[BLOG NOTE: reruns are over! This is not a rerun post! No subsequent posts will be rerun posts! Thank you.]
It may surprise you to learn that the Catholic Church is against homophobia.
You see, many Catholics argue, it is a logical conclusion of Catholic teaching that one should not be cruel to LGB people: one should not discriminate against them at work, disown them, wave signs about how they are in hell at their funerals, assault them, murder them, et cetera, et cetera. It’s right there in the Catechism:
[LGB people] must be accepted with respect, compassion, and sensitivity. Every sign of unjust discrimination in their regard should be avoided.
So therefore (they argue) it is really quite unfair for people to go around calling the Catholic Church homophobic just because they keep calling LGB people “intrinsically disordered” and saying that they will be tortured for eternity if they ever have an orgasm. Homophobia is the thing where you want to discriminate against LGB people and commit violence against them! The Catholic Church doesn’t support that!
I hope we can all agree that the sensible response here is not “that sounds reasonable!” The sensible response is “while I am very happy about you not supporting the murdering and the disowning and the obnoxious sign-waving and so on, the suggestion that gay sex is morally wrong is still homophobic. You are not as homophobic as you could possibly have been, but that doesn’t mean you’re not doing something homophobic. Your attitudes cause LGB people a lot of pain and provide cover for homophobes who are far worse than you, and I wish you would stop.”
Sometimes, people respond to to accusations of having done something racist by saying that they are very against racism. In fact, they are so against racism that they think that only very very evil people are racists. Since they are not very very evil– as both they and their conversation partner can agree– it is highly unfair to say that they’re doing something racist.
I sort of admire this rhetorical move. Normally, when you try to avoid being told that you’re racist, you set yourself up for being accused of not taking racism seriously. But this argument sets up your opponent as the one who doesn’t take racism seriously! It’s very clever.
It’s still bullshit.
Look: Stormfront is not the primary cause of black people’s suffering in America today, because there are literally only a few thousand of them. (130,000 according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which has an incentive to exaggerate to stay in business.) If you avoid people with swastika tattoos and websites that use the word “Negroes”, you can very easily go through your entire life without interacting with a Stormfront member.
What is a cause of suffering for black people in America today? Nice people who just feel uncomfortable in neighborhoods with too many of the wrong kind of person. Nice people who vote for politicians who promise to get tough on crime, because, well, think of the children! Nice people who just thought the black woman wouldn’t fit in with the culture of the company. Nice women who cross the street when they see a black man at night. Nice cops who really believe, in their heart of hearts, that they saw a gun.
The racism problem is basically 100% a nice person problem, because most people are nice people.
And when you say “racism is a word reserved for very, very evil people”, you are making it impossible to talk about the vast majority of actually existing racism.
Now, some people suggest that we should reserve “racism” for the Very Very Evil People, and instead say something like “perpetuating racial prejudice” for your more ordinary housing and job discrimination. But the problem with that is that people can tell what you’re fucking talking about. If I say “unauthorized removal of preowned objects”, you can tell I mean “stealing,” and if I say “perpetuating racial prejudice”, you can tell I mean “racism.”
In practice, words such as “cissexism” intended to refer to lighter forms of oppression tend to get an equally bad negative reaction– if you say “it’s cissexist to say a trans woman is biologically male”, you will still get people being upset at you because how dare you say that, they are not a real transphobe, they always use the right pronouns for everyone except sometimes when they forget.
Furthermore, this is not how other words in English work. Frank Abagnale was dishonest, and claiming to be sick so you can skip a boring-but-important-to-your-friend performance is dishonest, but you would not object to someone saying “it’s dishonest to lie about being sick” with “I’m not a real dishonest person, REAL dishonest people assume no fewer than eight identities including a doctor and an airline pilot.” Fundamentalist Christians are irrational, and the sunk cost fallacy is irrational, but you would not respond to “you continuing to watch that boring-ass movie is irrational” with “how dare you call me stupid? I’m not a fundamentalist Christian!”
When I talked about the ideas in this post with my friends, some of them pointed out that there is a very good reason not to want to be called racist, which is the fear of social justice mobs. But I think we should identify the correct problem here: speak out against social justice mobs (which I have), not against correctly identifying problems.
Thing of Things 
The problem is that it’s not just “social justice mobs”. If you call someone “racist”, you are accusing them of having engaged in behavior that is almost universally considered completely unacceptable in our society. That’s what the word “racism” connotes outside of a few esoteric circles. “Perpetuating racial prejudice” doesn’t connote that.
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Slight tangent, but I think a similar effect lies behind people who deny rape accusations and victim-blame. “Rapist” doesn’t mean “sober person who had sex with a barely conscious drunk person” it means “jumped out behind a bush with a knife, beat her up a bit, and then forcefully had sex with her”. The popular meaning of “rapist” is second only to “murderer” in terms of awfulness. So, when people hear that a kid from their community had sex with a person passed out drunk, they say “oh that couldn’t have been rape, because he wouldn’t jump out from behind a bush with a knife, there was just a misunderstanding”.
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This: ““Rapist” doesn’t mean “sober person who had sex with a barely conscious drunk person” it means “jumped out behind a bush with a knife, beat her up a bit, and then forcefully had sex with her”.”
Should say: ““Rapist” doesn’t mean “sober person who had sex with a barely conscious drunk person” it means “jumped out behind a bush with a knife, beat her up a bit, and then forcefully had sex with her” outside of certain educated circles.”
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I agree its awfully “convenient” to forgot the normal connotations of racist.
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I’d suggest that this is the concept related to motte-and-bailey, which involves different members of a group doing different things. You can say all you want “well, they’re not discriminating or otherwise doing harm to people, but they still fit the definition of ‘homophobic'”, but everyone else on your side will, when it comes to *punishment*, act as though being homophobic means discriminating or doing harm. The situation, therefore, has one person being called homophobic using the weaker definition, but then punished for being homophobic according to the stronger definition. It also goes for being racist, and being a rapist, of course.
It isn’t actually motte-and-bailey if it’s different people doing it, but this is very common when it comes to anything SJ-related, and we really need something to call it.
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Actually, InferentialDistance points out below that this is the non-central fallacy, so we do have something to call it, although it still raises questions of whether the fallacy can be said to exist when A calls someone racist and B defines what meaning of ‘racist’ is central, and A and B are different people.
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(I’m using racism as an example here but I think the argument applies basically equally well to homophobia or sexism)
I agree that minor actions with little or no malice can be racist, but I’m not sure you fully addressed the counterargument. We as a society have spent years making the term “racist” connote with “Very bad no good awful person” and implying that racism is a special kind of evil. A lot of this is intentional to make it very clear how profoundly unacceptable the extent of institutional racism was historically and therefore trying to institute a social penalty for having these kinds of opinions (I know certain places on the social-justice sphere disagree, but if somebody hears you supporting jim crow in most regions this will have a very adverse affect on you). If we agree that it’s reasonable to call people racist for aliefs and unintentional microaggressions, (acts which clearly are racist!) we need to simultaneously decrease the level of stigmatization of racist from “something that if an employer catches you doing they are likely very justifiable in firing you” to “a problem that most people, even good people trying to their best to avoid it, genuinely have”. In respect to lying, I’ve lied, and most people have lied but if somebody calls me a “liar” I’m probably going to get indignant and upset. The word “liar” in common parlance isn’t meant to say “somebody who occasionally says untrue things” or even “somebody who said an untrue thing right now” but instead “somebody who says sufficiently many untrue things that they are untrustworthy and unethical” which is much stronger.
If people have the discussion about how racism/sexism/homophobia aren’t especially bad things inherently and usually only become so once they’re effects are communalized or aggregated or in the more severe cases, then I suspect they will come off to many people on the broader left, not just hyper aggressive social justice advocates because many people who do this are doing this in order to minimize genuinely very harmful forms of racism/sexism/homophobia and it’s incredibly hard to not implicitly be supporting their point if you try and argue this one.
In particular, their are various circumlocutions you can use to say behavior is racist that will successfully get across the academic implications without the emotionally charged ones, I’ve seen this used most of the time when somebody actually wants to change somebodies behavior. So I’m unsure why people don’t choose to do this unless they want the sting. (there might sometimes be a reason, I’ve failing to think of one which applies regularly). Yes, I’m able to reason out that you’re calling me some equivalent of racism, but by the circumlocution, if done correctly, it can be clear, you’re trying to say racism in the “your action X is perpetuating Y aspects which hurt Z people” rather than the “you are an awful person who hates Z people” form. Certainly this will still hit denial, people very often don’t want to accept they’ve done something harmful, especially unintentionally but I feel like you will usually avoid triggering the same emotional burden that calling somebody a racist has. I feel like you are incorrectly conflating these two reactions (though admittedly both reactions can happen to both, it’s a matter of likelihoods).
I do think it’s usually reasonable when things are depersonalized to call more minor things racist, but in that case the emotional toll is usually weaker.
(I’m don’t think I’m trying to argue Motte-Bailey but I’m slightly worried that this is going to pattern match too heavily into it, if it does/seems to be throwing off concerns could somebody let me know)
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I agree with everything you said. In addition:
I think the motive behind using the word “racism” to describe microaggressions is the hypothesis that, if people do it enough times, microaggressions will become as unacceptable as lynch mobs are today. That is, the social justice community is trying to deliberately invoke the “horns effect”.
It’s a clever strategy, but unfortunately, there are two problems with that approach.
Firstly, every time you deliberately incite people’s most powerful emotions (e.g. by calling them a word that means “despicable evil scumbag”), you are riding a tiger made of fire. It can very easily turn against you.
Secondly, these word association effects go both ways; and by using the word “racism” to mean “any behavior that is even remotely influenced by racial prejudice of any kind, however minute”, you risk diluting the word “racism” to the point where it becomes no more powerful than “jerk”. Sure, no one wants to be a jerk, but most people won’t lose too much sleep over being called one.
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I very much agree here; it’s the boy who cried wolf issue. We’ve established Racism to be this big bad evil, so when you start leveling that word at the sociological equivalent of littering we start to ignore its use. You need different levels of a term in order to keep the value constant.
Or, to paraphrase a mad genius, “when everything is racist, nothing is.”
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Related: The use of the term “misogyny” (meaning hatred of women) for anything the speaker regards as sexist, even if completely unmotivated by hatred (indeed, often even including benevolent sexism!), and the use of the term “anti-Semitic” (meaning hostile to Jews as a (pseudo-)biological race) to describe anything the speaker perceives as anti-Jewish, even if explicitly religious or cultural.
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I think this bears resemblance to the idea on LessWrong of debating by “taboo-ing” a specific word so that the speaker has to be more precise. Although it takes up a lot of people’s time to use circumlocutions, it makes it clear that people who commit microaggressions aren’t necessarily in the same reference class as the KKK.
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I think you’re right on about how limiting the meaning of racism to grotesque racism reduces our ability to perceive and respond to less horrific acts that limit people.
I’m scratching my head at this statement: “it’s cissexist to say a trans woman is biologically male”. As I understand it, a trans woman’s body is physically indistinguishable from the body of a cis man (aside from effects from any hormones she may be taking or surgery she may have undergone). How can I talk about this without being cissexist?
