4 ms·
I get where you're coming from, but black people being compared to apes is kind of an age old racist trope, so it is understandable that people would be unhappy
by jnky 10y ago
I get where you're coming from, but black people being compared to apes is kind of an age old racist trope, so it is understandable that people would be unhappy about it.
Being mislabeled as a bear on the other hand does not generally carry the negative connotations as calling people apes, so I suspects that this is why CapitionBot is erring on this side of the classification.
- mc32 10y agoI'm aware people may want to _use_ it as a racist tool --but I fail to understand that transformation. We're all apes[1] the offender and the target/victim. So more than anything, it shows ignorance by the victimizer/bigot. I suppose it's like calling someone a Neanderthal, but with racial implications. Interestingly, we're learning Neanderthals were not as cognitively lacking as perhaps some supposed. It's like saying, hey, you are hairy... Right, we're all hairy (bald or not) with very few exceptions. It's a weird thing. [1] In Indonesian lang. people and apes share the "orang" root. Oran, orangutan, orangnakal, etc.
- jnky 10y agoI don't think there is as much to understand as you make it out to be. People feel insulted when called apes, because it is frequently used as an insult. It may well be taxonomically correct to say that humans as well as apes are primates and members of the Hominidae family, but that doesn't make it any less insulting. Just because something is technically correct doesn't mean it isn't dehumanizing and suitable as an insult. I'm sure nobody would like to be called a sack of meat either.
- mc32 10y agoPoint taken. Still, this is a machine that's doing the labelling, and one would have to think someone purposely programmed it to do that, rather than the engineers lacking foresight to see a possible misrecognition.