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> If racism is bad, stop drawing attention to race. I understand where you're coming from. Not having to think about race, or gender, or whatever is a great l

> If racism is bad, stop drawing attention to race. I understand where you're coming from. Not having to think about race, or gender, or whatever is a great long term goal that we probably share. However, I argue that saying we should stop thinking about it today is premature. Most discrimination is unconscious, but has a significant cumulative effect. Consider the studies on blind interviews or auditions, showing that interviewers rate women higher when they don't know they're women. Or the studies showing that the same idea can be presented in meetings, more likely to be shot down when it's from a woman and accepted when it's from a man (sometimes even both in the same meeting). You don't need me to look these up for you. There have been many, they're easy to find, and you can even conduct your own experiment if you want. Or ask some women you know whether this has happened to them. Here's the key point: Discrimination does not require ill intent. It's highly likely that nobody in these interviews or meetings means to be discriminatory, or recognizes themselves as such, but the outcomes happen anyway. Even if you are the most virtuously fair-minded person ever, that won't undo the effect of other people's unconscious discrimination. The only way to address discrimination is to consciously recognize it in others and in ourselves, and to explicitly address it when it happens. That means paying attention to different outcomes for different groups, which in turn means maintaining an awareness of who's in which group. Leaving our eyes open might be uncomfortable, but closing them simply doesn't work.

Yetanfou 10y ago
Discrimination exists, true. So does racism, partly due to the fact that humans develop a preference for 'their own' within a few months after birth [1]. Those habits die hard and can, in some, end up as debilitating racism where they consider anyone outside their own phenotype to be undesirable. In most people it just stays around in a watered-down form without doing real damage. Some people make conscious efforts to try to unlearn this latent racial bias, some even go so far as to hyper-correct against their own phenotype. Having said this, I still stand by my wish to get rid of identity politics and to tone down or get rid of focus on race/ethnicity/gender/etcetera. The reason for this is that it leads to less cohesion in society, not more. As usual in politics it is the louder mouths which get heard while the more thoughtful ones get relegated to the back. This quickly leads to outspoken people pushing themselves forward as defenders of their identity group, decrying the injustice society supposedly does upon them and calling for special treatment. It does not take long for all nuance to be lost, for the discourse to polarise around these loudmouths. Disparate identity groups withdraw behind their barricades, hurling insults and epithets at perceived opponents and soon any chance of improving the original situation is lost. I'm left-handed. If I were so inclined I could start a political pressure group to fight all the injustice this right-hand-dominated society foists upon me and my identity group. I'd throw myself up as the fearless leader of the oppressed sinister masses - see, even the word used for left has a stigma attached to it - and request, no demand that society adapts itself to my minority. I'd be in the media, be positively flooded with funding from government and NGOs, I'd be famous. What's not to like... ...but I won't. Why not? Because, even though there is a clear right-handed bias in society [2] due to the fact that around 90% of people are right-handed, I don't see how it would help to focus my identity around my left-handedness. Jimi Hendrix was left-handed as well but that did not keep him from picking up a right-handed guitar. Like him and countless others I learned to adapt to my environment and use it to my advantage. [1] https://www.google.se/search?q=babies+racial+bias https://www.google.se/search?q=babies+racial+bias [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bias_against_left-handed_people https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bias_against_left-handed_peopl...

Yetanfou 10y ago

Discrimination exists, true. So does racism, partly due to the fact that humans develop a preference for 'their own' within a few months after birth [1]. Those habits die hard and can, in some, end up as debilitating racism where they consider anyone outside their own phenotype to be undesirable. In most people it just stays around in a watered-down form without doing real damage. Some people make conscious efforts to try to unlearn this latent racial bias, some even go so far as to hyper-correct against their own phenotype. Having said this, I still stand by my wish to get rid of identity politics and to tone down or get rid of focus on race/ethnicity/gender/etcetera. The reason for this is that it leads to less cohesion in society, not more. As usual in politics it is the louder mouths which get heard while the more thoughtful ones get relegated to the back. This quickly leads to outspoken people pushing themselves forward as defenders of their identity group, decrying the injustice society supposedly does upon them and calling for special treatment. It does not take long for all nuance to be lost, for the discourse to polarise around these loudmouths. Disparate identity groups withdraw behind their barricades, hurling insults and epithets at perceived opponents and soon any chance of improving the original situation is lost. I'm left-handed. If I were so inclined I could start a political pressure group to fight all the injustice this right-hand-dominated society foists upon me and my identity group. I'd throw myself up as the fearless leader of the oppressed sinister masses - see, even the word used for left has a stigma attached to it - and request, no demand that society adapts itself to my minority. I'd be in the media, be positively flooded with funding from government and NGOs, I'd be famous. What's not to like... ...but I won't. Why not? Because, even though there is a clear right-handed bias in society [2] due to the fact that around 90% of people are right-handed, I don't see how it would help to focus my identity around my left-handedness. Jimi Hendrix was left-handed as well but that did not keep him from picking up a right-handed guitar. Like him and countless others I learned to adapt to my environment and use it to my advantage. [1] https://www.google.se/search?q=babies+racial+bias https://www.google.se/search?q=babies+racial+bias [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bias_against_left-handed_people https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bias_against_left-handed_peopl...