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As I understand it, a CIS women’s body is physically indistinguishable from the body of a cis man (aside from effects from any hormones she may be excreting or has excreted in the past). Hormones and surgery change a person’s biology, so calling them biologically male would just be inaccurate. Furthermore, and I’ll admit this is a bit of a stretch, the brain and all it’s thoughts and feeling are essentially biological in nature, so even someone who is pre-everything but just identifies as a woman can’t be said to be fully biologically male.
That being said I understand the frustration. There ARE meaningful biological differences that sometimes need to be talked about. The key is to remember that male and female refer to clusters of biological characteristics that co-occur so often, you can usually get away with using a single pair of words to describe them. The rest of the time you just need to be more specific. Talk about chromosomes, or the specific reproductive organs that are or aren’t present, and make sure you only talk about these things when they’re actually relevant to the discussion. I’d also recommend looking into just how extensively hormones can effect the body (a lot more than one might naively expect).
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The problem with that approach is it falsely atomizes a series of traits which are usually tightly connected.
There’s a concept in developmental biology called “canalization”, which is shorthand for the network of feedbacks in development and how they respond to internal and external perturbations. Some organs and structures are under very tight regulation that will guarantee a given result unless the perturbation is extreme (“highly canalized”), others are less so, more prone to variation from internal and external sources (less canalized). But, due to the feedbacks in development, few traits, if any, are uncanalized.
I see the term “biologically male/female” mostly as a way of saying which canal did development aim for, even if actual development left the canal. IMHO, it provides a useful framework, a sort of roadmap to the various sorts of sexual and gender identities.
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Many thanks to MCA for the word ‘canalization’. I needed that word!
I agree that ‘biologically male/female’ is a useful term and does not require someone to be, as Nikola put it, naive about the existence of the many kinds of intersex people and trans people. Categories don’t have to be perfect to be useful, and it’s important not to distort the biological reality of humans coming primarily in two broad types, even to further the admirable goal of helping people feel loved and accepted.
Obviously, though, biological precision should hardly ever come up in social situations. Treating people kindly and decently is not fundamentally about their body configurations and I don’t concern myself with what kind of genitals people have unless I’m likely to be interacting intimately with them. The number of situations where I would need to know something about a friend’s chromosomes would be vanishingly tiny.
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I gotta admit, I’m kind of amused by the idea that we should consider male and female human bodies to be “physically indistinguishable” with certain notably rare exceptions. If I were some kind of alien from Betelgeuse, I’d probably think that. But I’m not. I’m a human being from Earth. One of the things I am most adept at is analyzing the differences between humans. Facility at this skill is literally built into my DNA. Lacking it is literally a disorder. See, e.g., prosopagnosia and related ailments.
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J N, ‘biologically female/male’, while it may be acurrate (I don’t think so, but lack the energy to back that up), has become a superweapon of the transphobic.
I’m a trans-woman and it has been made known to me on many occassions that I am, indeed and forever, ‘biologically male’, i.e. never female to any meaningful extent. This invalidates everything I feel I am, and my year long struggle to become who I am now, which is (on those occassions and they are the majority) exactly the point. It’s an invocation of ‘nature knows best’/’god’s will’ to make people shut up.
TL;DR: >90% of people that say ‘biologically male’ are seriously transphobic and inconsiderate jerks. They made it impossible for you to say the words without sounding like one of them.
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I’m sorry that people are jerks to you. I can’t imagine the kind of thinking that would inspire someone to reject someone socially for such an absurd reason. it sounds like you’re saying that terms like ‘biologically male’ have been made ugly by people using them hatefully, like ‘homosexual’ has been adopted by anti-gay people and therefore largely abandoned by pro-gay people.
So if ‘biologically male’ is poisoned, how do people talk about physical configurations of trans people, on the rare occasions when it is necessary and appropriate to explain something while being accurate and clear? (and to make sure I’m being clear, ordinary social situations are not such occasions — people’s bodies are not public property for casual chat)
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To me, ‘racism’ and ‘perpetuating racial prejudice’ have an important difference in framing. Racism is what racists do – the associations are with deviant individuals and the focus is on the individual. You said a racist thing so you must be a racist. Perpetuating racial prejudice is what people do when they don’t think how something will affect others, when they trust that their action is benign. The focus here can be on the incentive structure that made the act seem benign and reduces the implied malice of the person. You perpetuated a racial prejudice so maybe you should re-examine where you learned that this particular thing would be okay.
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The difference between “racist” and “irrational” is even more striking. I can agrue if favor of irrationality, and most philosophy majors won’t call me the worst person ever. Even among economists and lesswrongers, who will most likely disagree with me, I won’t get the reputation of a huge jerk. But if I defended racial prejudice in any form, my reputation would be permanently strained, and I would gain some social capital among quite horrible people (oh wait, I’m a damn russky commie transvestite – never mind, that won’t work). It is categorically wrong to state any opinion that pattern-matches to racism, regardless of its merit and the potential harm from stating it.
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I think there’s a very significant difference between “what you just did was racist” and “you *are* racist”. The former is a judgment of a particular action; the latter can easily be construed as character defamation.
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Let me elaborate: I consider isms aggregated assessments of a person. It’s not a one-drop thing. Doing something racist doesn’t per se *make* you racist. I’d prefer to restrict the term to people who make a habit of it. I like the idea that good people can do bad things, and I find it uncharitable to abandon that for certain types of bad things.
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I agree, although I think it won’t solve the problems addressed by the OP. Whether you say a person’s actions are racist, or you call the person racist, most people respond identically.
There’s also an option C, which is to talk about racism as a noun.
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Yeah, but there are two questions here that are getting conflated a bit in the comments.
1. How can you fairly say what you mean to say, such that how someone reacts is at least mostly on them?
2. How can you be sure that the person reacts the way you intend?
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I think it’s a little more than idiotic, not to mention a dirty rhetorical trick, to claim that the people you disagree with have an irrational fear or phobia.
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To me, it’s an issue of differentiating between calling someone a “racist” versus declaring that a particular action or attitude is racist. The former comes across as branding someone as an evil scumbag, and except in cases where that’s actually true, it’s probably better to stick to the latter.
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Oh well, I see that Skye above just said the same thing, guess I should have refreshed the browser before posting my reply.
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Interesting aside, which you should feel free to delete if its too drastically changing the subject, but ” We can’t be homophobic, we don’t advocate violence or mistreatment (and our unusual definition is the only one that matters)” seems very similar, in structure and implication, to “We can’t be sexist (against men), sexism means oppression of nonmen (and our unusual definition is the only one that matters)!”.
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The title of this post is more objectionable than the content. As SJ people will happily tell you in every context except this one whether you mean your words to be insulting is not a magic wand you get to wave to disregard the fact that your listener is bothered by them.
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I don’t think that in the majority of society the word “racism” means “the entire spectrum of racially problematic acts, from microagressions to genocide.” I think it means “the acts at the most problematic end of the spectrum, such as legally enforced segregation, lynching, and genocide.”
To make an analogy, we have the spectrum of “problematic sexual acts” with lewd name-calling at one end and rape at the other end. Calling one of those “nice people” a racist is like calling someone who calls people lewd names a rapist.
So saying someone is “perpetuation racial prejudice” is significantly better than calling them racist. “Perpetuating racial prejudice” isn’t a synonym for racism, it’s a term for a class of acts that racism forms the extreme tail of.
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“I don’t think that in the majority of society the word “racism” means “the entire spectrum of racially problematic acts, from microagressions to genocide.” I think it means “the acts at the most problematic end of the spectrum, such as legally enforced segregation, lynching, and genocide.””
So if I say “that guy told a racist joke,” would most people in our society would think I was accusing him of lynching and genocide?
Of course not. The concept of minor acts of racism – such as telling racist jokes – is commonplace in our society, and widely understood.
If I say “I worry that Timmy’s teacher may be a little bit racist,” virtually no one would think I’m accusing the teacher of lynching. If I say “I thought the depiction of the natives in Indiana Jones was a bit racist,” people may disagree with me, but no one but a few marginal extremists would think I’ve accused Stephen Spielberg of committing genocide. If I say “that frat held a costume party and everyone came in blackface, it was so racist,” no one will think that’s the same as saying “that frat lynched someone last week.”
There are literally hundreds of examples of people using the term “racism” without it even remotely referring to lynch mobs and genocide.
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I think you’re right for referring to objects/actions/media/etc., less so for people, because calling a person even “a little bit racist” is still saying that, at their core, they don’t believe in equality and they judge others by their skin color. You may not be attributing the same actions to them as KKK members, but you *are* attributing the same fundamental mindset and character flaws.
To someone who is not used to SJ vocabulary, saying they’re “a little bit racist” is like saying “I’m not accusIng you of actually molesting children, justmof being attracted to pre-teens”. They may not be actually guilty yet, but by sharing the motivating attribute, they’re complicit and similarly morally stained/flawed.
Bear in mind, I am not saying that view is right, only that it’s what other people will hear, particularly non-SJ folks. For communication to be effective, the message must be correctly interpreted by the receiver.
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The very popular musical “Avenue Q” includes a song called “Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist.” It’s a funny song – the most popular one, other than “The Internet Is For Porn,” from that musical – that’s been heard by hundreds of thousands of people, and I doubt ANY of them interpreted it to mean that “Everyone shares the same fundamental mindset and character flaws as KKK members.”
TV shows have often show that characters can be sympathetic and relatable but still have some racism to overcome, from “Archie Bunker” and “Happy Days” when I was a kid to “South Park” nowadays. That wouldn’t be possible if people were generally as simplistic in their thinking as you believe.
Most native English speakers have a more nuanced idea of what “racist” and “racism” can mean that you and others on this thread seem to realize. English is a language which supports multiple definitions of words, and nuances and shades of meaning, ordinarily and effortlessly, including in the conversations of ordinary people. You don’t need a college degree to naturally use English’s multiple-meaning words.
The idea – which a lot of people on this thread have expressed – that ordinary people don’t understand any nuance to words like “racism,” ever, is mistaken and, honestly, comes off as a bit elitist.
In fact, I’ve NEVER encountered a typical person who didn’t understand what a phrase like “a little bit racist” means. The only people I’ve ever heard take the view you describe – leaping from any mention of the R word to the KKK and so on – are people who frequently discuss politics in detail, who are making the same argument you’re making now.
* * *
I do agree that SJs and SJWs (terms that are far less understood in ordinary society than “racism,” by the way) define “racism” in some ways that are peculiar to them, i.e., the idea that only White people can be racist. Likewise, the idea that “racist” must always mean “just like a KKK member” is a view that’s peculiar to anti-SJW folks, not an idea that’s generally held.
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And yet that response has been nearly unanimous. Are you suggesting that everyone who expressed this idea is wrong about the connotations of words like “racism” in their cultures, or perhaps that their cultures are out of touch with “ordinary people”?
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Ampersand: the reason that people understand “a little bit racist” is that “a little bit” is a *qualifier*. The very fact that the qualifier needs to be used in the first place shows that people think of the version without the qualifier as the extreme version.
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Notice the quantifier “a little bit”? It specifies that the quantified phrase is a non-central example. That’s important.
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@Ampersand: I agree people grasp some nuance to the word ‘racism’. Still, I think most people outside of SJ circles do think it means conscious and intentional racism, even if it is minor. I’m not sure most people grasp the idea of implicit bias, but maybe I’m being elitist here and I’m wrong, I grant.
