6 ms·

Do you believe the acknowledgement of race or racial difference to be intrinsically bigoted?

by germinalphrase 5y ago

stickfigure 5y ago
It's one thing to acknowledge differences. It's another to define ourselves by them.
- throwaway894345 5y ago
  Or to conflate "this is true on average for this group of people" with "this is true for everyone in this group".
JPKab 5y ago
Yes. Kids don't see skin color the way these ideologues do. They look at it like hair color. My twin brother and I were literally the only white kids on our school bus, attending mostly black public schools in a mostly black county in southeastern Virginia. We were never really aware of skin color as a thing, just "this kid let's us borrow his gameboy and is nice", vs. "this kid punches us in the back of the head on the bus cuz he's psycho". Race was a useless proxy for good/bad when you are in a heavily integrated school system, because it's ALWAYS been a useless proxy for judging human character. People that speak like this publicly ("sea of white children") are THINKING like this constantly. In my opinion, he projects his own bigotry and obsession with skin color onto everyone else around him. That's what bigots of all colors do.
- MikeUt 5y ago
  > Kids don't see skin color the way these ideologues do. Infants show racial bias toward members of own race and against those of other races: https://phys.org/news/2017-04-infants-racial-bias-members.html https://phys.org/news/2017-04-infants-racial-bias-members.ht...
- noen 5y ago
  Through my childhood I would agree with you. By the time I was in high school this was no longer the case. Had many black friends, and once we all pass puberty and got cars, the world changed. The first time I was with a black friend who got pulled over for no reason, and seeing the cop visibly change his demeanor when he saw me (white clean cut male) in the passenger seat, changed me. Talked with my friend after - this was already normalized for him. I was angry beyond belief. It’s a useless proxy for judgement and yet US society does it to black and hispanic people with alarming consistency and frequency. It hasn’t gotten better since my youth. This is the crux of white privilege and why “cancel culture” is bullshit for snowflakes who can’t imagine that the world is as systematically unjust as it really is. I’ve listened to many black activists who ARE anti-white, who do self segregate, and I don’t blame any of them for a second nor hold any animosity towards them. They spent their lives being lied to, despised, tricked, and crapped on. Why would anyone want to continue that cycle?
  - JPKab 5y ago
    Walk into a trailer park in Appalachia and talk about white privilege. See what they think. Not that you've spent a minute of your life in one. Ever met a coder from that background? Didn't think so. Class is the issue, but putting it all on race let's the man off the hook, which is why this so called revolution is corporate sponsored.
    - joshuamorton 5y ago
      Both are an issue. Trying to reframe all racial issues as only class issues is as dumb as trying to claim all class issues are racial in nature. Few people who think about racism deny class has impact though. An intersectional analysis would suggest that a rich black, rich white, poor black, and poor white experience would all be different. > Walk into a trailer park in Appalachia and talk about white privilege. See what they think. Right, I can't tell if your argument here is that you don't think a poor Appalachian person would be up on the intersectional lingo, or you think that they can't critically analyze different kinds of privilege, or you think that they think that there's some kind of moral argument that poor white people can't also have advantages over black people and I'd feel bad talking to them about that? In any case, you're wrong. Also you realize that Appalachia has a significant black population right, its 10% of Appalachia vs. 12% of the US population. Appalachia includes large swaths of Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi. (also it includes major metro areas in Pennsylvania, so trying to paint "Appalachia" as a rural-white-poor thing is dumb and misrepresentative of Appalachia).
- xeonoex 5y ago
  Kids do not write laws or have political agendas. In an ideal world, skin color would be an afterthought. But that is not the world we live in. I grew up as a white person in a 99%+ mexican/hispanic area. I grew up thinking the same. I didn't think much of people's race, but other people did. I was treated differently because I was white. It took me a while to realize that I wasn't seeing the world from the minorities point of view because I wasn't a minority. If you try to ignore race completely, you ignore the issues minorities are facing.
oh_sigh 5y ago
Do you believe white people kill black people with impunity in America?
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  Less so today than they did before BLM highlighted the way they repeatedly did so. EDIT: I mean, two people actually think the recent spate of prosecutions of white law enforcement officers for unjustified killings of blacks is because in the last few years American law enforcement officers have just become violently racist in ways they previously weren't, and not a change in accountability resulting from public attention to the issue?
  - koheripbal 5y ago
