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"All Lives Matter" is Racism 1.0 thinking. But Racism 2.0 has been pushed out and – in some ways – it's a forced upgrade. Racism 1.0 was widely understood: ra

• ponker 6y ago
  The "closed source" phenomenon is real. For someone who is not black, the risk/reward profile of participating in this conversation is extraordinarily poor. I'm not stepping in the muck, "Your Silence is Complicity" placards notwithstanding.
  • whymauri 6y ago
    I've actually found it extraordinarily easy to talk about anti-racism without imposing any risk on my career, health, or future.
    • ponker 6y ago
      Sure, but others clearly haven't. Not knowing in advance which category you fall into, the smart move is not to play.
    • SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
      I've been able to do it as well, but I don't think it's fair to call it easy. It requires self-control to avoid getting heated and saying something inelegantly, and attentiveness to make sure you avoid pushing any hot buttons. There's no way you can talk as freely and easily about anti-racism as you can about, like, food or sports.
• mindslight 6y ago
  I think it's more that "All Lives Matter" has become a slogan to rebuke the rallying cry that Black Lives Matter. If someone expressed the general concept in a way that wasn't trying to downplay BLM (eg "equality under the law"), I don't think that would be called racist. Also, you're summing up the topic of racism as referring to the progression of criticizing racism. Actual "Racism 1.0" would be more like "it is good and just to subjugate different tribes". Racism 2.0 would be "they're less capable, it's for their own good".
  • ponker 6y ago
    Well the point of saying "All Lives Matter" isn't actually to claim that all lives matter, so a "good faith" way would kind of be missing the point. The people who invented it and say it don't mean the lives of poor black kids in the inner cities, families of Salvadoran immigrants apprehended at the border, transgender activists in San Francisco, etc... the phrase "All Lives Matter" is just the 2020 version of... (I'll let Lee Atwater do the rest): You start out in 1954 by saying, “Ni\\er, ni\\er, ni\\er.” By 1968 you can’t say “ni\\er”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Ni\\er, ni\\er.”
    • smooth_remmy 6y ago
      This quote is essentially saying... that the root of fiscal conservatism and small government conservatism is racism. In the 1960s and still today, people support states' rights as an indirect way to hurt black people...? This quote is terrible and one of the most racist things I've ever read. It tries to interject race into forms of political theory that have nothing to do with race. Just absolutely toxic for society.
  • karatestomp 6y ago
    "All lives matter" as a rebuttal or reminder is about as useful as "LOL it's not actually free you forgot about taxes" when someone mentions "free" healthcare. Everyone already knew that. Context is always part of understanding language and in both those cases the context is pretty damn clear—these aren't even ambiguous or difficult ones. It's just being intentionally obtuse for a plainly-bullshit "gotcha".
• downerending 6y ago
  We were recently asked by management to stop using the words whitelist and blacklist, as they are seen as being "hurtful". No real idea how to react to that, given that they are terms of art (and of course, were never any sort of reference to race). I suppose it's pretty much like most management edicts that come down over time. Just nod your head, keep your mouth shut, and with any luck it will all blow over in a month or two.
  • ponker 6y ago
    I think a lot of this goes too far, but I do agree with whitelist and blacklist. In all aspects of our lives we use "white" to describe things that are good and "black" to describe things that are bad. That movie is "dark." It has a "black-hearted" villain. While that phenomenon does not have its origin in racism, I do think it reinforces it. I've moved to allow-list and block-list on my company's recommendation. I only remember to do it about 50% of the time, so I'm glad that it's not being policed, but rather a constructive suggestion.
    • mc32 6y ago
      Ok what about your balance sheet being in the black? Should that be neutralized too? I think it’s going too far. If you want to do something for people go out and help them. Devote time to kids, provide mentorship, etc. This other superficial stuff only satisfies misguided activists and does nothing for affected kids. Here’s the thing. It’s easy to find someone or something to pillory. It’s time consuming and hard to get on the ground and help. People love “showing” how good they are, but rarely act on it in real life with hard effort —that’s too much work. As Zizek says, what happens the day after (the revolution)? Everyone is enamored with the effervescence or revolution being the good guys... but no one wants to do the hard work. Everyone’s life has to go on when you get back to reality.
      • deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      • ljm 6y ago
• pjc50 6y ago
  > Saying "I don't see colour" is suddenly the wrong thing to say. For a long time it was the correct thing to say and think. I'm not sure it ever was? It's been criticized for a long time that pretending not to see colour is just a way of pretending the problems don't exist. Generally the best approach is to find nonwhite voices on the subject - part of the problem is that even within antiracism activism it's easier for white people to get on TV or get an audience for lectures and books. And part of the reason that there's all the problems right now is that ""racism 1.0"" never went away.
  • whymauri 6y ago
    >I'm not sure it ever was? I'm inclined to agree. Black authors and scholars have been critiquing the 'color-blind' school of thinking since the 60s; notably, James Baldwin did it live on TV. [0] [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fZQQ7o16yQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fZQQ7o16yQ
  • downerending 6y ago
    I think most reasonable people really do understand the idea of treating everyone the same regardless of race. Personally, I consider that to be ideal behavior on the subject of race relations, and any other standard seems ethically inferior by comparison. I had always assumed that that was MLK's central point in his most famous speech. Maybe I misunderstood what he was saying.