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@Tarindoc:
And yet that response has been nearly unanimous.
Of the self-selected group that reads this blog, a self-selected subgroup chose to respond to this topic; that this self-selected subgroup “nearly” agrees is to be expected, and contrary to what you seem to believe, says nothing at all about how Americans in general respond.
Are you suggesting that everyone who expressed this idea is wrong about the connotations of words like “racism” in their cultures, or perhaps that their cultures are out of touch with “ordinary people”?
I’m suggesting that everyone who expressed the idea comes from a particular subgroup of Americans: Politically aware people who are used to talking about politics, and who are exaggerating how confusing the word “racism” is because doing so benefits the argument they’re making and accords with their desire to oppose “SJW” arguments.
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@Jiro and @Inferential Difference:
Note that I was specifically responding to MCA, who wrote:
To someone who is not used to SJ vocabulary, saying they’re “a little bit racist” is like saying “I’m not accusIng you of actually molesting children, just of being attracted to pre-teens”.
So he was specifically denying that a qualifier could work to meaningfully make “racist” less offensive. In that context, I hope you’ll agree, my defense of the phrase “a little bit racist” made sense.
I agree that “a little bit” is a qualifier. I’d also agree that there’s a big difference between if I just point at someone and yell “RACISM!,” and the usual way people use the term, where – if you’re suggesting that someone in the discussion has said or done or supported something racist – it is ordinary behavior to qualify or explain what you mean.
So I agree, adding qualifiers and explanations makes a big difference. And this is typically how the words “racist” and “racism” are used. If you’re just saying that during debates and discussions, we shouldn’t just point and say “racism!” without qualification or explanation, then I agree.
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@LTP:
I think that if you say “implicit bias,” most people without the right academic or online background won’t know what that term means.
But if you say “unconscious racism” or some similar phrase, and contextualize it, (i.e., “Without intending to, unconscious racism changes how people talk about New York City cops strangling Eric Garner”), then I think most English speakers would understand that.
I’m not denying that there are some terms of art used by some leftists, such as “implicit bias,” or the idea that only white people can be racist. But the words “racist” and “racism” are words that ordinary people understand, and the idea that one can be racist like Archie Bunker – that is, a racist who is just an ordinary nice guy in many ways, who doesn’t support the KKK or lynch mobs or genocides or whatever – is not even slightly incomprehensible to most Americans.
In fact, I’d argue that the extreme, inflexible meaning ascribed to “racism” by many people on this thread is a conservative and anti-SJW term of art. It’s a specialized definition used among that subgroup that is different from how most speakers use the word.
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@Ampersand:
I’m willing to accept that Americans in general might feel differently. I can only speak for myself, the culture I grew up in, and the social expectations of the people I associate with.
I’ll be happy to take your word, and Ozy’s, that there’s a whole population of people out there who don’t experience the word “racist” as a bitter insult — if you’ll take me, and the other commenters here, at our word that there’s a population of people who do.
And since Intent Is Not Magic, then if someone calls me “racist”, it doesn’t really matter whether or not they share my view of the word, right? I’m hurt by their insult no matter what they intended, and if they don’t mean to hurt me, they should find another way to express what they mean. Just like if someone from a backwards, racist culture honestly thinks “n****r” is simply how one refers to black people, they have a responsibility to stop as soon as they realize the pain they’re inflicting.
Again, I can only speak for myself, but I’m certainly not exaggerating.
I’m not arguing that the word is confusing, either. I’m arguing that, for many of us at least, historical use has given it a connotation of evil and contempt that makes it an insult, whether or not the speaker intended it that way.
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@Ampersand:
Well, it’s the meaning I picked up when I was young in one of the most liberal parts of the country. My father was a hippie who hitchhiked around Europe; during the first Gulf War, we once spent the afternoon playing a game he made up to teach me that war was a tragedy. In my elementary school, the kids sang folk songs, learned to garden, called teachers by their first names, and got medals for participation.
I suppose it’s possible that the “conservative” meaning independently evolved in my liberal culture as well, but I suspect it doesn’t actually have anything to do with politics at all.
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@Taradinoc:
I do agree that there’s a population of people who take any reference to racism as a bitter insult. I just don’t agree that these people are acting reasonably or that I should feel obliged to accommodate them beyond assuring them that’s not how I intend the term. I also don’t agree with the implication that if I use a different term with the same meaning, they will cease to feel insulted.
For instance, the same people who object to the word “racism” also commonly object to the word “homophobia” in a similar way – even though, for people my age and above, “homophobia” is a recent word that they didn’t encounter in their childhood. For that matter, many of the same people object to the word “cissexual” (or being referred to as “cis”), or the word “transphobic,” in much the same way, even though these words are of even more recent vintage. So I don’t believe the issue comes down to how the words were used in our childhoods.
And since Intent Is Not Magic, then if someone calls me “racist”, it doesn’t really matter whether or not they share my view of the word, right?
Speaking for myself, I’d say that “intent is not magic” doesn’t mean “intention never has any salience in any circumstances,” and I doubt that’s what most people who use the phrase mean. I think it means “intent is not a magic wand that you can wave to make the entire issue disappear.”
In this case, I’ll try to assuage your hurt feelings by saying things like “I’m not saying that you’re a bad person or that you’re a hater. I’m not talking about what’s in your heart, I’m saying that I think the policy we’re discussing is racist both in the sense that it harms the interests of black people, and that it a society without a background level of racism that affects absolutely ALL of us, we would be able to see that more clearly and thus be less likely to accept the policy” and blah blah blah blah.
I am totally willing to meet you halfway by making it clear that I don’t intend to insult you, that I’m talking about policies and not people, and explaining what I mean.
What I’m NOT willing to do is give up on having terms that describe bigotry: racism, sexism, homophobia, ablism, etc, and that have the connotation that these are important issues (which they are).. And if that’s the only acceptable solution to you, then yes, I’m going to simply accept that my good intentions are NOT magic and I am willing to live with hurting you rather than choose to give up necessary and valuable vocabulary for describing the ways marginalized people are hurt by prejudiced societies.
Just like if someone from a backwards, racist culture honestly thinks “n****r” is simply how one refers to black people, they have a responsibility to stop as soon as they realize the pain they’re inflicting.
The two things are not even remotely the same, because words like “racism” and “anti-semitiism” and “transphobic” have legitimate uses. Having words to name bigotry and prejudice is an essential tool used by marginalized groups and allies to push back against real injustices, and to describe the realities that harm them. The cost of never using those words again, to marginalized peoples, is far greater than the cost to us of having our feelings hurt because someone used the word “homophobe” or whatever.
OTOH, for a non-Black person to give up using the word “nigger” as a pejorative costs us* nothing we should have. It does not deny us justice; it does not deny us the ability to describe our own lives truthfully; it does not deny us the ability to name our oppression. It just means we’re giving up a word that has no meaning apart from being a pejorative word for “Black.”
These two things are not even remotely the same.
( * I don’t know your racial background, but for purposes of this response, I’m assuming you don’t identify as Black or African-American, and hence used the word “us.”)
Regarding your childhood community, first of all, I think you should consider that memory is not videotape, and your memories today are possibly being seen through the lens of your own belief system and ideology (whatever that is).
Second of all, I can’t look at a videotape of your schoolyard games, but you can look at videotape of pop culture when I was a kid.
My favorite show as a kid was “Happy Days,” one of the most popular shows of the time, where they more than once showed that the positive, likable main characters were bigots in some ways. In an episode called “The Best Man,” for example (season 1 episode 14, it’s on Youtube), a Black army buddy of the father visits, and everyone else is clearly freaked out by this. Before the episode is over, the mother character is explicitly called “prejudiced” and “a bigot” by the father character, and the script obviously takes his side. But I don’t think the writers meant us to think of Marion as evil, and I don’t think viewers took it that way. On this extremely popular and mainstream TV show, racism was presented as a variety of things, not as just one thing.
If you search “youtube” for “Late 70’s Anti-Prejudice PSA,” you can see a PSA from the Department of Health (I think) that played a lot when I was a kid. Again, I don’t think either the makers of that commercial, or the viewers, understood adorable little Jimmy as an Evil Monster. (Admittedly, that uses the word “prejudice.” But that was a much more commonplace word in the 1970s than “racism,” and a lot of people took exception to the word.)
My point isn’t that no one ever presents bigots as Evil Monsters – of course that narrative exists. But it’s not and never have been the ONLY mainstream narrative. The narrative I’m talking about – that ordinary, good people can nonetheless be bigoted in some ways, and that doesn’t mean that they’re irredeemable monsters – is also a common narrative, and one that you can find in the pop culture not only of the 1970s, but in more recent decades. I seriously doubt that you or your parents, when you were a kid, would have watched that episode of Happy Days and concluded that Marion was an irredeemable monster; and if your parents would have taught you that after watching that episode with you, then I’d say your culture (or at least your parents) were atypical of American viewers at that time.
(Of course, I have no idea how old you are; for all I know you were born 20 years after that episode of Happy Days. But I hope you can see my general point, even if my example doesn’t apply.)
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@Ampersand:
In this thread, you’re hearing people tell you they will. Why is it so hard to believe that? Why speculate about an archetypical “racism”-objector’s motives when you have real testimony from real people right in front of you?
Hmm. It’s going to be hard to have a productive conversation if you insist on gaslighting me and erasing my experiences. Perhaps this is one of those “check your privilege” moments where you just have to accept that other people have lived a different life than you have, and even though my experiences may be foreign to you, they’re just as real as your own.
The same idea can be expressed in other words, though. Saying “perpetuating racial prejudice” instead of “racist” would cost you nothing and avoid needless insult, but you and Ozy have explicitly rejected it. What do you gain from saying “racist” instead, if invoking the connotation of evil and contempt isn’t your goal?
That may very well be the case, but as you can see from all the other comments here, it wasn’t unique to my family or my personal situation. I don’t think it matters how a “typical American” would feel after being called a racist; there are enough people who share this view to fill this comment section, and indeed enough to inspire the original post. You know — now, at least — that there’s a good chance someone will be insulted if you call them a racist.
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Because people have invented words, in the past, that mean “milder version of X”– as I said in my post, “cissexist” is a milder version of “transphobic.” Using “cissexist” instead of “transphobic” does not seem to have reduced the number of people who get very offended and think that I must be saying they are evil. Given that this is the case, I am skeptical that the response to me switching to “perpetuating racial prejudice” will be no one getting offended; I suspect that what will happen is that “perpetuating racial prejudice” will become an extremely offensive thing that no one will want to be accused of, just like “cissexist” did. Do you have a reason that “cissexist” and “perpetuating racial prejudice” are different? Because all I have is that one of them is three words long.
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I think the main reason they’re different is that “cissexist” is very close to the word “sexist”, which has similar connotations to “racist”, whereas “perpetuating racial prejudice” is a descriptive phrase whose component words don’t have those connotations (in my experience, at least).
It’s certainly possible that “perpetuating racial prejudice” will start to be used as an epithet and thus become as offensive as “racist” is now, but we can avoid that euphemism treadmill by not using the phrase as an epithet.
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…are you seriously claiming that the word “prejudiced” does not have strong negative connotations?
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@ozymandias:
Not nearly as strong as “racist”, in my experience, but I suppose YMMV. It’d be interesting to see if other people feel the same way about the two words.