    Do you honestly believe that you could have murdered a black coworker without criminal justice ramifications prior to BLM?
    - dragonwriter 5y ago
      > Do you honestly believe that you could have murdered a black coworker without criminal justice ramifications prior to BLM? Well, no, but that’s not germane to the issue being discussed. Your asking that question in this context embeds several assumptions, at least one of which is incorrect.
- chevill 5y ago
  This is a question that's so loaded its disingenuous without context. You weren't asking me but here's what I think about it. Do I think that police involved in bad shootings or another type of unjustified death have a really good chance of getting away with it? Of course. Do I think that the scenario above of an unjustified police killing happens more to people of color? Probably, I haven't looked up the numbers though and I don't know where to find them. Do I think the overwhelming majority of police killings are justified? Yes. But that doesn't mean it isn't a big deal when unjustified deaths go unpunished. Do I think most white people in the US could get away with murdering a black person? No, and keep in mind this is closer to the question you actually asked than the question you wanted an answer to.
dgb23 5y ago
My intuition from reading these quotes is that this person spent a lot of time thinking about socioeconomic differences in relation to race[0], so they see things through that lens. It can come off as hostile, but the more generous interpretation that they simply emphasize this theme. [0] I dislike the term "race" in these contexts. In biological terms there is only one human race currently alive as far as we know. Every time I read or use it I feel like the pseudosciences such as social darwinists have won.
- naivedevops 5y ago
  About [0], in Portuguese we have abolished the usage of the term "race" for human beings for exactly that reason. Now we exclusively use the term "ethnicity". Edit: What about the downvotes? Are people going crazy?
  - whimsicalism 5y ago
    Which is why Brazil is such a beautiful post-racial utopia?
    - zozbot234 5y ago
      Compared to Latin America as a whole? Yup, pretty clearly so. They're on a path to becoming more racially progressive than much of the U.S.
      - throwaway894345 5y ago
        In fairness the U.S. has been on a regressive trajectory for the last ~10 years, so anyone who isn't similarly regressive is "on a path to becoming more racially progressive than much of the U.S.", strictly speaking.
        whimsicalism 5y ago
        Just because problems are more visible does not mean they have regressed IMO.
acituan 5y ago
> acknowledgement of race or racial difference Acknowledgment of race is inherently an essentialist position; that there is an essence to being a certain race that sets it apart from other races. Doesn't matter if that position casts the purported essence in a positive or negative light, it is bigotry in one way or the other.
- throwaway894345 5y ago
  You can acknowledge that there is a social construct called "race" that some people believe is useful for predicting things about individuals without subscribing to those beliefs yourself. E.g., some people argue that white people are unfit for certain roles because they haven't endured the sufferings of people of color which is clearly expressing a belief that (1) race is real and (2) race is useful for predicting things about individual white and non-white people. This is racism, race essentialism, etc. But I can also acknowledge that those people are more likely to treat white people (i.e., the people that they put into their "white" category) differently than nonwhite (i.e., the people they put into their "people of color" category). This is not racism or race essentialism or etc.
  - zozbot234 5y ago
    What the U.S. calls "races" would simply be considered subcultures in the rest of the world. (Bordering on ethnicities, but not really - they're way too integrated within mainstream culture to be true ethnic subdivisions.) You can acknowledge subcultures without clinging to the absurd notion (that is, absurd to much of the civilized world) that "race" is a legitimate term at all, even for a socially and culturally-bound construct.
    - throwaway894345 5y ago
      I don’t think that’s correct considering people from Nigeria, France, or N-th generation Americans can all be considered “black” provided they have a certain set of physical traits even though these people very likely have very different cultures. So the American notion of “race” spans cultures and it is derived from physical traits, not cultural artifacts.
tarsinge 5y ago
The confusion between skin color, race and culture seems to be one of the root cause for many problems in the US. Their history with minorities seems to have unfortunately unconsciously tied skin color and culture, ignoring the fact that it's the definition of racism. Not saying it's all rosy elsewhere, but at least it seems not that deeply ingrained and perpetuated. So to candidly answer your question, yes there are of course physical differences between people, and correlations between people sharing a set of physical attributes, like skin color. Now if you attach culture and values to skin color, yes it's intrinsically bigoted, no matter the group. The corollary is that people with different skin color can have the same culture, and that criticizing a culture is not racist.

