8 ms·

All you say is true, as I understand it, but there are two problems: First, social scientists are overwhelmingly liberal. Normally, I don't have a problem with

by xaa 10y ago

All you say is true, as I understand it, but there are two problems: First, social scientists are overwhelmingly liberal. Normally, I don't have a problem with an appeal to "academic circles" as I'm in them. But this is a legitimate reason, I think, for conservatives to be skeptical of the motivations and reasoning here in such a politically-fraught topic. Secondly, redefining words with existing meanings is a bad idea that only leads to confusion. A crude analogy: imagine I redefine the word "moron" to mean "an uninformed consumer of news". Then, I go around calling people "moron", and am surprised when they are offended, and are not placated when I tell them the word's new meaning. They might wonder: might I not have chosen that particular word to make uninformed consumers of news appear worse than they really are? I think it is disingenuous to blame the public for "misinterpreting" what is meant by "racism" in this context, even though all you say about its academic meaning is true.

pron 10y ago
> this is a legitimate reason, I think, for conservatives to be skeptical of the motivations and reasoning here in such a politically-fraught topic. It is a legitimate reason to be skeptical, but not a very interesting starting point for a discussion if one side isn't even interested in rigorously studying the subject at all. There's a vast knowledge gap between the two sides. > Secondly, redefining words with existing meanings is a bad idea that only leads to confusion. In the case of racism it's not clear which definition came first. In the case of sexism, the situation is clearer: the academic, feminist definition came first, and has indeed been continually misinterpreted. > I think it is disingenuous to blame the public for "misinterpreting" what is meant by "racism" in this context I'm not blaming the public for the misunderstanding at all, but many people are actively hostile to even trying to understand the more well-researched point of view, so I'm not sure you can blame the academics, either. After all, people who have not studied psychology, sociology, anthropology or history find it hard to accept how social dynamics and prejudice work through them without them being aware of it, just as it took 300 years for people to accept that some disease is caused by invisible microbes. Sadly, we do not yet have a simple, self-evident experiment like Pasteur's to demonstrate the existence of racism (and even after Pasteur's experiments, it took a couple of more decades for most people to become convinced). So you cannot deny the active resistance to the idea.
- xaa 10y ago
  Wikipedia contains interesting sections on the etymology of both "racism" and "sexism". "Racism" (and the older term, "racialism") have been around since at least 1900. It originally seemed to have mostly related to pseudo-scientific methods of categorizing people by race, and circa WWII, acquired its now most-familiar meaning of "belief in the superiority of a particular race". "Sexism" was coined by analogy to "racism" in the 1960s, within an academic context, but had not yet acquired the additional connotation you're talking about (the "systemic" part). The first occurrence in print defines it thusly: "Sexism is judging people by their sex when sex doesn't matter." No apparent mention of institutional or systemic effects; those probably came later. So what we have here is a word, "racism", which acquired a well-known public meaning c. WWII that meant what we would now call "extreme, overt racism", and a word, "sexism" defined by analogy to it in the 1960s. It seems plain to me that much of the public is still going by these older definitions. The fundamental problem is that, under the old definitions, calling someone "racist" (and probably "sexist"), is a very serious accusation. There is a reason Nazis seemingly come up in every discussion about racism: they are the ones who gave the word its modern, common meaning. In some ways, calling someone "racist" is therefore a direct, linguistic analogy comparing someone to a Nazi. Academics later refined and repurposed these words. If they, and media surrogates explaining their ideas to the public, had stuck to terms like "(institutional) bias/prejudice", we wouldn't have nearly the degree of problems we have. Certainly it is important to distinguish between implicit, explicit, and systemic biases, which is exactly why we shouldn't use the same word for all of them. And if the goal is progress and understanding, we probably shouldn't use an emotionally charged word that gained its modern definitions from the Nazis. We cannot realistically expect the public to read academic publications before voting. I'm in biology, and it would surely be nice if voters would read my papers so that they understand issues in medicine better (maybe they would increase NIH funding!), but that's completely unrealistic. No, it is up to academics and media to communicate clearly with the public, and I am arguing sociologists have failed miserably in this regard.
  - pron 10y ago
    > We cannot realistically expect the public to read academic publications before voting. No, but we can hope that people would at least listen to those who dedicate their lives to a rigorous study of society rather than dismiss their views based on nothing of the sort. Academics (and journalists) don't explain those terms and the reasoning behind them only in academic publications.