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In this thread, you’re hearing people tell you they will. Why is it so hard to believe that?
Because I know from experience that no matter how I phrase it, the people who tell me they are offended by the word “racist” are in fact offended by the concept however it is phrased. When I say “I’m against that policy because it’s biased in a way that harms black people unfairly,” they see through my clever code.
I have tried, many times, to go around it in the way you suggest. It’s a waste of effort. It doesn’t succeed in doing anything except robbing my language of urgency.
It’s going to be hard to have a productive conversation if you insist on gaslighting me and erasing my experiences.
It’s going to be hard to have a productive conversation if you are going to insist that I accept undocumented anecdotes as if they were evidence and capital-t Truth.
Human beings don’t have memories like video tapes; memories are reconstructed narratives, rebuilt every time we “remember” something, and filtered through our current beliefs. This is, to the best of my knowledge, a completely uncontroversial view among scholars who study memory. If you can produce evidence that I’m mistaken about this, however, I’m open to changing my view.
That said, I don’t see the relevance. As I pointed out (and you provided no counterargument), the exact same arguments are given for why newly coined words like “transphobia” should be forbidden and banned from discourse, so whatever the real issue is, it’s not childhood memories.
The same idea can be expressed in other words, though. Saying “perpetuating racial prejudice” instead of “racist” would cost you nothing and avoid needless insult, but you and Ozy have explicitly rejected it. What do you gain from saying “racist” instead, if invoking the connotation of evil and contempt isn’t your goal?
1) Using words that convey urgency and this is injustice, rather than bloodless and bland words, is my goal.
2) Using language that links current struggles with social justice activists going back decades, and (by keeping the language the same) keeps writings of the past that are relevant accessible to new readers.
3) Not having to constantly switch terms whenever y’all decide that the new term we’ve settled on hurts your feelings too.
4) Using words that won’t sound like “keep out!” to people who aren’t comfortable with academic-sounding indirect phrases (such as the phrases you suggest).
That said, I am totally willing to have extensive conversations without using those words. I’ve had hundreds of conversations about marriage equality, with opponents of marriage equality, in which I didn’t use the words “homophobia” or “bigotry” or “prejudice.” But I’ve also had hundreds in which I did. There is no one-size-fits-all-conversations rule.
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@Ampersand:
This isn’t a courtroom where I’m using my memory to establish guilt beyond a reasonable doubt; I’m telling you what I believe and how long I’ve believed it. I know quite a bit more about my beliefs and my past than you do.
For you to tell me that I’m really offended by things that don’t offend me, or that I didn’t really grow up hearing the word “racist” used the way I did, is gaslighting, plain and simple; and beyond the obvious insult, it’s troubling in deeper ways. Please, think twice before deciding to hang your social justice credibility on this flimsy hook.
As I said before, I can only speak for myself. I’ve made no argument about the word “transphobia” and I don’t plan to; I don’t know why you’d expect me to defend an argument made by some hypothetical person who isn’t in this thread and certainly isn’t me.
I hope you see the irony in defending your use of the term “racist” with the very same arguments people use to defend their use of racial epithets. “First we can’t say ‘n****r’, now we can’t say colored? It’s so hard to keep up! And who the heck is going to know what ‘person of color’ means, anyway? We’re all some color!”
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[Oops, this ended up under the wrong parent post.]
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A person disagreeing with you about the meaning of your lived experience is not gaslighting you. Gaslighting is the presentation of false information to make you doubt your memory or sanity. In general, people cannot be gaslit by strangers or outside of fairly intimate relationships.
I find it somewhat… interesting… that you are objecting to the term “racist” as unnecessarily pejorative while accusing the person you’re arguing with of committing emotional abuse.
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@ozymandias:
I’ve seen the word used in the context of online discussions, for example when someone who claims they’ve been harassed or discriminated against is told that they must be misremembering, and some of the common definitions fit. From What is Gaslighting?:
But hey, I’m not attached to the word, and if its association with domestic relationships is distracting, then I’m happy to give it up.
So, the situation here is that I’m making assertions about my own feelings and beliefs, sometimes using personal anecdotes as support, and Ampersand is telling me I’m misremembering my own past and I don’t really believe the things I think I do. How else would you describe that?
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@ozymandias: While I think taradinoc goes a bit far, it’s worth noting that I’ve seen men repeatedly get accused of “gaslighting” women online for suggesting that they’re crazy (or even, as here, simply that their memory must be unreliable) without any intimate relationship or presentation of false evidence.
As with a lot of de facto equivocations, I think that the legitimate issue at the core of the concept is a useful one, but the accretions around it are not.
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@ozymandias: I find it somewhat… interesting… that you are objecting to the term “racist” as unnecessarily pejorative while accusing the person you’re arguing with of committing emotional abuse.
I find that entirely unsurprising; see what happens with a few terminology shifts[1]:
“I find it somewhat… interesting… that you are objecting to the term “racist” as unnecessarily [triggering] while [overreacting to] the person [defending it].
Put that way, it sounds entirely normal, though regrettable, and to be avoided when possible.
[1] Which do add somewhat to what taradinoc’s been saying (and therefore may be incorrect), but which don’t contradict anything they’ve said.
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(note: I’m assuming good faith in all involved parties, which may be incompatible with well-thought-out posts by all involved parties, or (more probably) with correct reading comprehension on my end)
@osberend: yeah people are misusing the word, but ozy’s position on this is (I think) an excellent standard. It seems (to me) that taradinoc was not accusing ampersand of emotional abuse, and gaslighting as defined is clearly abuse. The typical use by the drama exarches (exarcs ? not sure about the correct plural, you English-speaking people are weird with those things) on twitter/tumblr should not be taken as a guideline for an horrible way to abuse someone.
@taradinoc: I assume you are mistaken by the typical use , but you really don’t want to use those rhetorical devices when you just got handed what you needed to refute Ampersand’s point (well, to be frank, anyone’s point with the current phrasing0. Stick to his words and refuse to let him use it differently for you and for himself. He says that memories are unreliable, then states things that are supported by “Because I know from experience”. Just point him towards that. You may be biased and interpreting your surroundings while growing up as blu-er than they were, he might be biased and misinterpreting his opponents in debates.
(funniest thing is that I agree with Ampersand’s general point about how memory works in general, if not with the specific use here)
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@Thirqual:
Actually, that I may be misinterpreting my experiences due to my own biases is a perfectly fair point. Why would it not be?
@taradinoc: I apologize for hurting your feelings. For what it’s worth, that certainly wasn’t my intention.
Yes, and both Hitler and I paint pictures. Therefore I’m just like Hitler, right? Wow, you certainly showed me there.
Look at the people protesting the police-perpetuated murders of people like Eric Garner. Those protestors are going to change the world. 10 or 20 years from now, it’ll be a LOT more common for police to wear body cameras, and if early results hold true then the result will be a measurable decrease in the amount of needless police violence. That will improve the world in a real way (albeit in a marginal way, but that’s how change usually happens).
I see no evidence that the protestors and activists would be any more effective if they refused to use the word “racism.” More broadly, I don’t believe “never, ever hurt anyone’s feelings” is compatible with actually creating change. There are people who support the status quo; it is impossible to change the status quo without some of those people feeling hurt.
On the contrary, having to couch every word and action in cottonballs for fear that someone like Rudy Giuliani will claim his feelings are hurt isn’t merely futile, it’s counterproductive, because plain and passionate language is the language of protest and activism, and it’s the language that keeps people coming out.
And let me touch back on the futility angle again. First of all, I’ll take your word for it regarding your own singular example however, I am interested in discussing the general issue, not your example to the exclusion of other cases.
Let’s take the words “homophobia” and “bigotry” – words that opponents of marriage equality have frequently said are harmful and insulting to them, and should be avoided altogether, or at least never applied to people.
So what happens if someone avoids using those words? Well, the Supreme Court majority in the Windsor and Perry cases, two cases that the Court decided (more-or-less in favor of marriage equality) in June of 2013, did not use the word “homophobe,” or “bigot,” or “superstitious.” (Do a text search if you don’t believe me). They used the most polite, refined language they could have.
Yet, when the rulings came out, Rush Limbaugh said “That was in the Supreme Court ruling today, that people who oppose gay marriage are bigots and want to deny and want to make fun of and want to impugn and demean homosexuals.”
So they did everything y’all – and yet the reaction was. as far as could tell, exactly the same as if they HAD used the words “homophobe” and “bigot.”
Rush wasn’t alone – similar sentiments were expressed all over. For example, Alito’s dissent claims that the majority argument must mean that those who opposes marriage equality are “bigots or superstitious fools.” Scalia said the majority had called opponents of marriage equality “enemies of the human race.” The National Review said that Kennedy, the author of the majority decision, believes that “if you merely think the federal government should continue to define marriage the traditional way while the states define it however they want, then you are a bigot. Your views deserve no political representation…. Kennedy simply declares the supporters of DOMA hateful people.”
(The words “hate” and “hateful” appear nowhere in Kennedy’s opinion.)
This is hardly the only case I can point to. I can point you to many more examples. Contrary to what many people here are claiming, the conversations don’t get more productive, and folks aren’t less likely to be affronted, if words like “racism” and “bigot” and “homophobe” are avoided.
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@Ampersand:
Thanks, I appreciate it.
No, my point is that we rightly reject these arguments when people use them to defend the use of racial slurs and similarly offensive words: it’s annoying to have to remember to say “mentally handicapped” when you’re used to saying “retarded”? You’ll get used to it. People are intimidated by big words? They’ll get used to it too.
Most of us would agree that the benefit of not using a word that offends the people it describes is worth the minor, temporary inconvenience of adapting to the new word, at least in other cases, and I think we ought to reject those arguments in this case as well.
I agree! I’m not suggesting no one should ever be called a racist or accused of practicing racism — just that you should realize they’re likely to be insulted, and only do it when you intend to insult them.
I’m also not suggesting you should never hurt anyone’s feelings. If a cop kills an innocent man because he happened to have the wrong skin color, he deserves to be insulted. Someone who merely disagrees with you about a political issue probably doesn’t.
Different standards of evidence apply in different situations. If I claim to have seen Bigfoot, it’s appropriate to demand hard evidence. If I claim to be feeling sad, or that a word has a certain association in my mind, you pretty much have to take my word for it; there’s nothing I can do to prove my mental state to you anyway.
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@Ampersand: it’s not a fair point in a discussion with a quasi-stranger over the Internet because you have very little else than your bias to decide what to keep and what to throw away in what your interlocutor is saying. You then conveniently use that to say that taradinoc may be misremembering/misinterpreting, based on your experience. Of course there is, to any third party, no indication that you are not the one misremembering/misinterpreting, which potentially stalls the discussion without having to deal with the validity of taradinoc’s experiences.
And before my post, with no indication that your own experiences where as much subject to such uncertainty. Your appeals to self-doubt appear very one-sided.
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@Ampersand: The words “hate” and “hateful” appear nowhere in Kennedy’s opinion.
Not as such, but the meaning is unambiguously there.
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osberend: You do realize you have just conceded Ampersand’s point?
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If you say something liberal in the public view that Rush Limbaugh can use against you, he’ll use it against you. If you say something that he can’t use against you, he’ll misrepresent it and use it against you. It’s not his job to honestly report facts. It’s not even his job to honestly report opinions. He gets his money from stirring shit up — much, in fact, like some across the aisle that I could name.
