Sure, I understand that part of what he’s saying. What I’m saying is that there is no such thing as “reverse racism”, any more than there is such a thing as “reverse hatred” or “reverse stupidity”. “Reverse racism” is just not a logical phrase to begin with.
I'd be interested to hear your ideas of racial stereotypes which are not harmful in some way.
I’d be interested in hearing those too, if that’s what I said. : ) But I didn’t say or mean that stereotypes don’t harm at all - I mean that there is a difference between stereotyping and overt racism.
It is literally neurologically impossible for humans to think without generalizing in some way. Stereotypes are generalizations that are applied to people. This is problematic and important to recognize - but is, again, unavoidable in any society large enough where everyone doesn’t personally know everyone else. Racism, on the other hand, is a specific and very nasty form of stereotype which directly harms people by casting them, in some essential way, as less human and less worthy of kindness than others.
Yes. That doesn’t invalidate the fact that talking about racism means talking about more than an individual’s opinions. Just because architecture or economics or law is made up of individuals doesn’t mean that we only talk about what individuals are thinking and feeling when we talk about those topics.
The context is what gives those people their beliefs in the first place. The context cannot be ignored or put aside or written out. The context is vital for the conversation. Racism is not just a person’s opinion, it is also the contexts for those opinions.
In the absence of people with beliefs, the trans-atlantic slave trade wouldn’t have existed. In the absence those beliefs being racism, it also wouldn’t have existed. Racist beliefs create racist structures and racist behaviors, and you can’t talk about one without talking about the others.
The slave trade (as carried out in recent centuries by Western civilization) was based on the premise that people of certain races were lesser beings who could be bought and sold as property. The premise was racist. The laws which allowed it to exist was racist. The perpetrators were racist. The ongoing effects were racist. Everything about it was capital-R racist.
Saying “it’s not a racist institution if you take the racists who perpetrated it out of the equation” is a bizarre and meaningless statement. That’s like saying “pornography isn’t inherently sexual if you edit all the sexualized content out of it” or “arithmetic isn’t inherently mathematical if you take all the numbers away.”
That’s a nice word, preconceptions: An opinion or conception formed in advance of adequate knowledge or experience. But it’s also the problem.
I think we need to take personal responsibility for not only our actions but our thoughts as well. It doesn’t matter if the concepts we hold - but didn’t actually make ourselves - came from your family; experience; or pop-culture.
But, isn’t that what we actually want to curb? Abuse?
I mean, I don’t care if you think you’re better than me, I don’t care if you think only brown people have souls, its actually worthwhile to raise the point that ethically, nobody wants to impose a single mode of thought on individuals, and neither you or I are advocating for a sort of thought police that can punish racist thoughts. In this sense, being racist does not equal being wrong and is a dead end discussion.
In real world meat-space, we want to curb actions that discriminate people based on their skin color. Therefore I would argue that this is the only fight worth having, this is why to equate a white man’s racist comment as being as racist as a black man’s racist comment is spurious. It avoids the question of effect altogether, it protects white privilege by treating whites and blacks equally in a world that is not equal.
Just think about it, if black people stop saying what you perceive to be racist comments, would racism stop?
I think not. So, is it functionally racism then?
Yes, Aamer may be discriminating on skin color but I bet that the only people offended are those that believe that whites and blacks are on a level playing field, the same people that while they may not have racist thoughts are perpetuating discrimination by not being aware that there are things that need to change.
They have had their righteousness offended, not their skin color.
Its a sad kind of charge, not racism, but ignorance.
And how did that context get created in the first place?
The context is other people who already have those beliefs, or some observed basis for the belief. It’s not something magical that exists by itself and hands out beliefs to people at random. It all comes back to interactions between people.
And the post you’re replying to agrees with you, though primarily because without racists the institution doesn’t exist at all. My point has been that racism is needed for the institution, you don’t need the institution for racism.
I keep saying that it’s more than just people’s thoughts. It is ALSO people’s thoughts. I’m not removing that from the equation. I’m pushing against the idea that you can say that racism is only about what people believe, limited to that, and thus not about economics or history or politics or, well, context. It’s about people’s thoughts, and it’s about the context in which they’re having those thoughts.
Which is how racism manages to get bigger than a person’s thoughts. Even if he’s a guy who bears no prejudice to anyone based on the color of their skin, Cleetus still exists in a context in which certain people are punished for their skin color, and thus he can’t claim “Racism!” when someone tells a joke about white people not being able to dance. Race shouldn’t matter. To Cleetus personally, maybe it doesn’t. To the world Cleetus lives in, it does. No one gets the luxury of ignoring that context.
You need the institution for racism, because racism is insitutional.
You don’t need the institution for people to be bigots, but being a bigot is only part of racism.
You don’t need slavery for racism, but that’s not the same as saying the institution and legacy of slavery doesn’t play a major factor in modern-day racism.
War requires people who are willing to commit acts of violence to exist. War can also drive people to commit acts of violence. It’s not always a clear case of cause-and-effect.