  • kick 6y ago
    It was never the correct thing to say or think, you're correct. Society has been critical of people insisting on that practice anywhere from 1960 to 2020, and there's an obvious reason why most depictions of it in media for the past fifty years have been rich white people with southern accents uttering it as an excuse to do something absolutely racist as a punchline.
• karatestomp 6y ago
  > It's structural and systemic, so for the first time a lot of of white progressives are discovering that we're part of the problem. Saying "I don't see colour" is suddenly the wrong thing to say. For a long time it was the correct thing to say and think. K-12 schools, even in "red" America, very successfully taught me that sex and color aren't how you judge people, and gave me the impression we were past that. The dissonance of seeing that not everyone was on-board with that program the way I thought they (we) just about all were, and of backlash against that attitude itself(!) has taken me from legitimately, no-BS, about as close to being not-racist and not-sexist as possible, as a kid, to feeling like I'm more racist and sexist than I was. And I don't just mean that my eyes have been opened to ways I was without realizing it, but actually transforming my thinking to consider those factors way more and (inevitably) incorporate biases from them. It's weird and fairly unpleasant (and, as a symptom of precisely this issue, I must hasten to add that I don't intend this as crying about getting the short end of the stick or setting myself up as victim-in-chief, obviously).
• monoclechris 6y ago
  Tell me which data point you want to fix and how you intend to fix it, this vague nonsense is useless.
• zimpenfish 6y ago
  > For a long time it was the correct thing to say and think. I don't think that's true, really; "I don't see colour" was always a cop-out to avoid thinking about anything.
  • thirtythree 6y ago
    No, it could be used to imply the person saying it will treat everyone the same.
• at_a_remove 6y ago
  I gotta say, I'm not really enjoying the Racism 2.0 upgrade. Weirdly, "Oh man it's kind of sick how much joy I get out of being cruel to old white men" is not only fine by the Racism 2.0 standards, even objecting to it makes you problematic by the new standards. I don't think you can really paint me as being "confused" as in "you should educate yourself," which is a fairly common refrain on the support forum. In some sense, Racism 2.0 runs counter to the reason I bought Racism 1.0, because previously the idea behind the software was that we try hard to treat everyone the same no matter what, and now in Racism 2.0, that's bad, and who you are has everything to do with what you are allowed to do, say, and even think.
• gedy 6y ago
  I'm not a political scientist, but it seems like when a group takes control, there is always some hidden social rules that you just need to "know", and helps identify the out-group. What you say/can't say in "polite company". Feels like just another mechanism for control.
• dragonwriter 6y ago
  > Saying "I don't see colour" is suddenly the wrong thing to say. For a long time it was the correct thing to say and think. It's been widely held up as the standard privileged response that helps secure an unjust status quo through erasure for longer than, really, any of the rest of the phrasing in this sentence was current in how one would express the problem of that statement. As an example (comparatively recent in the history of that expression being widely derided as problematic), when Steven Colbert adopted the faux-right-wing personality for the Colbert Report 15 years ago, “I don’t see race” was one of the standard refrains he used, which wouldn't work if it weren't not only problematic but widely and stereotypically so. So, no, it didn't just suddenly become the wrong thing to say.
• jxpx777 6y ago
  I think this framing is itself problematic. The language of "forced upgrades" and "pushed out" updates implies a sense of victimization and to me seems to imply that the goalposts are being moved. If "All Lives Matter" was Racism 1.0, what was happening before 2013, an extended beta? Moreover, this line of discussion reinforces the idea that somehow the comfort White people even matters when we're talking about racist systems of oppression. The truth is that racism has always been more complicated than "the nice people" vs "the mean people". Blackness and Whiteness were invented by slave traders to justify the subjugation of the people they intended to enslave. The definitions of Whiteness were carved out around those in power, in the colonies especially, to make sure they retained their wealth and power. The problem we face as White people now is that we are far enough into the advancement of this system that we unwittingly participate in and benefit from it. This makes me extremely angry. What we have is a system that is so advanced that most of us White people do not see it, a system so geared toward our comfort and privilege that when the system is questioned, it makes us feel uncomfortable and impinged. I'm reminded of the story about Facebook's AI that created a language that humans couldn't understand. The racist system we were born into, have swum in for our whole lives, and are now confronted with is not something that can be refactored, papered over with code coverage, or pivoted in the same way that we often think of resolving software problems. The system itself is corrupt. We need to rm -rf this repo and init a new one with a fresh perspective and a bold, courageous vision for the kind of society that we want to live in based on our values and lessons learned with. As a White person, that can be scary because it means that the world might not continue to cater and defer to us. But we have to be committed to true justice, true equality for all people.
• tofonic 6y ago
  >"All Lives Matter" is Racism 1.0 thinking. I genuinely wonder, why is that? If I'm white, this means my life doesn't matter, and when I will be killed I will end up just as +1 in some statistics because of the colour of my skin?