If you look for phrasing that Rush Limbaugh can’t misrepresent, you’re going to be looking for a long time. Forget about Rush. Think about the people who aren’t getting paid to be demagogues.
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which potentially stalls the discussion without having to deal with the validity of taradinoc’s experiences.
But there is no way to establish the validity of Taradinoc’s, or my, experiences. If I am not allowed to ever question anyone’s anecdotal data – which seems to be your argument – then can’t anyone always “win” any argument by just citing an unverifiable anecdote?
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@Oserbend: But doesn’t that just prove my point?
I’ve been saying all along that using phrases like “this policy harms and demeans black people” rather than saying “this policy is racist” will not reduce anyone’s propensity to take offense. People can see through that clever code.
You’re right – Kennedy commented on the intentions of the authors of DOMA to demean bi and lesbian and gay people. But he did it without using the words “bigot” or “homophobe.” And yet people were horribly offended anyway. How does that not support my claims, and Ozy’s?
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@Nornagest: Rush wasn’t the only example quoted in my comment.
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@Ampersand
This is absolutely not my argument. There are many other way to question anecdotal
data, for example discussion on how typical those are, or by presenting anecdotal data showing the opposite (which signals for everyone it’s time to get serious with the research if we want to progress). This is not what you have done.
I also tend to assume good faith in interlocutors.
Now, because it is the subject of that thread after all, I’d like to point out that your argument can be used to shut down a member of any given disadvantaged group presenting their experiences, by saying that their expectations of being discriminated leads them to interpret their experiences in a certain way. It is indeed very often seen in discussion about street harassment.
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@Ampersand (and Ozy): I guess this depends on exactly how broad your claims are. If you’re just saying that describing things things that meet the definition I accept (and which I contend is the standard historical definition) of racism in a euphemistic way won’t help, then I agree. I do not agree with the “racist means Klansman” faction.
But it seemed to me that you were making a broader case, that there is no point to abandoning the use of the term “racism” for everything that falls under the SJ definition thereof (which I oppose in general, so none of this is a support for euphemism). And with that, I disagree.
To return to my favorite example: If you say to me “Your loud and vulgar denunciation of Islam could only be motivated by a dislike for brown people,”[1] then you are not going to make me any less angry than if you say “your Islamophobia is racist.” If that is what you believe, however you may express it, then we are (at least on this issue) enemies to the knife, and there is no point in beating around the bush.
But if you say “Although your loud and vulgar denunciation of Islam is not itself racist, it is quite likely that many of your listeners are racist, and will hear your statements as support for their feelings about Islam, which are racist as well. You should refrain from making such statements, in the interests of not providing unintended support to racists?” . . . then I’m still going to disagree with you, for reasons that I’m happy to discuss, if anyone is actually interested in this particular tangent. But there will be the possibility of a meaningful discussion, and maybe even one of us changing their mind. But if you say “your statements are Islamophobic, and Islamophobia is racist,” the odds that anything other than a screaming match is going to result are approximately zero.
[1] This is, in fact, something I have been told. Multiple times. It gets old.
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@taradinoc:
Most of us would agree that the benefit of not using a word that offends the people it describes is worth the minor, temporary inconvenience of adapting to the new word, at least in other cases, and I think we ought to reject those arguments in this case as well.
In the case of people having to give up using (for example) the word “kike,” it is worth the trouble because what is being given up – a word that facilitates demeaning people for being Jewish – is worthless. Weighing what is lost (a word that facilitates demeaning Jews) against what is gained (avoiding insulting people, a bit less bigotry in the world), the scales tip heavily in favor of giving up the word “kike.” I don’t think any reasonable person would refuse to give up “kike” in all but a few narrow circumstances.
But when people ask SJAs to forswear (for example) the word “racism,” what we are being asked to give up is a word that facilitates discussing and opposing injustice. That is not worthless. A reasonable person can weigh the two things (on the one hand, the possibility of fewer people taking insult; on the other hand, giving a word that facilitates important discussions and activism) and decide that the latter matters more than the former.
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Alright, I’m accepting that the SJ definitions of “racist” et. al. are idiosyncratic. You know that. I know that. This isn’t the first time this controversy has come up. Every two bit wannabe “insightful critic of SJ” talks about how SJ has a different definition than the general populace. That fact has apparently been widely internalized.
Why, then, is productive discussion effectively impossible? I can see the claim that being called “racist” makes you uncomfortable, because the other guy might be making a really strong attack, and people in general just don’t want to deal with wild, overly hostile claims like that.
But unless you’re going to argue that most SJ people have stronger meanings despite defining the word more broadly, you know for a fact that is likely not what’s happening. If that is what you’d like to argue, then you should probably start actually making that argument rather than this one here.
I have some sympathy for someone who just walks into an SJ space and is bewildered by the jargon, and insulted at some of the criticisms. I have considerably less patience for people who know damn well what the intended definition is, and get upset anyways.
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Except we’re not asking you to foreswear the term. We’re asking you to limit it’s application to targets who are closer to the exemplar than you currently do. This is not the same as asking people to stop calling Jews kikes, which forbids ever calling anyone a kike. It’s asking people to stop calling abortion doctors murderers; Ted Bundy doesn’t get a pass.
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Why, then, is productive discussion effectively impossible?
Because the probability that the sort of person who would say “Islamophobia is racist” will respond in a non-mindkilled way to my saying “All right, you despicable, boot-licking, dhimmi swine, answer me this: [insert intelligent, though hostilely phrased, question about the evidence they have for their assertion]” is approximately zero.
I can see the claim that being called “racist” makes you uncomfortable, because the other guy might be making a really strong attack, and people in general just don’t want to deal with wild, overly hostile claims like that.
My contention is the he is making a really strong attack by definition, especially if there’s an audience.
But unless you’re going to argue that most SJ people have stronger meanings despite defining the word more broadly, you know for a fact that is likely not what’s happening.
Except that I don’t, even in the more narrow sense that you’re considering. At least half of the times that I’ve pressed someone on what basis he has for accusing me of racism, he has either explicitly accused me of disliking non-whites or sarcastically stated the reverse (e.g. “Oh sure, it’s just a coincidence that almost all the people you hate are people of color. Right.”).
But I certainly don’t think that all of the people who are doing that have just decided on their own that hostility to Islam is obviously motivated by (normal -definition) racism, and just happened upon a compact statement of that sentiment that happens to also have a less blatantly ridiculous meaning if one defines “racism” in the idiosyncratic SJ way. I think that they’re enacting the implicit purpose of the SJ definition, which is to set people who are SJ-racist up as targets for the non-central fallacy at best, and even broader equivocation at worst:
1. Islamophobia statements is racist.
2. Racism involves dislike of brown people.
3. Therefore Islamophobia involves dislike of brown people!
If this isn’t your goal, then what is your purpose in re-defining “racism?” You say you “have some sympathy for someone who just walks into an SJ space and is bewildered by the jargon, and insulted at some of the criticisms.” Why does that sympathy not motivate you to oppose the bewildering jargon, unless the lack of clarity is useful to you?
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Er, strike “statements” from fallacious syllogism point 1. Apparently, I only partially changed “Islamophobic statements” to “Islamophobia.”
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People oppose being labeled in that manner in order to avoid falling victim to the non-central fallacy. That it is important to you to use that particular label is a sign that maybe not all is as kosher here as you think.
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I feel like continuing to use the SJ definitions of “racism” and “sexism” comes from the same place as defining “male” and “female” by chromosomes. Everyone knows these definitions make some people feel attacked and hurt. But some people insist on those definitions anyway. The anti-trans people and the social justice people should stop pretending they are just “upholding definitions.” What they are doing is defining words is using language to marginalize their out-groups.
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Doesn’t that line of reasoning create, like, just the worst incentive structure?
“Hey man, I feel hurt and attacked because you define thief in a way that includes me taking 20$ from your wallet while your back was turned. Its not like I rob banks. Why do you insist on using that definition?”
“Excuse me, miss? I feel hurt and attacked by your definition of bully. Just because I like to push people around and intimidate them to get what I want doesn’t mean you should tar me with mean words.”
I mean, yeah, you could say that SJ people are just being malicious, but I don’t think intent has any actual effect. I could have the biggest hate on for a certain outgroups, but if there’s nothing actually wrong about my definitions, then it doesn’t really matter (unless that hatred manifests itself in some other way).
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If you call someone a thief you are attacking them. If you call someone a bully you are attacking them.
Sometimes its good to attack people. But I am not going to pretend that when I call someone a thief I do not mean them any harm. If I didn’t want to hurt them (Even in self defense) I wouldn’t call them a thief or bully.
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Is wanting them to stop stealing money from me, the same thing as meaning them harm, in your view?
If I say “the case against same-sex marriage is rooted in a homophobic society, because….” I’m not saying it because I’m hoping to hurt people. I’m saying it because 1) I believe it’s true, and 2) I’m hoping that if I say it often enough, people will be persuaded to stop opposing same-sex marriage.
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@Jacob – but the reverse is similarly stupid – you cannot possibly expect people to listen to your points or consider your views when 90% of expressing those views is deliberately hurling the most hurtful invective possible at the person you supposedly want to convince. Reductio ad absurdium works poorly in either direction in this case.
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If you define “attacking them” as “describing them negatively,” than I agree. Calling someone racist, even by the broadest definition, is a negative way to describe someone, and as such constitutes an attack as described above.
If you mean “intend to demean them with insulting words,” then I think you are simply wrong.
But attacks were not the central point: you argued that SJ people were using language to marginalize outgroups solely on the basis that they maintained and used definitions of negative words that included people who don’t want to be included, drawing a parallel between SJ people and anti-trans people.
Now maybe that really is true, but you’re going to need a hell of a lot stronger of basis for that claim to make the claim worth acting on. If all it takes to for me to establish that you’re marginalizing me is to say “You used a definition of a word that included me when I felt attacked by the inclusion,” then I have a very easy way to deflect criticism in possibly the most meaningless way I’ve ever encountered.
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Intent is not fucking magic as they say.
If you call someone a racist they are likely to feel demeaned. And by calling them a racist you are making them look much worse in the eyes of many people.
If you call a transwoman “biologically male” then you are likely to cause her significant pain. And you contribute to a climate where she is likely to feel unsafe and unwelcome.
If you try to define “sexism” in such a way that men cannot experience sexism who are actively making it worse (imo) for male victims. And certainly you are making it much harder for MRAs to communicate (they have to deal with the “men cannot experience” meme every-time they talk).*
If I call someone a thief I am making them look worse and may upset them. If I call them a thief near a police officer (and have some proof) I may send them to jail and get them fired.
——
If I engage in these actions I am hurting people. If you know an action will likely hurt someone and do it anyway you are attacking that person. Sometimes people need to be intentionally hurt (I support hurting certain criminals by putting them in jail). And sometimes we need to hurt people because not hurting them imposes too many costs.
But if you are going to take actions that hurt people have a reason and be honest about it. And have a good reason.
*I am not an MRA. And I am very comfortable attacking Paul Elam for example. But I think MRAs deserve to be able to communicate without having to deal with a million attack memes. So do feminists btw.
