"Racism" as a tool for social change has outlived its usefulness, IMO. Back in the day, branding people as Evil for supporting racist policies was worth the side effects. Jim Crowe laws, "separate but equal", and the other issues rampant in 1950s America were terrible. If we didn't hand out anti-racist good guy points and pro-racist bad guy points, we'd never have cared about expending effort on fighting the terrible injustices of the time.
The problem is that the anti-racist strategy has slowly morphed over time to fight things that are less and less terrible. Theres a ton of pointless Culture War bullshit that really isn't important enough to have super high stakes in terms of being a Good Person. Whether or not you participate in a campus Day of Absence. Whether or not you like Marvel making a black Captain America. Whether or not a video game has enough racial diversity. The concerns are often just so completely petty that I just want to opt out of the whole system, commit myself to simply treating people fairly and being a good person, and get on with my life.
A lot of white people my age and younger in America don't really understand racism well. And how would we? We were trained from a young age to just repeat the right answers and not ask questions.
Without asking questions, there's no way to learn the topic well enough to apply it to real situations.
But there's no safe place to ask questions. If you ask an academic, they will give you incredibly confusing and vague answers that you aren't meant to understand without studying for a PhD in sociology. If you ask anyone else, they just brand you as a racist and move on.
It doesn't have to be this way. Even other sensitive topics like religion allow for ways to ask interesting, challenging, or practical questions. A priest will give a sincere answer to a sincere question.
I have been a longtime advocate of the "I am racist, and you are racist, and we are all racist and that's very bad, like as bad as murder, but it's also OK because that's how the universe is and we can get better at being less murder-y, but let's still keep calling this thing I'm talking about racism" camp.
But this essay makes a compelling argument that racism as used colloquially refers to bad intentions.
I'm willing to concede. I'll stop using racist except in a situation where there is an indication of conscious intent for racial subjugation, thus relegating the word to essentially disappear from modern parlance, but...
What word am I supposed to use instead? I guess I just have to use complete sentences. But that's hard.
> What word am I supposed to use instead? I guess I just have to use complete sentences. But that's hard.
There are many issues that I feel this way about. One of the side effects of our social stratification is difficulty in having even basic conversations with one another.
I'm glad you're reconsidering your views as well. It's pretty clear that 'racist' starts with a scarlet 'R', meaning people use the label for social punishment: see Mel Gibson, Michael Richards, George Allen, etc. That sort of shaming, punishment, and ostracization makes no sense if we mean they also contribute to a very bad but mostly diffuse oppression.
The reason your first definition of racism is having problems being universal is because the word is used as a form of labeling for the purposes of punishment. It's not generally used as a sort of mutual confession leading toward renewed resolution.
It's a very useful word. "Bob has very discriminating tastes in wine."
Do you discriminate in your hiring practices? Hell yes we descriminate! The only reason we have a hiring/interview process is to discriminate between good and bad candidates.
But by and large it's come to mean only "bad" forms.
I think the overuse of the word "problematic" is a result of this dilemma. I think any popular synonym would have it's meaning appropriated by people who man different things when they use it. Being specific is all we've got, I guess.
Actually, what the essay proposes wouldn't result in ignoring it, it'd result in making it more obvious.
The idea of trying to understand and/or address the rational reasons behind a seemingly racist behavior is the process of stripping excuses that a person might have.
But it's only when you look beyond just assuming "oh, they're racist", that this sort of process can begin. And, as linked and explained in the article, there's no guarantee that you actually understand what motivates a person, especially if you haven't tried (or been forced to).
If you actually read the essay, Scott says that we should seek to find the underlying causes of unconscious racism, and treat those. Most racism without intent means that, presented with a better option, people would choose to discriminate less.
What he didn't mention in this essay is institutional racism, which in his terms must be racism by consequence, because institutions don't have beliefs or motives. At least not in this context. Institutional racism is something that needs addressing, but it's not the same racism by motive, nor should we expect the same solutions to work.
Institutions do have motives. Institutions want to keep being relevant. Institutions want to see the influence grow. Institutions want to continue existing.
I think that racism is one of those words that have multiple meanings we are intended to confuse. My favorite example of this is "AAA" in gaming. Does it mean:
a. a high quality game
b. a popular game
c. a game that cost a lot of money to produce and, especially, market
The correct answer is c, but game-industry marketroids believe, and want you to believe, that all three are coterminous with each other.
Now back to racism. Does it mean:
a. evil intent towards another race
b. belief in racial superiority/inferiority
c. a tendency to produce effects that disadvantage people of one race
The answer is a, but people want you to believe that all three categories are coterminous. Meaning if you hold b. beliefs or take actions that fit c., you are also in category a.
The reasons for this are complex and have to do with backlash. Once we decide that X is horrible, we overcompensate in taking great care not to do anything that could be construed as X because we are afraid of how we might be judged. After World War II, the allied world (except for the USA) decided that nationalism is bad because it leads to Hitler, so you have cosmopolitan Europeans and Canadians falling all over themselves trying not to exhibit any sort of national pride and in fact telling people they have no attachment to their accidentally assigned nationality. Except when a soccer match is on or something.
> After World War II, the allied world (except for the USA) decided that nationalism is bad because it leads to Hitler, so you have cosmopolitan Europeans and Canadians falling all over themselves trying not to exhibit any sort of national pride
It's good that you added the word "cosmopolitan" here, because large chunks of the population in most European countries don't try to hide their nationalism in any way.
> and in fact telling people they have no attachment to their accidentally assigned nationality
This phrasing is insidious because you're implicitly denying that this position could be hold earnestly. In fact, I'm German, and I will tell you exactly that. I'm grateful for being born into a situation of relative wealth, freedom and stability. But to me, a state is not much more than a provider of legal and physical infrastructure. How can you peek into my head to verify whether that is just a claim or the truth?
