lumping in Asians and Latino’s with blacks. So now you are suddenly morally equating these different groups, with very different histories and experiences. Why is that suddenly OK, when it is so very objectionable when you point out some overlap in discrimination between black and white people?
Do you understand why this makes no sense to me at all? To me, it shows that you think in racial terms, separating white people from the rest of humanity. I don’t see why this is acceptable when doing the same thing to non-white groups isn’t acceptable.
@77 mookie
One way that it is harmful is that people start ascribing all the bad things that happen to them to racism and start seeing racism where none exists (or at least, it is ambiguous). This logically leads to hatred of white people, which leads to separation of the races, which leads to a lack of opportunities to move up in life (and other issues).
Falsely attributing problems to racism also leads to people putting their energy in solving the wrong problems, rather than the real ones.
An example of a most likely false attribution was an interview that I read of a black woman who gave an example of racism: “I found my airplane seat and saw the white person at the adjacent seat looking at me disapprovingly.” Now, this person was a plus sized woman, so the white person may have reacted to that. The interviewee jumped to conclusions based on her stereotypes about white people.
In the P+P narrative, this person experienced a micro-aggression and should feel offended. Perhaps she should get angry and confront this person, accusing her of racism. In my narrative, the interviewee should examine her own stereotypes and stop assuming the worst about people. I believe that my way results in a more happy and productive life.
Obviously this is not a grandiose example, but I think it is illustrative in its simplicity.
PS. Note that I’m not saying that clear cases of racism shouldn’t be confronted.
PS2. Another example is that I had an experience at the university where people had to form groups in one of my first classes and a bunch of non-whites sat together right away. It was a real eye opener for me at the time. In the P+P narrative, they might have been looking for a safe space, empowering each other or something like that. In my reality, they failed to take advantage of a great opportunity to learn from people who were more likely to have academically educated parents and/or learn from a more academically successful culture. I thought it was very self-destructive behavior (and I think they all flunked out). In the P+P narrative, they should blame anyone but themselves. In my narrative, self-destructive behavior by minorities should be addressed. Not to tell people that they are to blame for all of their problems, but to make them realize that they are not helpless in life and can make smart choices that will leave them better off.
I’m not sure if this shows that you don’t understand the claim you’re addressing, or if you just misstated it.
No one is claiming “only PoC can face institutional discrimination.”
There are people claiming that “in a white dominated society, only PoC can face institutional discrimination based on their race.” Which isn’t the same thing, as I hope you can see.
Wow, does that anecdote sound like bullshit. You recognized all of them based on that one classroom experience, kept track of their college careers after that, and have personal knowledge that they all flunked out? Every single one of them?
You know, I don’t even want to hear your explanation of how it is you just happened to know that – because whatever the explanation is, it’ll be just another anecdote you can’t prove.
From now on, on “Alas,” don’t use anecdotes that can’t be documented or proven to illustrate narratives about how minorities are stupid, lazy, self-destructive, don’t realize that they could make smart choices (if only a white person would tell them that!), etc.
This is just basic debate 101; don’t attempt to prove or illustrate obviously controversial beliefs with dubious-sounding and completely unprovable anecdotes.
It’s obviously wrongheaded because, even if you’re being truthful, you are not an objective or perfect observer. Furthermore, it puts everyone who’d like to disagree with you in the invidious position of having to address an event that they have no possible way of gaining independent knowledge of.
(There are cases where illustrative anecdotes make sense – like, for example, if Linus is telling a first-person anecdote of being an abuse victim. But this isn’t such a case.)
@84 Ampersand
This wasn’t at an Anglo-Saxon university. The university I’m talking about separates students at the start by ‘major’. So there were only about a 100 students that started in the same year, who would all do the same courses at that stage. Not that hard to track people that way. You would constantly bump into the people of the same year group. Quite a few dropped out quickly, so you didn’t even have to keep track of 100 after a trimester.
There were 6 students of this particular ethnicity (which as a person with eyes, I noticed) and the 4 who were in my class and who segregated themselves all disappeared in the first year. It’s not that hard to draw conclusions when they don’t show up for any of the classes that your entire year group has to do.
Even more basic is to ask questions, rather than accuse people based on incredulity due to your limited understanding of the world.
YOUR narrative is that I did this. I gave 1 example to illustrate 1 instance of self-destructive behavior and claimed that this may not be honestly discussed in your world view. NOWHERE did I claim that all members of this ethnic group display this behavior. I didn’t claim that white people behave any differently (but of course it isn’t as destructive if they do the same, in most cases). I didn’t claim in any way that they were more stupid (or lazy, how did you read that into it???) than others. My actual objection is that people like you prevent honest discussions of how minorities can change their behavior to better their position, which I think is just as valid a discussion point as how non-minorities should change (again: my position is not to discriminate on race, so I criticize all).