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@Jacob
You should notice how close our argument is to the argument against respecting people’s pronouns. Especially the pronoun of non-binary trans individuals.
You basically say: “We should not accept the norm of “if people feel hurt hurt by our political definitions we should accommodate them unless we have a strong reason.” Because then people will claim to be hurt by everything.”
The anti-trans people say: “We should not accept the norm of “call people by whatever pronouns they want. And try to alieve anyone’s claimed gender/sex.” If we accept that norm then people will claim all sorts of crazy things. What if someone claims their gender is Napoleon and wants to be called your highness.”
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Yes, yes, we should be honest about our willingness to hurt people, and that we are, in fact, hurting them.
But, again, that isn’t the point. You accused SJ people of defining words to marginalize outgroups based solely on an analogy with anti-trans people; based solely on their adherence to certain definitions. Accepting and acting on such reasoning creates a perverse incentive structure, where criticism, however true, can be deflected with the wild claim that one’s critic is attempting to marginalize; a claim based solely on the fact that the critic defines certain words in ways unflattering to the one being criticised.
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I draw a significant distinction between subjective personal identities and behaviour. That people are hurt by certain words is worth considering. When it comes to personal identity e.g. prefer pronouns, there is virtually never a good reason to refuse another’s preference.
When it comes to describing peoples behaviour, that’s another matter entirely. That is not solely a personal thing: your behaviour impacts other people, possibly in negative ways. I will absolutely object to a norm that allows people to deflect criticism of their harmful behaviour by making a counter accusation of attempted marginalization, based on the fact that they would prefer if their harmful behaviour not fall within the definition of a certain word.
Seriously, do a simple ad lib on your original statement:
How many acts of abuse do you think can we obfuscate with wild counter claims of attempted marginalization? Quite frankly, if I found myself supporting a norm that could do that, I would start to question the usefulness of my norms. And since obviously good aspects that come from said norm (i.e. calling trans people by preferred pronouns) can be justified by other means (else they wouldn’t be obviously good), I would simply default to other justifications and abandon my trivially abusable norm.
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A lot of other people have raised the argument that “racism” is generally understood as only connoting particularly severe violations, and “racist” as connoting particularly despicable individuals. I think that’s accurate, but it’s not at the heart of my objection to SJ use of those terms (and “sexism”/”sexist,” and most other comparable terms as well), which is as follows:
The standard historical denotation of the term racism is (it seems to me) a form of double-standard, specifically (a) the belief that there exist circumstances where a member of race X should be treated differently from a member of race Y who is identical in all other relevant respects and/or (b) actions implementing such a belief. To many people, including me, this is what “racism” properly means.
But SJ folks don’t (in general) accept this definition, but want to broaden it massively (while also narrowing it to exclude racism against white people, of course!). At the moderate end, this means expanding the definition to include aliefs and alief-driven actions. In principle, that might be reasonable, since it keeps the core property of the normal definition—that it’s about double standards—but I’m still wary. Partly, that’s a result of the connotational problem that others have discussed, but partly, it’s simply that these seem like different enough phenomena to need different terms. In particular, under the normal (belief-only) definition, it is possible to determine relatively simply whether one is racist, and one cannot (bar certain edge cases) be racist against one’s will; under the alief-inclusive definition, neither of these is true.
Still if this was the full extent of SJ maximalism on the issue (and if SJ folk were willing to stop trying to define away anti-white racism), then the debate would be a lot less charged, and I’m willing to accept that it’s possible (although I think rather unlikely) that the broader definition would prove to be more useful.
But instead, we have people trying to argue that an action or attitude is racist if it harms a higher percentage of non-whites than whites, even if there is no double standard. So, for example, it is fairly routine to see SJWs describe principled opposition to Islam (so-called “Islamophobia”) as ipso facto racist, simply because most Muslims are non-white. This is intolerable.
In addition, it is fairly common for SJWs (in my observation) to define as racist any belief that different racial groups[1] have different distributions of genetic factors contributing to intelligence, personality, criminality, etc.[2], even if one believes that members of different races who are the same with respect to these factors should be treated the same. The idea that there are questions that must not be asked, because the answers are known a priori by their political usefulness is utterly abhorrent, and must be opposed by any individual with intellectual integrity.
All of this follows, it seems to me, from the fact that the normal definition is fundamentally individualist, while the concept of social justice is fundamentally collectivist. As an individualist, I refuse to accept a definition of “racism” that allows an attitude or action to be “racist” that treats relevantly-equal individuals of different races equally.
[1] As conventionally defined by society; I am fully aware that the boundaries tend to be fairly arbitrary, which means that any notional of essential racial qualities (beyond whatever qualities one may use to define a race in the first place) is absurd. But given any method of defining a set of groups, even a very silly one, one can ask what the distribution of quality X is in each group, and examine whether it is the same across all of them.
[2] Personally, I’m agnostic on all of these.
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Scott’s The Categories Were Made For Man, Not Man For The Categories is relevant here.
To someone who’s studied feminist theory “racist” means “perpetuating racial prejudice”, to the man on the street “racist” means “an evil person who goes out of his way to oppress minorities”, to King Solomon “racist” means “that really tasty verity of olives” because metaphorical Ancient Hebrew is weird like that.
None of these definitions are wrong. But trying to direct the man on the street’s feelings about evil people to regular people by taking advantage of the phonetic similarity between those words. That would be wrong.
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What about directing him to the olives definition?
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If you use a harm centric definition of morality it’s probably ok. Calling olives evil or racists is so out of context that it’s unlikely to cause actual harm.
And if he did think the olives are evil, the olives don’t care. At worst it might affect an olive grower’s sales, but that’s not likely. At least not outside of cultures who’s opinions on olives are more fine grained than “green or black”.
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Eggplants, on the other hand, are paragons of virtue.
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Hrm. Imagine someone objecting to being told he shouldn’t use racial slurs, because he thinks it won’t make a difference: “People can tell what I’m fucking talking about anyway; if I say ‘people of color’, you can tell I mean ‘n****rs’.”
He’s wrong, right? I mean, yes, people will be able to tell if he’s using “people of color” as a euphemism, dropping it in place of the offending word but still expressing all the same contempt. But if he’s just cleaning up the vocabulary he uses to refer to a group of people in non-hostile contexts, he’ll see a big change in the way people react. “We have to make sure our interview process is fair to black applicants” sounds way, way, way better than the version with the racial slur!
The word is the problem, because it has connotations beyond its literal meaning.
And frankly, for white folks from a certain culture, “racist” is the closest thing to “n****r” it’s possible to call them. It doesn’t just mean someone who believes in racial superiority or perpetuates racial stereotypes; it’s absolutely dripping with spite and contempt, because they grew up in a world where racism was a go-to example of evil, on par with rape and murder — if not worse, since some individual racists in high places facilitated the mass injustices of slavery and genocide, whereas an individual rapist or murderer has far fewer victims.
The OP alludes to this (“In fact, they are so against racism that they think that only very very evil people are racists”), but I think you might have missed the full implications of that. It’s not that they think only very very evil people perpetuate racial prejudice, it’s that they expect the word “racist” to only apply to very very evil people. That’s how they were taught to use it, it’s the only they ever saw it used until very recently, and even today when it’s used more liberally, it often seems to be used in order to invoke that connotation of evil.
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Yay, Ozy returns! 😀
Anyway, yeah, my objection is going to be pretty similar to what others have already said, but:
The problem is that the use of “racist”, “homophobic”, etc., is eliding moral inferences that different people, depending on usage, would regard as challengeable. Now, some of those I totally agree with and am fine with eliding! Others… not so.
So let’s say you’re the Catholic Church. You’re pretty convinced that you’re right about homosexuality, but people are calling you “homophobic”. What are you going to do?
Well, if you accept the inference implicit in the word “homophobic”, your only options are to insist, “No, this isn’t homophobic” or to admit that you are wrong. But if you’re a careful thinker, you’ll notice that the most technically correct response, given your assumptions, is to respond with “Yes, it’s ‘homophobic’ according to how you’ve defined the term, but that doesn’t make it wrong.” Potentially followed up with “Moreover, I reject that ‘homophobic’, as you’ve defined it, is a natural category.”
This is more or less what the neoreactionaries do, and I kind of have to applaud them for having the guts to do it, with their attitude of “Yes, my position is racist; now would you mind telling me just what you think is wrong with my argument?”. To try this on a larger, more public scale, though… well, you don’t exactly have to be a careful thinker to guess what the consequences of that will be.
Basically, in any reasonable public setting, you’re presenting the other person with an inference they disagree with but are not allowed to challenge. (You’re also hiding the inference in a word, and most people are bad at picking up on that sort of thing.) That’s a problem.
(There’s also just the general problem that because these words have been used in so many different ways, even without any of the above, it seems to me that at the least disambiguation is called for. Like, “racist in the X sense”. Because otherwise you will cause confusion.)
(FWIW, my own understanding of the word “racist”, prior to encountering SJ and such, was basically that of osberend, except that wasn’t specific to explicit beliefs; aliefs and actions would certainly count. But it was fundamentally individualistic, and, perhaps more to the point, causal rather than correlational.)
(I would also like to second Joe about the whole “phobia” thing being a dirty rhetorical trick.)
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“Bigamy is wrong”
“You polyphobe! Get that hater out of my sight!”
“What? No, I don’t hate bigamists, but I do think it’s a crime and morally wrong to boot”.
“See? Hater!!”
I’m also interested in how the ‘phobic’ part of “homophobia” was elided from meaning “irrationally fearful of something” to “is actively and violently opposed to due to hatred”. I have seen people gloating (and that’s the only word I can use) about “homophobes” being “forced out of society” and it’s all because they (homophobes) are haters and their notions are down to hatred and they’d be violent if they dared.
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Oops, that should have said “reasonably public setting”, not “reasonable public setting”.
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Racism Without Racistsis a book that runs on this topic (not whether or not racist is an insult, but what language white and black people use to speak about race and how they feel about other races) and is *quite* good for the topic. There are some methodological issues, it wanders outside some of the data, it doesn’t offer a ton of individual solutions, but it is FAR better than most writing around this.
It seems quite possible that Ozy has read it, but seems like commenters could be interested too
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But what in the name of Cthulu is the point of using the word racists? If we both agree, for example, that my aliefs or subtle word choices result in inequality, then we’ve already communicated every relevant fact about the situation. Why in the seven hells would you then go out of your way to use a word with such horrible connotations? Who benefits from that?
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Idealists who don’t care if they hurt you, the denizens of echo-chambers who don’t know any better, and people who want to hurt you to raise themselves in relative station.
The usual.
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“Your subtle word choices result in inequality” not only sounds silly, but as Ozy pointed out, everybody knows that what’s really being said here is “you’re a bigot”.
I do find it ironic that the very people who I would expect to decry politically-correct euphemisms are now insisting on them when their own feelings are at stake.
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I can’t speak for wireheadwannabe, but for me, the central issue is that you apparently think that subtle word choices that result in inequality automatically constitute bigotry.
As I’ve said elsewhere in this thread: I’m against euphemism. If something is racist under the (common, historical) definition that I accept, then I’m for it being called racist. What I’m against is the definition being aggressively expanded, and disagreement with that expanded definition being treated as a demand for euphemization.
