I think this is my concern too. I think lots of people do this, actually. Hell, Stephen Colbert regularly mocks the notion… “I don’t see color. People tell me I’m white, and I believe them because I’m rich…” that sort of thing.
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Yeah, I disagree. Some people do that. Others still tend to focus on particular religions. Dawkins, and I might be mistaken here, goes after both Catholicism and Islam harder than Anglicanism, which has been just as dangerous in the world as the other two faiths. He might have less bigotry based on religion, but he still tends to culturally differentiate, despite the role the Anglican church played in British imperialism.
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Well, post-religiosity creates a tendency, it doesn’t solve the problem. What I think I’m trying to get at is the idea that loading up our tendencies in a productive direction is about as good as we can expect. “Solving” the problem of bigotry isn’t going to happen any differently than “solving” the problem of human sacrifice or slavery were solved by some kind of clever program. Instead we loaded our tendencies in other directions and waited a few (not many) generations. In the meantime we have legal remedies.
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I thought for sure you’d have thrown in:
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These things are solved? News to me.
I haven’t gotten around to reading it, but I’ve read an article based on that work. She’s amazing…
Did you see the quotes around ‘solved’? Or my discussion of tendency being more valuable than a (final) solution? It wasn’t a long comment, it shouldn’t have been so easy to misconstrue. It was an old comment though, I don’t know through what context you came upon it. Expand?
Sounds like a dysfunctional start. There doesn’t really seem to be anything meaningful to note about one’s cognition based upon sight. But I don’t doubt that some make guesses which they decide are meaningful. Rather than knowing who a person is, all they know is what they think of them, which is hardly the same thing.
It is definitely more productive, because structure which is based upon delusion has no future to it. There has never been any such thing as whiteness, and you help societies by modifying their structures.
You can say whatever you like. If your ancestors were Irish, It might be more accurate to say you are Celt.
Rather easily, IMO. I think of skin tone as a continuum, a spectrum of shades.
First, by not giving so much weight to what others say about you - particularly strangers. Second, through the feedback loop of defining culture and society deliberately through your inter-person relationships.
Race is class, literally. All of those groups are. A class is merely an empty category which you fill with what you find meaningful. The delusion is supposing that there is a consensus which would enable people to share a notion of “class” and mean the same thing, especially when most people are not very aware of what they are classifying, nor how they are doing it. Indulge its true subjectivity by devising your own classes, according to what you deem relevant.
Do it anyway! The cultures of some might not allow it, but maybe yours does. We can embrace real multiculturalism by breaking the monopoly and acknowledging parallel cultures with their own distinct traditions, goals, values, etc.
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My point is that it still has weight, even if I choose to reject what they think of me.
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Actually, I thought this was a new discussion. It rose to the top of the BBS somehow, despite there not being fresh discussion- hence some initial confusion on my part on what you meant by this.
I don’t think I misconstrued your comment, but I do think that when we talk about something like slavery, for instance, we’re just pushing the dynamic off on other groups rather than changing the way we think about the dynamic. What’s changed is how we see certain groups like Black people, Indians, and other POCs traditionally placed in involuntary servitude even if they are now considered White. Now our slavery is limited to less visible communities, like prisoners and foreign sweatshops. As the minimum wage fails to keep track with inflation, and as government services for the disadvantaged are increasingly being tied to some kind of employment, there is an argument to be made that we are merely reconstructing another kind of slave society–or at least a society with slaves. Slavery is often defined by the example set by the Romans and the American South, but historically, it has been a continuum. It’s nature has ranged from the forced labor of Roman prisoners who mined cinnabar under horrendous conditions to what various African and Middle Eastern communities termed slaves, but appear to be little more than a lower social caste.
So the essence of my issue with your idea here is not that I think you don’t understand that we haven’t solved slavery, but that our “tendency” has only been to change who we think of as outgroups and ingroups. This is what we are doing now with homosexuals. It’s not that society at large is coming to a realization that the systemic nature of oppression was wrong, only that homosexuals are people too. Most people do not take a broad, detached view that contextualizes the complex history and then make a shift in their moral judgment. The incremental change is as often about individuals going along to get along with the morality of their era, and has little to do with a sort of social arc that bends in a particular direction.