I find your response illustrative. You are completely unable to even understand why I gave this example, because it (very poorly) fits some ‘minorities are stupid’ narrative that you have identified as an evil narrative used by evil people. Because you have such a strong aversion to anything that is remotely critical of minority culture*, you fail to notice the nuances in my statements and jump to conclusions. Attributing things to me I never wrote.
The end result is that you just proved my point: you are completely unable and/or unwilling to discuss the issue that these students engaged in behavior that was destructive to them personally and how we may address that. Instead, you huff and you puff, insinuate that I said something racist, etc. It’s anti-intellectual and based on emotional accusations, not on facts and proper reasoning.
This is a nonsensical objection, since the core of my anecdote consists of 1 very simple observation that didn’t require me to intuit their reasoning or beliefs. So what subjectivity or imperfect observations did I bring into it?
* Note that this is the racism that is part of of anti-racism. It is allowed to point out problems with white (sub-)cultures, but not with non-white (sub-)cultures. This is a racial double standard.
Yet over here in reality, any claim of institutional discrimination by a white person is dismissed. I’ve never seen any SJW acknowledge one actual case ever, except as a theoretical (as in: “I’m not racist, so if you give me a real example I’ll accept it. I’ll just be so critical of any examples that none ever can qualify.”). I’ve seen it so many times that I just can’t take your objection serious.
So you’ve never seen any “SJW” (an annoying pejorative term, by the way) acknowledge, say, claims of institutional discrimination by lgbt people if they’re white? Or by disabled people if they’re white? Or by women, if they’re white? Etc, etc.
Because I see that ALL THE TIME. I could easily provide links, if you’re actually going to insist that such things NEVER happens.
@Aapje –
Almost your entire reply to me addresses claims that I did not make or do not believe, so I’m not going to spend time “rebutting” your post point by point. For instance, I would fully acknowledge that different groups of blacks and different groups of people of color have different experiences with respect to racism.
That you assume I would believe otherwise and “explain” this to me, without first asking, based solely upon a few sentences I wrote is a rude, unfair approach to engaging in debate. A better approach would be to ask people what they think, rather than just assume, because now you’ve annoyed me and I’ve lost confidence in how productive this conversation will be.
For instance, I find your statement here telling:
“I’ve never seen any SJW acknowledge one actual case ever…. I’ve seen it so many times that I just can’t take your objection serious.”
So condescending.
In this entire thread, you’ve done precisely what you rail against: lump people into groups, assume that people you are interacting with (so-called “SJWs”) fall into (or not in) those groups, and treat/respond to them accordingly before you actually know their actual beliefs and opinions.
I bet people’s (even “SJWs”) beliefs are more complicated and nuanced than you give them credit for. If you back off a bit with the harsh assumptions, you might find that out. If you don’t, not my problem.
@87 Ampersand
I was talking about discrimination of white people due to their skin color. Or discrimination against men for their gender for that matter. Intersectionality falsely makes the claim that institutional discrimination is part of a unidirectional system of oppression. So a white person can never be oppressed due to his skin color, a man cannot be oppressed due his gender, etc. At most, a white person can be oppressed despite his race, a man despite his gender, etc. I strongly disagree with this, but it does seem to be a belief that is shared by pretty much all SJW, in my experience.
PS. I find it a bit maddening that you abandon discussions as soon as you are proven wrong. Do you have any desire to either defend your false accusation of my dishonesty or to take back your words?
@88 fannie
Yes, but you still believe that:
and disagree with:
I can only conclude from this that you believe that all black people experience worse racism than all white people, no exceptions. Otherwise, a white person could feel the same consequences and you wouldn’t object to the insinuation that (some) white people can experience qualitatively worse racism as some black people. I’d just like people to be open to this possibility, rather than judge people by race on their supposed life experiences.
Note that I’m not talking about the overall discrimination of groups, but rather the level of a single individual.
I guess so, yet I’ve had seen the same scenario play out time and again. An example is given/requested of discrimination of a white person and the other debater goes out of his way to prove it isn’t institutional or otherwise doesn’t count. I was just heading off a request for an example, since I am not willing to enter that rabbit hole right now. It was a sign of exasperation, not intended as an insult.