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I’m going to (potentially) disagree with almost everyone here and argue that the strongest case against the broad use of the term ‘racist’ as described in the OP is not about how it makes people feel: It’s that it’s focusing on the wrong end of an interpersonal dynamic.
Based on what Ozy is saying, it sounds like ze defines something as racist based on its consequences rather than the state of mind of the person perpetuating the racism, which could range from thoughtless (touching a black person’s hair), to frightened (crossing the street to avoid a black man), to sadistic (or whatever emotion is involved in joining a lynch mob). People who are not consciously thinking thoughts about race are included, along with people who are consciously thinking about things tangentially related to race, like class or religion.
It is completely unhelpful to call all of these problems by the same name. It’s like being a rheumatologist and diagnosing all of your patients with ‘allergies’. That tells them nothing about what they should avoid, what medications they should take, or to what degree they’re allergic to something. Focusing on the broad outcome – an allergy – rather than breaking it down is completely useless to the actual patient.
When it comes to racism, what a lot of activists fail to take into account is that it makes more sense to think about the behavior than the outcome, because different behaviors require different solutions.
Sometimes there’s a cultural difference at play that makes people uneasy. I don’t like large groups of people congregating on the sidewalk, or playing loud music from their cars, because I grew up with the understanding that taking up that much space is a rude thing to do. Those also happen to be behaviors that – where I live – are most often performed by black and Latino people. (I never tell anyone to stop, mind you, because something being rude by my definition doesn’t mean that it’s wrong, and I’m glad it makes other people happy to be loud.)
Sometimes racism is the product of subconscious stereotyping. The example that sticks out to me (not a personal one, thank god) is the ready association between black men and guns, and how someone can genuinely mistake another object for a gun if it’s held by a black man.
Sometimes racism is completely rational, in the sense that the racist individual risks suffering unnecessary inconvenience – or even measurable harm – if they do not discriminate. I’ve mentioned before how I now shy away from poorer black people in the Bay because a large enough percentage of them will interrupt me to ask for money, or call me a faggot and/or grab my arm and follow me home, that it makes no sense to give anyone an opening by engaging.
These three problems have different solutions. You might solve the first one by simply living and letting live, or even giving the behavior a try yourself to expand your horizons. The second one seems (at least per the articles I’ve read) to have a rather nifty solution: Deliberately expose yourself to positive stereotypes. Seeking out positive portrayals of the group in question will weaken your subconscious association in a way scolding yourseld over it never could. For the third problem, there’s really no solution you can compel an individual to follow through on, because they are making a decision based on a very powerful emotion that is often backed up with facts. The only thing you could ask the individual to do is to push for positive systemic change that will eliminate the existence of the perceived threat, like anti-poverty initiatives or better mental health services in the example I gave. (Going in the direction of hurting the people you fear – anti-homeless laws, for example – is unacceptable for reasons that go beyond race and into treating your fellow human beings in a generally decent way.)
If you stop at calling someone a racist for racially prejudiced outcomes, you are not helping. You have completely ignored the ‘why’ of their behavior, and as a result you can offer no productive solutions and nothing will change for the better. You can wank about privilege theory all you like, but there’s a reason why the comments are always full of questions about what that means in terms of action, and it’s not because the commenters are obstinate or stupid.
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claiming to be sick so you can skip a boring-but-important-to-your-friend performance is dishonest, but you would not object to someone saying “it’s dishonest to lie about being sick” with “I’m not a real dishonest person, REAL dishonest people assume no fewer than eight identities including a doctor and an airline pilot.”
But we DO do that; we’ve invented the concept of “the little white lie”. Yes, it’s technically dishonest to tell Sally we were sick so that’s why we couldn’t go to her recital, but that’s not a real lie, we only said it so we wouldn’t hurt her feelings by telling her the truth – that her violin playing sounds like a dying cat!
REAL lies are big polluting oil companies or politicians of the other party to mine or that jerk Bill who said he had the flu and couldn’t come to my birthday party but really he was perfectly fine and went to the darts tournament instead!
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And to tie this to other recent threads — on that theme recently…
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Will we hear anything about your experience at App Academy? My bf is there right now.
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If you think calling someone racist isn’t an insult then you aren’t speaking english, you’re speaking a private ozzy-language of your own devising.
Most Americans will feel insulted if you call the a racist. If you call them a racist anyway, knowing this, then you meant it as an insult. Full stop.
If you didn’t mean to insult, you would use softer, more verbose, more precise, more explicit language, like “harboring unconscious racial bias”, or whatever.
You don’t get to throw a sharp, pointy, radioactive connotation-laden word like “racist” around and then tell people that it’s a fluffy little teddy bear word that your only using for its denotation. That’s not how words work.
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“Sometimes, people respond to to accusations of having done something racist by saying that they are very against racism. In fact, they are so against racism that they think that only very very evil people are racists. Since they are not very very evil– as both they and their conversation partner can agree– it is highly unfair to say that they’re doing something racist.”
I think your missing an important point here. People don’t just deny they are being racist because they believe only bad people can be racist. People deny they are racist because people typically believe in there beliefs. To many people, black people being unintelligent/violent/lazy is an objective fact. Even if they don’t believe in something directly negative about black people they may uncritically support institutions that harm black people. From these peoples perspective calling them racist is only an ad hominem attack.
If your using racist to make it clear to someone that already agrees with your definition of racist what your talking about, then its useful to call someone a racist. On the other hand if your goal is to change someones racist beliefs then calling them a racist is a useless tactic. It’s not enough to tell someone they are racist. You need to convince them they are being racist.
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Tying into my post on SJW, I think Ozy is perfectly free to use racist in any way ze prefers, but:
1) It’s a conversation killer (like “objectify”) because you waste a lot of calories at the front end explaining what we’re talking about. If A tells B – “you’re a racist because you punish kids in you class who you catch texting on their phones, and it turns out that Freedonians text more than Sylvanians”, you’re going to get in a big debate about whether B intends that policy to be racially discriminatory. If A starts with “your electronic devices policy is having some unfair abd bad effects, can we talk about other ways to accomplish what you want,” you cam move straight into costs, benefits, and alternatives.
2) Broad use of “racist” tends to weaken the stigma of the word. Once you’ve heard people complain that you shouldn’t call President Obama skinny or say he plays too much golf or say his foriegn policy could be better because all those things are racist, my guess is some people just tune out stronger concerns about the way people react to the President.
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There’s also a possible digression into what Orwell called “objective facism” and his later thoughts on that subject, but I leave that as an exercise for the reader.
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If you call me a racist you have insulted me.
You absolutely have.
You really really have.
Not only that, but racist isn’t a standard, garden variety New-Yorker-in-a-hurry-insult. It is a lethal insult. It’s the kind of insult that results in the abrupt and permanent severing of relationships.
I am dumbfounded that not only people don’t know about this, but that they refuse to believe who are informing them of the fact. The bay area must be more of an island unto itself than I thought.
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Sure. And you are insulting me by calling me “selfish” for deliberately grabbing all the cookies before anybody even got a chance to have any, even though I was, objectively, selfish.
But what if you say “hey, taking all the cookies was selfish”? Is that still an insult? After all, you are not saying that I, in my soul of souls, am an inherently selfish person; you are saying that I acted selfishly.
But I sure can derail you from arguing about my hogging the Thin Mints if I turn the conversation around to one about how you unfairly called me selfish, eh?
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First of all, “selfish” and “racist” aren’t even in the same order of magnitude, so false equivalence there.
Second of all, saying “taking all the cookies was selfish” is a direct attempt to call attention to and change behavior. Calling someone “racist” is making a value judgment about a person — a value judgment which equals “a person who brings shame to me if I so much as associate with them.”
Third of all “I am not insulting you when I call you racist” is an objectively false statement, which is odd coming from someone who purports to believe “one should not believe objectively false statements.”
Fourth of all, way to derail the argument about your incivility by claiming it’s a character flaw that I take offense at an insult. Try calling a Yiddish speaker a schmuck and see how far that gets you.
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@ Fisher
So, would something like “casting white kids to play Inuit kids was racist” be an acceptable thing to say?
Too bad some people have turned it into a joke (I mean thatsracist.gif)
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If I call you selfish, for any reason including taking all the cookies, then I have insulted you! This may or may not be deserved. If I say “taking all the cookies was selfish” I have not directly insulted which is better. Though it still makes them look worse. So one should be careful about calling people selfish. Its easy to make mistakes and call out too many actions.
Similarly:
Calling someone racist, for any reason even deserved, is insulting them. Calling their action racist is not directly insulting their character which is better. Though one should be careful.
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You know what’s interesting about this: I have direct, non-empirical access to knowledge that “racist” is an insult. I just imagine myself being called a racist, and I feel insulted. Presumably as a fluent english speaker Ozzy also has the same access. This narrows down the possible explanations for disagreement significantly.
Here’s what i can think of.
1. I am insane.
2. Ozzy is insane.
3. Ozzy actually speaks a different dialect of english than me in which racist actually isn’t an insult.
4. Ozzy is intentionally equivocating for rhetorical advantage.
5. Ozzy is the unwitting carrier of a meme which contributes to the fitness feminist ideology by equivocating between insulting and non-insulting meanings of the word “racist”. Ozzy has compartmentalized the part of ver mind that recognizes racist as an insult from the part of ver mind that articulates the meme that it is not one.
6. Either Ozzy or I does not know what the word “insult” means.
7. Ozzy thinks connotations don’t matter for determining what is insulting and what isn’t.
8. Ozzy thinks that if something is true (according to some reading of the literal meanings of words), it cannot be an insult. Ve would not consider calling a overweight person “fat” to be insulting.
9. I have some sort of unusual hangup about being called racist and I’m assuming everyone else will react the same way I would.
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I would prefer:
10. Many of my commenters are the unwitting carriers of a meme which contributes to the fitness of ideology that maintains the lower position of people of color in our society: the meme that if someone is saying that one of your actions is discriminatory or prejudiced, they are saying that you are the moral equivalent of a slaveholder. This meme makes it extremely difficult to even talk about the causes of the lower position of people of color, much less mobilize to solve them. I wish they would stop carrying this meme.
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There are words in English that can be used to point out discrimination or prejudice without saying their perpetrators are the moral equivalents of slaveholders. Words, for example, like “discrimination” and “prejudice”.
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Having to talk about “ideology that maintains the lower position of people of color in our society” instead of “racism” *is* making it difficult to talk about the ideology that maintains the lower position of people of color in our society, just like it would be difficult to talk about tables if instead I had to say “a piece of furniture with a flat top and one or more legs that provides a level surface you can set things on.”
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Both “discrimination” and “prejudice” tend to mean “conscious belief” in common parlance. For example, from google:
Prejudice: “preconceived opinion that is not based on reason or actual experience.”
Discrimination: “the unjust or prejudicial treatment of different categories of people or things, especially on the grounds of race, age, or sex.”
Ozy, You need the qualifier “unconscious”, or something similar, to successfully communicate the concept to the general public. You are complaining that people are arguing against a valid reading of your words because it is not the reading you intended them to make. You are not adhering to the virtue of precision.
And yes, some people will still complain. Some people will still interpret “unconscious bias” as plain old “racism”. 100% satisfaction isn’t possible, but you can do better than your current position. At the very least, you will be more precise. Is that not worth it for you?
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An opinion may be a conscious belief in some senses, but the degree to which it need be conscious is incredibly minimal. See, e.g., dial testing, which can work just fine even if no one holding the dial can articulate why they turned it.
