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> The statement you quoted was written by a Wiki poster, and is most likely false. I was being dense. Thanks for pointing that out. > It is a fact that […] Y
by wizzwizz4 2y ago
> The statement you quoted was written by a Wiki poster, and is most likely false.
I was being dense. Thanks for pointing that out.
> It is a fact that […]
You're telling a story with the facts, and the conclusions you draw from that story are not necessarily facts. The medical establishment of a particular area often acts as though they are medicine, medical treatment, and that people distrusting them means they distrust medicine – when really, all it might mean is (say) that a group of people willing to run the Tuskegee Syphilis Study give off bad vibes.
> Even if every single imaginable bias, prejudice, and everything else were 100% true, it would not make what they did right.
Yes. Their claimed reasons transparently do not justify their actions; so either they had a weird moral system, or those were post-hoc justifications of a decision they'd already made. However, their stated reasons do reveal that they were racist, and racists often come up with post-hoc justifications for racially-motivated atrocities.
I agree with your last paragraph, in that racism isn't the only moral failure mode that humans exhibit – not the only trap we need to watch out for, lest we stumble –; but I think you're making a mistake in assuming that behaviour is either racist or something else. We can analyse it in many ways, and learn many lessons. (There's an extent to which we're really studying ourselves when we do that… but I digress.) There is no "the real value in the story".
- somenameforme 2y ago> Their claimed reasons transparently do not justify their actions This part I disagree with. They do. And that's the point - that bad actions, even if justifiable, do not suddenly become acceptable actions. You can have all the justifications in the world and, even if true, the second you start engaging in bad behavior - you are wrong. The entire point of studying history is see all of these people making justifications. And in many cases those justifications are compelling, logical, and reasonable - yet that does not then make the actions acceptable nonetheless.