In a debate we all need to make assumptions, since few people clearly tell us everything that they believe. The key is to let people respond and clarify, which you have every opportunity to do.
I disagree that I have been railing against lumping people into groups. I’ve railed against lumping people into groups by race/gender/etc, which I haven’t done. I try to only lump people into groups based on what they say or do. Furthermore, when I make a point in a discussion with someone, I am clarifying my position. This doesn’t mean that I necessarily believe that the person I’m responding to believes something different. It is an assumption on your part that I do so.
The issue I have with discrimination on the progressive side of the aisle is that there is a general reluctance to call it out/examine it. It’s very telling to me that I’m often accused of being conservative when calling it out and very often, people seem unable to grasp what I’m actually saying (see the inability by Ampersand so separate my beliefs from a ‘blacks are stupid’ narrative). This inability tells me that debate on this issue is a strong taboo, as otherwise people would be able to grasp more easily what I mean.
Before I answer, what University was this?
Aapje:
Wow. That’s the only conclusion you can draw? I think that has more to do with the drawing process than with the inputs.
Grace
Aapje:
In reading your comments, I find myself wondering how you understand the history of race relations in the United States and the context it provides for thinking about the issues you are trying to raise. For example, my wife was one of only two or three non-Black teachers in the public school where she used to teach. Understood as an institution unto itself, which in important ways it is, that school could easily become a site of institutional discrimination against white people based on race–and, in my wife’s telling (which I assume is not inaccurate), the experiences of the one or two white teachers who were there when she started would illustrate that fact. (In fact, my wife would argue that her experience–she is not white–and the experiences of the other non-white, non-Black teacher would be illustrative as well.)
At the same time, though, understood as part of the larger institution of public education in my city, the racial and socioeconomic makeup of the school–administration, faculty, staff, and student body do not now include even a single white person, as far as I know, and the student body is overwhelmingly poor, with not a few of the students living in shelters–as well as the school’s budget, is part of a larger, far more complex institutional racism that reaches not only far beyond the school system, but much farther back in history than the circumstances which make the racial makeup of the faculty and administration even possible.
The discrimination experienced by the white teachers I mentioned above, which had to do with things like privileging Black faculty in terms of choices for leadership positions and such, was certainly not fair, nor should it be blithely dismissed as a necessary evil in compensating for the injustices done to Black people. Nonetheless, not to understand it in the context of the larger institutional racism I talked about is to misunderstand it entirely and is to equate the relatively small arena in which the Black administration and faculty of this school have institutional power with much larger arena in which white people overwhelmingly have institutional power that Black people lack.
On another, not unrelated point, in your example of the non-whites in your classroom, I am, frankly, awestruck at the arrogance of the assumptions embodied in these two sentences:
First, on what basis do you imagine that the non-white people were less likely to have less “academically educated parents?” And why do you assume they came from a less “academically successful culture?” You may, in fact, have a factual basis for those claims–I myself teach at a college where, in certain limited contexts, some version of those assumptions might, and that’s an awfully big might, be valid–but the sentence as you have written it, frankly, reeks of racism.
Second, on what basis do you assume that they dropped out for self-destructive reasons? And why would you assume that they flunked out? Again, you may have a factual basis for those assumptions, but the way you have written about it ties those assumptions entirely to their skin color, which is patently racist. (Based on my own experience, students of all races drop out of classes all the time for all kinds of reasons, some of which are self-destructive, but many of which are not.)
I guess what I am saying is that I am having a hard time wrapping my head around the ideological underpinnings of what you’ve been writing. You claim that you are not racist–and I’m not going to argue whether you are or you aren’t–and that what you are doing is, in fact, calling out racism wherever you see it, regardless of who is perpetrating it; but the fact is that the way you have written your examples seems to root them in a whole host of patently racist assumptions that I find hard to reconcile with your anti-racist claims.
“… and the student body is overwhelmingly poor …”
How do you know that, Richard Jeffrey Newman? Because you are making assumptions, same as what you are lecturing Aapje about? I find lots of assumptions in your writings on this board, but I don’t want to appear to be a bully by starting a list of them all. And the point I’m trying to make is not that you are a hypocrite, but that we all make assumptions based on our experience with life. And we are all wilfully blind to things that don’t fit within the framework of our view of reality.
You may find some grains of truth in what Aapje is saying if you *listen*. If you are simply going to comb through anything he writes to come up with criticism, you will always find something. Useless waste.
As a side note, good writers make clear points and think about the target readers’ viewpoints. I appreciate people who write like that, and you are not one of them. The reader has to pull points out of some meandering, stream-of-consciousness flow in a bigger framework of fluff and thinking out loud and attempted big words.
