Since when to police go up to people who aren’t committing crimes and say “Kudos! Attaboy! Keep up the pro-social behavior!”?
Referring to @milliefink’s initial comments (which so inexplicably incensed @Treefingers) as “language cheerleading” might be justified. But “language policing” doesn’t really seem to fit.
Edit: I hate the construction, “the problem isn’t *”. Well that’s true, but the world is kind of a complicated place. Just because two things aren’t identical doesn’t mean they can’t have effects on each other. (In fact, even though Minecraft is considerably less complicated than the real world, it is still sufficiently complicated for this principle to apply.)
In this case (racism), the problem is how people think and language is pretty obviously a factor in how people think. Thought is expressed in language which is heard, interpreted, and processed into more thought. It’s a feedback effect. If you take extra care with the language part then you can have some effect on the thought part.
If I had to take a guess at motive, I would guess that @milliefink complimented @iquitos46 for admitting the limitations of his/her perspective because @milliefink believes that if more people took into account such limitations in language then people would be more likely to take those limitations into account in thought. This seems to me a pretty reasonable perspective and perhaps more than a few miles away from “language policing”. It also seems to me to be part of “working on the problem”.
Incidentally, who are these “other people” who are working on this problem and what are they doing precisely? Or was that just some bullshit you made up to try to put someone in his/her place for singling out whitey as being particularly clueless when it comes to racial issues?
Except that I’d say “if more WHITE people took into account,” etc. After all, they do tend to occupy most seats of power and influence (even though not all of them do so). Same-same for “if more MEN took into account,” etc. etc.)
[quote=“wysinwyg, post:59, topic:40690”]And then black people stopped talking about racism, ushering in all the civil rights victories of the 1960’s.[/quote]I can appreciate the sentiment, but I’m not one of those people who thinks not talking about anything will solve all our problems. The civil rights stuff down in the States got as big as it did because the state itself was drawing a hard line between two groups of people. So it was entirely appropriate to address the injustices of that line by calling attention to the characteristics used to define it. Even though racism hardly ended, the nature of the activism rightly changed when those laws were improved.
In any situation where race might not be the key difference, or not the only relevant one, singling it out is a distortion. Among other things, it could result in other legitimate injustices, such as those relating to gender or income inequality, being inappropriately sidelined.