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Again from google:
Opinion:
– a view or judgment formed about something, not necessarily based on fact or knowledge.
– the beliefs or views of a large number or majority of people about a particular thing.
– an estimation of the quality or worth of someone or something.
All of which connote consciousness. You cannot defend a non-central interpretation as central with another non-central interpretation. In fact, I’m not certain “unconscious opinion” is even a valid phrase; it raises a “square circle” exception and crashes my semantic parser.
Furthermore, it is significantly harder to rouse up a social justice mob by quote mining “they’re unconsciously biased” as compared to “they’re racist”.
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Jesus Christ.
Many of my commenters are the unwitting carriers of a meme which contributes to the fitness of ideology that maintains the lower position of people of color in our society: the meme that if someone is saying that one of your actions is consciously or unconsciously discriminatory or prejudiced, they are saying that you are the moral equivalent of a slaveholder. This meme makes it extremely difficult to even talk about the causes of the lower position of people of color, much less mobilize to solve them. I wish they would stop carrying this meme.
does anyone have any other nitpicks
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Why is it important that discussions about unconscious bias use phrases that fail to distinguish between conscious and unconscious bias?
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Okay, I’m actually genuinely confused what you mean by insult having reread the piece.
If somebody called me “irrational” “unintelligent” “arrogant” “stupid” “manipulative” “or a “Liar” “Fascist” or Bigot” or yes a “racist”, I’d take them as insults.
Why should the latter be categorically different than the first? In general I’d expect calling most people any of these terms would result in negative consequences for our relationship even though many of them refer to traits that most people engage in from time to time.
(I do recognize that I’m lumping together a diverse quality of things in the second sentence, I’m not trying to say they’re all equivalent)
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…huh?
A lot of times I don’t know whether someone is consciously prejudiced or discriminatory against people of color or unconsciously prejudiced or discriminatory against people of color. I don’t know if white people are moving out of neighborhoods with too many POC because they have the explicit belief “POC are not like me” or are simply uncomfortable for no reason they can state. I cannot read minds.
All I can figure is that when I said that “racism is mostly a Nice People problem” you thought I meant “racism is mostly an unconscious bias problem”. But that is silly: at least one of my examples (“black women won’t fit in the culture of our company”) is conscious prejudice, and others could be. Plenty of good, decent human beings hold conscious prejudice against people of other races.
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“Plenty of good, decent human beings hold conscious prejudice against people of other races”
Don’t you understand how unusual of a sentiment that is? Racism is not considered a forgivable character flaw. If those decent human beings express those particular conscious prejudices publicly, they are very likely to lose friends, get fired, be publicly shamed and ostracized. If you say someone is a racist, you are saying they deserve to be publicly shamed and ostracized. You are not saying that they have a forgivable, correctable character flaw.
The conscious/unconscious distinction is where Americans have drawn the line between gets-you-ostracised racism and undesirable but socially acceptable bias.
When you call someone “racist” you are saying they deserve to be ostracized.
When you claim someone’s prejudice is conscious, you’re saying they deserve to be ostracized.
Maybe society’s standards are hypocritical or wrong. Maybe we’re all a little bit consciously racist, and we should admit it so we can be less racist. Even if that is true, It’s still an insult!. You can’t say someone deserves to be ostracized and not expect them to flip out.
If you want to defang the word “racist” so it can be used denotationally without everyone going nuts with rage, the only thing you can do is to say “I’m a little bit of a racist myself” not “you are a racist”.
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My understanding of “fit in the culture of our company” is that it’s a euphemism to describe the interviewers emotional response to a candidate after the job interview. Additionally, “Nice people who just thought the black woman wouldn’t fit in with the culture of the company” is talking about a distinct person, which does not connote a general belief that black people as a class of person won’t fit the company culture; I simply assumed that the implication was that the nice people displayed an unusual pattern of finding black applicants unfitting for the company culture.
The disconnect is that most people feel that being consciously prejudiced is sufficient to render an individual neither good nor decent. This is especially true of the broader discourse. While technically correct, focusing on racism is framing for heat instead of light; the class of people you’re talking about seem to be more naieve than racist, and are almost certainly going to be easier to persuade by focusing on the former over the latter. People don’t like being told they’re wrong either, but on average, react better to that than being told they’re evil. And saying you don’t mean they’re evil when you use that language does little to fix that, much like a person saying “I’m not a misogynist” does little to fix “”. Doubly so when many other people are more than happy to swing by and tell them how that language means they’re evil.
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“” should read “(belittling statement about all women here)”
(that’s what I get for confusing html standards with bbcode standards)
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What is a cause of suffering for black people in America today? Nice people who just feel uncomfortable in neighborhoods with too many of the wrong kind of person. Nice people who vote for politicians who promise to get tough on crime, because, well, think of the children! Nice people who just thought the black woman wouldn’t fit in with the culture of the company. Nice women who cross the street when they see a black man at night. Nice cops who really believe, in their heart of hearts, that they saw a gun.
Well, yes, and also, centuries of state oppression and white terrorism and government policies explicitly designed to keep black people down, poor, and in their place, up to and including things like redlining and voter suppression. You know. A little bit, maybe.
Also, SPLC does not actually say Stormfront has 130,000 members; they say that Stormfront claims it has over 130,000 registered members “though far fewer remain active”. In other words, you took a comment about how Stormfront probably has less support than it says it does and twisted it into an implication that the SPLC is fibbing about the number of racists around, probably so they can talk people into giving them money. Are you fucking serious?
(Protip: Stormfront is far from the only active white supremacist group, even if we limit ourselves to the US, and far FAR from the only group with other purposes that is virulently racist.)
This, Ozy, is the thing that drives me up a wall about your blogging: you have smart and important things to say, and you don’t think them through, so you post them all clotted up with half-baked bullshit.
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I can’t speak for anyone else, but to my ear “racist” is an example of linguistic inflation. It started out meaning, roughly, someone who hates or despises other people because of their race. That meaning gave it a lot of emotional punch, so people used it for weaker and weaker forms of racial prejudice in order to (dishonestly) imply that they were that bad. At this point, it seems in many people’s usage to mean not much more than “someone with opinions relevant to race that are different from mine.”
For a possibly helpful analogy, consider the use of “fascist” to mean “someone in favor of governments having more power than I think they should have” or “sadist” to mean “someone less sensitive to other people’s unhappiness than I think he should be.”
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Would it help if I told you that you are etymologically wrong?
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=racist
Don’t let the Nazi reference fool you. Note the dates. The Nazi theories the term originated to describe were about ethnic nationalism and supremacy, not the holocaust. And the terms “racism” supplanted included both “race hatred, AND “race prejudice.”
What’s actually going on, historically- The US has long used the phrase “racism” to refer to things like claiming that you certainly don’t HATE black people, obviously not, you just don’t want them living in your community. It has long used the phase “racism” to refer to things like believing that black people are just a hair more inherently criminal than white people, or just a bit more bestial. None of this is new.
But. The way the Civil Rights Movement operated was to tar all racism with the same brush for the effect of moral suasion. See, e.g., Letter from a Birmingham Jail, or just basic historical literacy.
America is nothing if not cowardly with respect to confessing it’s own sins. Kinda odd in a nation that likes to claim that it’s Christian, but whatever, right? So the sort of inverse version of Truth and Reconciliation that America settled on with respect to racism, a sort of “Lies-and-Let’s-Pretend-Someone-Else-Did-It,” resulted in the following narrative- Racism was a really terrible thing where black people were murdered for no reason except sheer irrational hatred. It was also a thing that other people did- weird, hateful people, particularly in the South, who were related to no one and who magically vanished sometime around 1980, leaving behind a society full of people who couldn’t be blamed, except for some general rudeness that was obviously the fault of both sides.
The effect of this is that for the last forty years, we’ve been seeing a string of public figures, particularly conservative ones who were clearly on the wrong side prior to the moral cutoff date when MLK was shot and there was a parade and we white people decided that racism went away, defending themselves from charges of racism by pointing out that they’ve never literally dragged a man to death behind a pickup truck.
Well, that was never the only issue. Never. The reason everyone thinks “racism” is only about blind hatred is because there was a genuine decades long political drive to re-cast the term to mean that.
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“Would it help if I told you that you are etymologically wrong? ”
Only if you provided some evidence in support of that claim, which your link does not provide.
To be fair, I don’t have etymological evidence either. I’m going on my memory of how I’ve seen the word used for the past fifty plus years.
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I finally got around to checking some old dictionaries. The OED has neither “racist,” “racism,” or “racialist.” But the 1958 Webster’s unabridged has:
racialism, n. a doctrine or feeling of racial differences or antagonisms, especially with reference to supposed racial superiority, inferiority or purity; racial prejudice, hatred, or discrimination.
(note the “especially”)
racism, n. 1. racialism.
2. program or practice of racial discrimination, segregation, persecution, and domination, based on racialism.
(note “and”)
racist, n. a person who believes in the doctrine of racialism or who advocates or practices racism.
With considerable effort you could squeeze the white woman who crosses the street at night to avoid a black man into that, but it doesn’t make a very good fit. It makes a much better fit to how I remember the word being used back then.
It also makes a better fit to the attitude that the post is disagreeing with.
And if you water the meaning down, by suitable selection, to anyone who believes there are any differences in average characteristics by race, it not only is not an insult it is entirely useless, since everyone believes that there are–most obviously that people whose ancestors a few generations back came from sub-saharan Africa have, on average, darker skins than people whose ancestors came from Europe.
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…you don’t think that someone who reflexively believes black people to be inherently more criminal than white people can validly be labeled as holding, quote, “racial prejudice?”
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You are insulting somebody’s character if you call them racist. That is inherently an accusation of partaking in harmful behaviors.
The reason why people are bothered by that is way simpler than anybody is giving it credit for. It’s not “white fragility” or stubborn defensiveness of subtle racism or a refusal to listen- sometimes it is, but not always.
Oftentimes, a person is bothered by being called racist because they aren’t being racist and the claim being made against them is false. People don’t like to be falsely accused of negative things. So if you, for example, call somebody racist simply for holding people of all colors to the same standards of language usage, and holding a black person just as personally accountable for not making brash generalizations as a white person, then you’re wrong. The person you accused has every right to be upset by that accusation and in fact they should refuse to accept that you have grounding for calling them racist, because if they don’t, then they are then contributing to actual racism, ironically.
People are tired of having accusations of racism leveled at them simply for being equal in their treatment of all people- the opposite of racism. There are a lot of people who actually are racist, but there’s also a lot of people who aren’t, or at the very least aren’t racist in many of the ways that people are accusing them of being, and they don’t deserve to be insulted for things they haven’t done and for harms they haven’t caused.
That’s a perfectly reasonable response. If somebody accuses you of murder but you haven’t killed anybody, you deny it. If somebody accuses you of racism but you haven’t treated anybody unequally through behaviors or otherwise, then it makes sense to deny it, but people have gotten things so twisted up that the mere denial of being racist, even if you really aren’t being racist, is considered proof of being racist, and so anybody can fling the accusation around at any time and be guaranteed through this false logic to “win the argument” so to speak.
Isn’t that awfully convenient? Doesn’t it make sense to you that people are put off by that sort of entrapment?
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