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> Reducing people's behavior to something fueled by ethnicity is racism. So when people say "white people are often racist", that's racism? (I actually agree,

by tomp 10y ago

> Reducing people's behavior to something fueled by ethnicity is racism. So when people say "white people are often racist", that's racism? (I actually agree, minorities are often very racist like that!) > Freedom of religion is a constitutionally protected right. Most rights are suspended at the border anyways.

kbenson 10y ago
> So when people say "white people are often racist", that's racism? Depending on how you interpret "often", it can be. It's functionally no different than "X people are often lazy" in how it paints a population based on some demographic which actually has nothing to do with that attribute. If you treat "often" in it's literal sense, as in "this happens a lot", then as long as it's happened at least a few times, it's subjectively true, since often is relative to what you think a good baseline is. If you think one time is more than should be seen, then experiencing it five times could be called "often" (technically. It quickly breaks down when applied to colloquial use in this situation). The real problem here is assuming a set of personal experiences, whether they number 10 or 1000, necessarily indicate a trait that scales across the entire population of those people. Even leaving out things like confirmation bias, where your original data may be woefully inaccurate, there is little to no evidence that any trend you think you are seeing applies to that ethnicity equally in other locations and situations. You can look at the sentiments of other people and stories in the media for corroboration, but since those aren't accurate representations either, it's still left open to rampant confirmation bias. This aspect of human psychology was less problematic when we all lived in somewhat small groups. In those cases, the other was the other tribe. Even though they probably looked like you, they were the outsiders, and some distrust and stereotyping of them served the dual purposes of security and social cohesion. The same psychological aspects are at play, and they still cause us to group together, but unfortunately now it promotes the opposite of social cohesion. (and now you have my pop psy take on it). > (I actually agree, minorities are often very racist like that!) I see what you did there. :)

by tomp 10y ago

kbenson 10y ago

> So when people say "white people are often racist", that's racism? Depending on how you interpret "often", it can be. It's functionally no different than "X people are often lazy" in how it paints a population based on some demographic which actually has nothing to do with that attribute. If you treat "often" in it's literal sense, as in "this happens a lot", then as long as it's happened at least a few times, it's subjectively true, since often is relative to what you think a good baseline is. If you think one time is more than should be seen, then experiencing it five times could be called "often" (technically. It quickly breaks down when applied to colloquial use in this situation). The real problem here is assuming a set of personal experiences, whether they number 10 or 1000, necessarily indicate a trait that scales across the entire population of those people. Even leaving out things like confirmation bias, where your original data may be woefully inaccurate, there is little to no evidence that any trend you think you are seeing applies to that ethnicity equally in other locations and situations. You can look at the sentiments of other people and stories in the media for corroboration, but since those aren't accurate representations either, it's still left open to rampant confirmation bias. This aspect of human psychology was less problematic when we all lived in somewhat small groups. In those cases, the other was the other tribe. Even though they probably looked like you, they were the outsiders, and some distrust and stereotyping of them served the dual purposes of security and social cohesion. The same psychological aspects are at play, and they still cause us to group together, but unfortunately now it promotes the opposite of social cohesion. (and now you have my pop psy take on it). > (I actually agree, minorities are often very racist like that!) I see what you did there. :)