Do you believe the acknowledgement of race or racial difference to be intrinsically bigoted?

stickfigure 5y ago

It's one thing to acknowledge differences. It's another to define ourselves by them.

throwaway894345 5y ago
Or to conflate "this is true on average for this group of people" with "this is true for everyone in this group".

JPKab 5y ago

Yes. Kids don't see skin color the way these ideologues do. They look at it like hair color. My twin brother and I were literally the only white kids on our school bus, attending mostly black public schools in a mostly black county in southeastern Virginia. We were never really aware of skin color as a thing, just "this kid let's us borrow his gameboy and is nice", vs. "this kid punches us in the back of the head on the bus cuz he's psycho". Race was a useless proxy for good/bad when you are in a heavily integrated school system, because it's ALWAYS been a useless proxy for judging human character. People that speak like this publicly ("sea of white children") are THINKING like this constantly. In my opinion, he projects his own bigotry and obsession with skin color onto everyone else around him. That's what bigots of all colors do.

MikeUt 5y ago
> Kids don't see skin color the way these ideologues do. Infants show racial bias toward members of own race and against those of other races: https://phys.org/news/2017-04-infants-racial-bias-members.html https://phys.org/news/2017-04-infants-racial-bias-members.ht...
noen 5y ago
Through my childhood I would agree with you. By the time I was in high school this was no longer the case. Had many black friends, and once we all pass puberty and got cars, the world changed. The first time I was with a black friend who got pulled over for no reason, and seeing the cop visibly change his demeanor when he saw me (white clean cut male) in the passenger seat, changed me. Talked with my friend after - this was already normalized for him. I was angry beyond belief. It’s a useless proxy for judgement and yet US society does it to black and hispanic people with alarming consistency and frequency. It hasn’t gotten better since my youth. This is the crux of white privilege and why “cancel culture” is bullshit for snowflakes who can’t imagine that the world is as systematically unjust as it really is. I’ve listened to many black activists who ARE anti-white, who do self segregate, and I don’t blame any of them for a second nor hold any animosity towards them. They spent their lives being lied to, despised, tricked, and crapped on. Why would anyone want to continue that cycle?
- JPKab 5y ago
  Walk into a trailer park in Appalachia and talk about white privilege. See what they think. Not that you've spent a minute of your life in one. Ever met a coder from that background? Didn't think so. Class is the issue, but putting it all on race let's the man off the hook, which is why this so called revolution is corporate sponsored.
  - joshuamorton 5y ago
    Both are an issue. Trying to reframe all racial issues as only class issues is as dumb as trying to claim all class issues are racial in nature. Few people who think about racism deny class has impact though. An intersectional analysis would suggest that a rich black, rich white, poor black, and poor white experience would all be different. > Walk into a trailer park in Appalachia and talk about white privilege. See what they think. Right, I can't tell if your argument here is that you don't think a poor Appalachian person would be up on the intersectional lingo, or you think that they can't critically analyze different kinds of privilege, or you think that they think that there's some kind of moral argument that poor white people can't also have advantages over black people and I'd feel bad talking to them about that? In any case, you're wrong. Also you realize that Appalachia has a significant black population right, its 10% of Appalachia vs. 12% of the US population. Appalachia includes large swaths of Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi. (also it includes major metro areas in Pennsylvania, so trying to paint "Appalachia" as a rural-white-poor thing is dumb and misrepresentative of Appalachia).
xeonoex 5y ago
Kids do not write laws or have political agendas. In an ideal world, skin color would be an afterthought. But that is not the world we live in. I grew up as a white person in a 99%+ mexican/hispanic area. I grew up thinking the same. I didn't think much of people's race, but other people did. I was treated differently because I was white. It took me a while to realize that I wasn't seeing the world from the minorities point of view because I wasn't a minority. If you try to ignore race completely, you ignore the issues minorities are facing.

oh_sigh 5y ago

Do you believe white people kill black people with impunity in America?

