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You probably would've been 10x as racist as Franklin had you grown up in his era.
by cheeseomlit 2y ago
You probably would've been 10x as racist as Franklin had you grown up in his era.
- Rinzler89 2y agoWho WASN'T racist back then? Except it wasn't called being racist, it was just the norm for everyone back then, it was the societal default. You can meet some old people today who still have very wrong views about minorities and immigrants, let alone people who lived in the 1700's.
- naasking 2y agoIf you ask certain people, everybody is still racist right now.
- Rinzler89 2y agoWell, racism and discrimination still exists among genpop today, even if on paper it's outlawed. These kind of biases are impossible to remove just with laws.
- naasking 2y agoRight, but I'm not saying that these people believe racism still exists somewhere out there, I'm saying they believe that racism is in every person's heart. That would seem to make it ineliminable, which seemingly deflates the purpose to care about racism. Ironically, such people claim to care the most about racism.
- pixl97 2y agoI mean, every able bodied person is capable of murder, we cannot get rid of it, and yet we spend a lot of time and effort to make sure people aren't out there doing it.
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- naasking 2y agoThis analogy fails because virtually everyone goes through life without becoming a murderer, where these people believe literally no one goes through life without being racist. A better analogy would be: is it reasonable to condemn people that refuse to stop being gay? If you really believe it's just something you are, that's part of your core and can't be eliminated...
- pixl97 2y ago"Wow, that guys wife is hot and I thought about having sex with her, oh no I guess that means I am an adulterer so I might as well actually have sex with her". If you turn off binary thinking and start thinking in degrees of effect, the fact you may naturally have some aversion to people that are not like you isn't a fucking excuse to genocide a group of people because of what they look like. Almost all the excuses worded like the ones above that I've seen are from hard racists on why they shouldn't have to change there harmful behavior to others by wrapping in infantile sayings like "Jon was born gay and I was born to burn crosses".
- naasking 2y agoI mean, if you're trying to point out that the people who believe that everyone is racist is a silly belief because it leads to absurdities, then I agree, welcome to the club. My point is not to justify that thinking, but to point out that they exist and so, to them, moral progress is apparently a fiction and so claims of "who wasn't racist in the past?" is not persuasive evidence that we're better now.
- pfdietz 2y agoRacism isn't outlawed, at least in the US.
- cheeseomlit 2y agoThat's my point, if you're going to be remotely fair when judging people from a radically different society you have to "grade them on a curve" so to speak. Otherwise, according to the prevailing modern social mores, not a single decent person existed prior to the 1960s or so
- Rinzler89 2y agoYeah, there's something fundamentally wrong about judging people from the distant past using the laws and views of today.
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- yesbabyyes 2y agoThat's ahistorical. I'd say Martin Luther King seemed like a fairly decent fellow. Also Rosa Parks, Medgar Evers, Harry Belafonte, J Waties Waring, Andrew Goodman and so on.
- cheeseomlit 2y agoBut those people are all from the 20th century, historically speaking still quite recent and relatable. I think you'd be hard-pressed to pluck anyone from a truly different time/place (relative to the modern west) and have their moral standards hold up to modern scrutiny, and if you could they'd be a notable exception and not the rule
- yesbabyyes 2y agoWell, you have Richelieu's famous quote about six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men and whatnot, but let's just say I think you're wrong. You're simultaneously underestimating the people who were here before us and our ability to adequately scrutinize their moral fiber. Of course, if by "people", "person" or "anyone", you mean the powerful, wealthy elite of the US, it's another thing entirely.
- chefkd 2y agoA lot of the world had hospitality rules and treated outsiders kindly. Lots of people were allowed to come and go as they pleased they actually provide interesting reads. Borders as we understand them today were invented in the 18/1900s. Mass slavery spanning multiple continents and racism on that magnitude hasn't happened since and hopefully won't happen again (except maybe Rome & Egypt but that wasn't trans continental)
- jajko 2y agoOne doesn't exclude the other. You / anybody could be most welcoming to visitors and have your slaves serve them the best you had and treat them very well. Norms change, sometimes shockingly, and even within one's lifespan. Now young generations will most probably realize this when they will become out of touch and rejected by new young generation in maybe 2 decades.
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