He’s been around for years, I’m sure youtube has bunches of clips. IMO, the rest of the clips I’ve seen over the years have been better. There’s one where he talks about some Aussie TV show about immigration / border patrol that’s really quite good.
Edit - I mean the standup he does about the show is good. The show itself does indeed sound grim.
I get the feeling that the term “Reverse racism” is a pc way for white people to get offended, they obviously couldn’t claim that black people were being racist towards them and have it taken seriously, but they could use a term that seems to suggest that racism was being redirected into more racism without looking like jerks for saying so.
[quote=“Daedalus, post:116, topic:15578”]
I’m pushing against the idea that you can say that racism is only about what people believe, limited to that, and thus not about economics or history or politics or, well, context. It’s about people’s thoughts, and it’s about the context in which they’re having those thoughts.[/quote]
And I’m saying that the context is still more people. It’s the beliefs and actions of groups of people. You can’t change a social structure without first changing enough people within it.
So, there’s other racists in Cleetus’s society who act out their racism, sure…
You seem to be working from a bias that this is only about racism towards white people, or is only about small things (“can’t dance”). What if the joke were one minority talking about another, about their criminal tendencies or work ethics? Would that not be racism because there’s no history of oppression involved?
I believe in the equality of any single human being of any race, having the sacred right to be racist against any single human being of any other race (or the same race, if that is what floats that person’s boat).
All humans are created equal in their ablility to find fault with any other person, if they choose to do so.
Reverse racism is getting mad at another driver on the road, throwing your car into reverse, and shouting racial slurs at them while backing over the hood of their car.
I don’t disagree about personal responsibility… I just think when understand this stuff we need to understand why and how they evolve and become embedded in our lives. These things are not always as simple as it being all down to the individual. No one lives in a total vacuum, and holding particular views can have consequences. In regards to the not-so-distant past, during Jim Crow in the south and the north, for example, being black was dangerous. Being a black woman meant you were constantly subject to a double round of discrimination, with black women being routinely raped and every so very rarely seeing justice for that. Even holding anti-racist views if you were white was not just nice and progressive, it could be hazardous to your health. Being seen amongst and to be seen supporting the African American communities could get you killed. Not too long ago, you could say the same about being gay, lesbian or bi-sexual, or supporting them – it could lose you your job, get you arrested or worse. Even today, we don’t live in a vacuum where we have a unlimited set of choices or set of ideas to choose from. More people have more choice in how they live and how they present themselves, but to think that we’re all free to make choices from an unlimited set of choices, I think, is just not accurate.
Actually, that gets things a bit backwards. Structures create thoughts. The reason we have the thoughts and opinions we do is because of the environment in which we’ve grown up. Structural change is required for a change of beliefs (see: Gutenberg and the Enlightenment).
The important thing is that Cleetus is still part of that racist society, even if he doesn’t really want to be. He might not be a bigot himself, but that doesn’t mean he can pretend that this means he’s not benefiting from the institutional bigotry of the life he lives, and that this affects what is moral for people to do in that situation.
I’m using that example since it was the one used in the joke. In the real world, there’s not a very good example of one minority joking about another without a history of oppression involved because colonialism and globalization have spread European cultural ideas (and their racism, both implicit and explicit) to most corners of the globe. Because that context isn’t something you can remove, an Asian-american comedian calling African-americans lazy in a joke is in a context where the white people are already telling them that. The same is true when an African-american comedian makes an “Asian people are good at math” joke. Hell, the fact that they’re both hyphenated-Americans already embedds them in that nation’s context and the associated racism therein.
I’m sure somewhere in the untouched Hypothetical Jungle Island (or whatever) there exists someone who tells jokes about a neighboring island’s people having weird-looking feet or being bad bow-makers or having goofy lips or something. That just might dodge the over-arching institution of racism and land smack in the realm of basic human bigotry, because they don’t exist in the same context.
But, of course, that doesn’t have a lot of relevance for us in deciding what we should do with our lives and the contexts we find ourselves in. It doesn’t speak to the world you and I live in, where human bigotry has metastasized into something that exists in the very words we speak with. In the world we live in, there is racism in the bones of the thing, regardless of what you or me or Cleetus personally feel about people who look different from us.
Structures (social ones, anyways) don’t exist on their own, and people aren’t enslaved by the structures they’re in. People create structures, and structures don’t change unless enough people change them.
Oookaay. I may be completely misreading you, but it sounds like you’re saying that, no matter what race is being racist towards another, it’s all the white people’s fault, and it’s not racism unless white people are doing it. If that’s really what you think… well, have fun with that.
I have seen that show. It is full of institutional racism (just to add fuel to the already well-burning fire ). Even by the standards of 'cops-on-the-job style reality shows, it’s canny grim, like.
Ouch. Ok, but I hope you know what I meant. “Enslaved” wasn’t quite the word I was looking for, but was the only one that came to mind.
And at the risk of seeming flip: slavery doesn’t enslave people, people enslave people. Slavery (as a social structure) is what happens when groups of people believe it’s ok to enslave people, it doesn’t exist by itself and force people to believe that it’s ok to enslave people.
). Even by the standards of 'cops-on-the-job style reality shows, it’s canny grim, like.