dragonwriter 5y ago
Less so today than they did before BLM highlighted the way they repeatedly did so. EDIT: I mean, two people actually think the recent spate of prosecutions of white law enforcement officers for unjustified killings of blacks is because in the last few years American law enforcement officers have just become violently racist in ways they previously weren't, and not a change in accountability resulting from public attention to the issue?
- koheripbal 5y ago
  Do you honestly believe that you could have murdered a black coworker without criminal justice ramifications prior to BLM?
  - dragonwriter 5y ago
    > Do you honestly believe that you could have murdered a black coworker without criminal justice ramifications prior to BLM? Well, no, but that’s not germane to the issue being discussed. Your asking that question in this context embeds several assumptions, at least one of which is incorrect.
chevill 5y ago
This is a question that's so loaded its disingenuous without context. You weren't asking me but here's what I think about it. Do I think that police involved in bad shootings or another type of unjustified death have a really good chance of getting away with it? Of course. Do I think that the scenario above of an unjustified police killing happens more to people of color? Probably, I haven't looked up the numbers though and I don't know where to find them. Do I think the overwhelming majority of police killings are justified? Yes. But that doesn't mean it isn't a big deal when unjustified deaths go unpunished. Do I think most white people in the US could get away with murdering a black person? No, and keep in mind this is closer to the question you actually asked than the question you wanted an answer to.

dgb23 5y ago

My intuition from reading these quotes is that this person spent a lot of time thinking about socioeconomic differences in relation to race[0], so they see things through that lens. It can come off as hostile, but the more generous interpretation that they simply emphasize this theme. [0] I dislike the term "race" in these contexts. In biological terms there is only one human race currently alive as far as we know. Every time I read or use it I feel like the pseudosciences such as social darwinists have won.

naivedevops 5y ago
About [0], in Portuguese we have abolished the usage of the term "race" for human beings for exactly that reason. Now we exclusively use the term "ethnicity". Edit: What about the downvotes? Are people going crazy?
- whimsicalism 5y ago
  Which is why Brazil is such a beautiful post-racial utopia?
  - zozbot234 5y ago
    Compared to Latin America as a whole? Yup, pretty clearly so. They're on a path to becoming more racially progressive than much of the U.S.
    - throwaway894345 5y ago
      In fairness the U.S. has been on a regressive trajectory for the last ~10 years, so anyone who isn't similarly regressive is "on a path to becoming more racially progressive than much of the U.S.", strictly speaking.
      - whimsicalism 5y ago
        Just because problems are more visible does not mean they have regressed IMO.

acituan 5y ago

> acknowledgement of race or racial difference Acknowledgment of race is inherently an essentialist position; that there is an essence to being a certain race that sets it apart from other races. Doesn't matter if that position casts the purported essence in a positive or negative light, it is bigotry in one way or the other.

throwaway894345 5y ago
You can acknowledge that there is a social construct called "race" that some people believe is useful for predicting things about individuals without subscribing to those beliefs yourself. E.g., some people argue that white people are unfit for certain roles because they haven't endured the sufferings of people of color which is clearly expressing a belief that (1) race is real and (2) race is useful for predicting things about individual white and non-white people. This is racism, race essentialism, etc. But I can also acknowledge that those people are more likely to treat white people (i.e., the people that they put into their "white" category) differently than nonwhite (i.e., the people they put into their "people of color" category). This is not racism or race essentialism or etc.
- zozbot234 5y ago
  What the U.S. calls "races" would simply be considered subcultures in the rest of the world. (Bordering on ethnicities, but not really - they're way too integrated within mainstream culture to be true ethnic subdivisions.) You can acknowledge subcultures without clinging to the absurd notion (that is, absurd to much of the civilized world) that "race" is a legitimate term at all, even for a socially and culturally-bound construct.
  - throwaway894345 5y ago
    I don’t think that’s correct considering people from Nigeria, France, or N-th generation Americans can all be considered “black” provided they have a certain set of physical traits even though these people very likely have very different cultures. So the American notion of “race” spans cultures and it is derived from physical traits, not cultural artifacts.

tarsinge 5y ago

The confusion between skin color, race and culture seems to be one of the root cause for many problems in the US. Their history with minorities seems to have unfortunately unconsciously tied skin color and culture, ignoring the fact that it's the definition of racism. Not saying it's all rosy elsewhere, but at least it seems not that deeply ingrained and perpetuated. So to candidly answer your question, yes there are of course physical differences between people, and correlations between people sharing a set of physical attributes, like skin color. Now if you attach culture and values to skin color, yes it's intrinsically bigoted, no matter the group. The corollary is that people with different skin color can have the same culture, and that criticizing a culture is not racist.