Statistics about poverty prevalence in the student body are available for most (and maybe all) public schools in the USA. I don’t know if the statistics for private schools are readily available, but they’re certainly gathered and known to the schools.
I’m just curious – where exactly are these *accurate* statistics, because even the IRS has a very hard time pinning down who has chunks of money stashed away, who works under the table, and just how much money people really have. Do they count drug traffickers?
Edited to add: I’m sure there is some link in Google to somewhere purporting to know exactly how much money people have in various school districts. And then there’s reality.
But aside from that, I’m sure in a similar vein that statistics exist on how many poor or black students have “academically educated parents”, one of the subjects of Richard Jeffrey Newman’s lecture to Aapje.
The kicker is: Did Richard Jeffrey Newman access these alleged statistics in forming his assumption? Or (more likely) did he just make his assumption without accessing any statistics? In the latter case, it’s the same as if statistics do not exist.
The thing about statistics is: they’re true for large groups, and really bad for individual people.
Even if RJN and Aapje had been using the same statistics, RJN’s statement would have been more true than Aapje’s, because Aapje was talking about four individuals, and RJN was talking about many students in the aggregate. But RJN was using a statistic* measured on the actual group he was talking about, while whatever statistics Aapje was using if any would not likely have been measured on a group including the four individuals in his class (though I may be wrong there); and RJN’s quantity (poverty) has a much longer history of research, and is thus less likely to be mismeasured based on a bad model, than the sociological quantities Aapje is referring to, if they can be quantified at all.
*edit: he hasn’t clarified this yet, but based on his commenting history here, I am quite sure he knew this number for the actual student body in question, and didn’t make anything up.
As I understand it, they’re calculated based on what percentage of children attending a school qualify for the subsidized lunch program. It’s a statistic widely used by researchers. (Or such is my impression – I’m not an expert, and I’m too busy with work to look into this right now, so I’m going by what I remember reading about this several years ago.) Schools need to gather this data for obvious reasons.
And of course, there’s no effective measurement of secret earnings. Nor is there any evidence, that I know of, to show that this is a significant problem, for talking about broad numbers rather than pinning down a particular household’s income. (As Harlequin points out.) Do you have any evidence that it is a significant problem?
It’s quite possible that RJN is simply relaying his wife’s direct (albeit somewhat subject) observations on the socio-economic status of the student body. There are some pretty tangible signs of poverty that will be readily apparent.
These signs include students coming to school hungry, because their parents are unable to afford a decent breakfast or are too tired from working long hours to properly organise it. Otherwise good students coming to school tired because they were busy doing things their parents should have been doing but were busy working additional shifts. Students coming to school without stationary or decent clothing. Students coming to school unwashed because they (i.e. their parent(s)) are homeless. Sometimes you don’t need statistics to identify poverty.
The rate of poverty in the area of the city where my wife taught—which I am not interested in identifying for reasons of her privacy—is 40%, one of, if not the highest in the city, according to The New York Times and other sources. The rate in the school where she taught is higher than that, though I do not remember—and, like Amp, I do not have the time right now to dig up—the precise number, but my wife knew it and we often talked about it. The reasons were several, not least because those parents who could send their kids to other than the public schools did so. (In addition, if you count the families at or just above the poverty line, the number of people in financial straits in that neighborhood rises to significantly higher than 40%.) Plus, what desipis said about my wife’s firsthand knowledge of the place.
Frankly, though, Veri, I have a feeling I could cite all kinds of numbers and that would not satisfy you. I could also point out that I was, as Aapje has asked people here to do, asking for clarification, while also explaining what I find problematic about the way her or his comments are written—not, just to be clear, and as I made clear in my comment, about her or his character—but I don’t think that would satisfy you either.
Whether because I did not write as clearly I might have—and there is at least one mouthful of a sentence in my comment that I could rewrite (but it was a blog comment, not an essay, so I’m not going to bother to do that)—or because your obvious dislike of my writing and my perspectives kept your from understanding what I wrote, you clearly did not see that I framed the whole comment at the beginning by acknowledging, as you put it, a “grain of truth” in what Aapje was saying about the existence of institutional racial discrimination against white people. My point is that this little sidebar is actually a distraction, a way of not talking about the actual issues that have been at stake in the conversation till now. I’m a lot more interested in hearing what Aapje has to say in response to my question about the history of race relations in the US and to learning whether or not there is a factual basis—and I recognize that there may in fact be one—for the claims he or she has made about the students in the classroom scenario.