> How can you peek into my head to verify whether that is just a claim or the truth?
That's just the thing. I can't. But I think more Germans would openly express pride in being German if pride in being German weren't associated with goosestepping and gas chambers.
Whatever the case, the only thing I have is the extensional evidence -- their claims. So that's all I'll cop to.
It seems to me that the obvious answer here is to spread awareness of the fact that there is a difference between (1) being something and (2) doing something and (3) doing something that someone in the being something category would do.
(1) "You are a racist." vs (2) "You have done something that is racist." vs (3) "You have done the same thing that a racist would do."
Some percentage of the time, greater than 0.5 and less than 1, (2) equates to (3), since clearly doing a racist thing is the same as what a racist would do, but something that isn't racist might also be the thing that a racist would do.
Alice is not a racist AND has not done a racist thing BUT has done the same thing that a racist would do.
Dan might be a racist BUT has successfully avoided doing something racist.
Eric is not a racist BUT has done a racist thing.
And so on...
Different people consider different proportions of (1), (2), and (3) when deciding whether someone or something is good/bad within their personal value framework. I guess the essay is saying that it's a shame that often everything gets collapsed into (1), but that's not a special problem. Surely it's always harmful in some way to mis-categorize anything.
Some people I've known and grown up among would make a precisely parallel distinction between sinning and being a sinner. I'm not seeing how, except in a purely reflexive sense, this is any more useful - I never saw it help anything for one person to call another a sinner, either. Perhaps your experience differs from mine.
Scott's problem is that his forum for discussion is social media.
No one can speak meaningfully and reasonably about anything on social media, let alone the politics of racism.
The medium makes the message almost completely devoid of meaning.
Seriously, there is no problem with the operating definition of racism outside of social media.
Every idiot screaming about the alt-right (or their phantasmagorical counter-part, the social justice warrior) is just someone who spends too much time on Twitter.
Might as well be complaining about what policies the Orc players in WoW use to justify who they vote for.
The OP is a post (by Scott) on his own blog on his own domain. If that constitutes social media in your mind, then what parts of the web do you consider not social media? If the answer is, none of it, then why didn't your comment talk (or complain) about "the web" instead of about "social media"?
He is active on a variety of social media and uses discussions on Twitter as evidence in the article in question.
His views on contemporary American political discourse are mainly shaped by these interactions on social media.
Unfortunately, the rest of the media is also on social media, so you can't really find a journalist or blogger who is in touch with reality.
Just to clarify, Twitter is as close to reality as World of Warcraft. At least with an MMORPG the players realize it is a game. Funny enough, more people are dying from playing video games like WoW than from alt-right/SJW altercations.
Try reading other stuff on that blog. I recommend Meditations on Moloch, for starters.
For long time readers of Slate Star Codex, expecting to find brilliance there is like expecting grass to be green. Scott is a great thinker, and an amazing writer too.
He's far from perfect, but the sheer length of his writing makes the flaws in his thinking easy to see, which I suspect is by design. He's generally right, and makes it easy to see when he's wrong.
Interesting essay, but it seems to miss the Jupiter-sized problem at the core of this global turbulence:
Power is power.
Power doesn't care who has it or how they got it. Power creates winners and losers. Power kills people while the survivors divvy up the former possessions.
Power doesn't play by the rules. Power is the rule.
Liberalism only works if enough people and power agree to let it work. Authoritarians of today want to smash this liberalism precisely because a world without rules on power benefits their style of acquiring and using power.
Only power beats power. Power cares little for meaningless terms like good and evil, if it even cares at all.
Bob, Carol, Eric and Fiona are racists. Alice and Dan are not.
Alice is avoiding the self harm of discomfort and lonliness. A refusal to assimilate, sure, but as much as refusing to go square dancing and wear cowboy boots. Dan is being charitable and productive in his actions without inflicting actual injury or damages. Advocacy for those less fortunate requires operating within the constraints of a role, and he is targeting the path of least harm. Advocacy means choosing sides, although Dan gets a hall pass, since his actions are ethically defensible. These are minor transgressions in each case.
Bob, Carol and Eric are willfully causing harm for personal gain, and favoring paths of least resistance, without exploring (perhaps as a conceit of these framed parables) alternatives.
Fiona, meanwhile, is openly racist. It says so in the text, so no mystery there. Her racism serves as a form of ethical de-escalation of circumstances that Alice and Dan might unwittingly bring about (and the others actively strive for), as "normal" ambient social behavior.
While unsavory in sentiment, Fiona's actions might serve as a means to prevent open violence with a curious form of social lubrication, by bearing the burden of being socially despicable, while refereeing the outcomes of unpolicable realities, with her racist counterparts on the other side of the prison yard (if you will), in a somewhat organized manner.
If Mayor Bob gets personal gain from terminating bus routes (as you claim), then being racist isn't the problem. Strip away the racial descriptions in his situation and what you have left is still a rational decision.
Carol considers a country's values and beliefs, not those of a race. She does not consider who a person is; she considers what a person thinks and wants. You conflate nationality with race.
The problem is that the anti-racist strategy has slowly morphed over time to fight things that are less and less terrible. Theres a ton of pointless Culture War bullshit that really isn't important enough to have super high stakes in terms of being a Good Person. Whether or not you participate in a campus Day of Absence. Whether or not you like Marvel making a black Captain America. Whether or not a video game has enough racial diversity. The concerns are often just so completely petty that I just want to opt out of the whole system, commit myself to simply treating people fairly and being a good person, and get on with my life.