by xaa 10y ago

pron 10y ago

> this is a legitimate reason, I think, for conservatives to be skeptical of the motivations and reasoning here in such a politically-fraught topic. It is a legitimate reason to be skeptical, but not a very interesting starting point for a discussion if one side isn't even interested in rigorously studying the subject at all. There's a vast knowledge gap between the two sides. > Secondly, redefining words with existing meanings is a bad idea that only leads to confusion. In the case of racism it's not clear which definition came first. In the case of sexism, the situation is clearer: the academic, feminist definition came first, and has indeed been continually misinterpreted. > I think it is disingenuous to blame the public for "misinterpreting" what is meant by "racism" in this context I'm not blaming the public for the misunderstanding at all, but many people are actively hostile to even trying to understand the more well-researched point of view, so I'm not sure you can blame the academics, either. After all, people who have not studied psychology, sociology, anthropology or history find it hard to accept how social dynamics and prejudice work through them without them being aware of it, just as it took 300 years for people to accept that some disease is caused by invisible microbes. Sadly, we do not yet have a simple, self-evident experiment like Pasteur's to demonstrate the existence of racism (and even after Pasteur's experiments, it took a couple of more decades for most people to become convinced). So you cannot deny the active resistance to the idea.

xaa 10y ago
Wikipedia contains interesting sections on the etymology of both "racism" and "sexism". "Racism" (and the older term, "racialism") have been around since at least 1900. It originally seemed to have mostly related to pseudo-scientific methods of categorizing people by race, and circa WWII, acquired its now most-familiar meaning of "belief in the superiority of a particular race". "Sexism" was coined by analogy to "racism" in the 1960s, within an academic context, but had not yet acquired the additional connotation you're talking about (the "systemic" part). The first occurrence in print defines it thusly: "Sexism is judging people by their sex when sex doesn't matter." No apparent mention of institutional or systemic effects; those probably came later. So what we have here is a word, "racism", which acquired a well-known public meaning c. WWII that meant what we would now call "extreme, overt racism", and a word, "sexism" defined by analogy to it in the 1960s. It seems plain to me that much of the public is still going by these older definitions. The fundamental problem is that, under the old definitions, calling someone "racist" (and probably "sexist"), is a very serious accusation. There is a reason Nazis seemingly come up in every discussion about racism: they are the ones who gave the word its modern, common meaning. In some ways, calling someone "racist" is therefore a direct, linguistic analogy comparing someone to a Nazi. Academics later refined and repurposed these words. If they, and media surrogates explaining their ideas to the public, had stuck to terms like "(institutional) bias/prejudice", we wouldn't have nearly the degree of problems we have. Certainly it is important to distinguish between implicit, explicit, and systemic biases, which is exactly why we shouldn't use the same word for all of them. And if the goal is progress and understanding, we probably shouldn't use an emotionally charged word that gained its modern definitions from the Nazis. We cannot realistically expect the public to read academic publications before voting. I'm in biology, and it would surely be nice if voters would read my papers so that they understand issues in medicine better (maybe they would increase NIH funding!), but that's completely unrealistic. No, it is up to academics and media to communicate clearly with the public, and I am arguing sociologists have failed miserably in this regard.
- pron 10y ago
  > We cannot realistically expect the public to read academic publications before voting. No, but we can hope that people would at least listen to those who dedicate their lives to a rigorous study of society rather than dismiss their views based on nothing of the sort. Academics (and journalists) don't explain those terms and the reasoning behind them only in academic publications.