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It might, presumably. But to whom?
To everyone, because we don’t walk around in bubbles that protect us - like it or not, interactions with others can impact us. Depending on how people perceive you, it can cost you a job, or a promotion, or your safety, or your life. If someone doesn’t perceive me as an equal human being, depending on WHO that other individual is can cost me big. I might be able to change their mind by interacting with them, but not necessarily. Just rejecting what someone else thinks of me isn’t always enough.
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Sure. These are still, in effect, arbitrary classes of person. Set apart by the demonstrably false notion that a different country or a criminal act demonstrate one to be a fundamentally different kind of person then the exploiter.
Agreed, which is why I try to aim for equitable treatment first, and the particulars of any given class or category as secondary concerns. This is what happens when you build a culture based upon the idea of “power over people” rather than “power of people”.
It is certainly beneficial to know about the histories involved. But what I think makes more of a difference is people cultivating a broad, detached view that contextualizes the present.
Why detached? Why not feel passionate about this stuff, because it has a real impact on real human beings?
While I think that being emotionally detached does not necessarily mean objective, @popobawa4u was quoting me. I tend to think of detached in the sense of being aware of your cultural context in a relativistic, rather than normative way.
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Because society is based upon making decisions, and being able to think in the long-term. Some people can be honestly passionate through introspection and analysis, and communicate with others why they feel strongly about what they do. But my experience has been, unfortunately, that for most this is a sum of mood, compulsion, and peer pressure. Better to decide that something should be done for a reason and then allow yourself to be passionate about it.
It certainly needn’t. Many of the more sociopathic elements fancy themselves rational because they lack empathy, but instead resort to enacting instinctive selfish preservation protocols without any analysis.
This is what I interpreted.
I think that this topic really does begin to hit the nail on the head.
As far as I can see, our target, the place we are aiming at, is a world where “race” as a construct is so unimportant that people treat it like they treat blood type, or birth date. A natural part of human variation, that has pretty much no impact on one’s day to day life.
And if that is our target, we should be surveying our actions and asking ourselves if they bring us closer towards, or further away from this goal. I think a lot of what even well-meaning people try to do on the subject of “race” tends to reinforce divisions and embed the nonsense constructs further, rather than to uproot them and let them wither.
Of course, there are always people whose target end state is not the egalitarian ideal I have illustrated above. Then we have a Problem.
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I guess my main response is that trafficking, now, happens mainly out of the light. Private companies are pushing their advantage on every aspect of information asymmetry. Maybe the next step is to say that private businesses no longer can have any right to privacy, given the extent to which these organizations abuse it.
I agree and to get to that point, we absolutely need to understand how race as a construct has worked in the past and still works in the present - not in some abstract way, but in the real world.
But often (though I don’t think anyone here is doing that right now), when people do that work, they get told “they are playing the race card”, and that the past, or the biases created by this social construct and examinations of that, is only reinforcing the problem - if we keep talking about slavery and jim crow, they reason, we’ll never get over it. Talking about biases will only reinforce the racism, but of course, they argue this happens in the opposite way.
But we can’t just wave away the past and pretend it doesn’t exist or that it didn’t create the world we all live in now. If “now is the only thing that’s real” (to quote a sample from a skinny puppy song), well, now is made up of what came before. We have to understand it, and face it head on. Unfortunately, not enough people actually want to do that.
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The problem with this, as I understand it, is that these biases are all that racism is. There is really no functional or valued system to it beyond these. It is quite simply the practice of saying that it’s acceptable for one’s group to exploit people who are “other”, and that who these are, and the excuses used, are basically interchangeable. In this way they are all classisms where the stereotypes behind racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, etc. work in essentially the same ways. The stereotypes themselves tend to be obvious fabrications. And the mechanisms of oppression tend to work the same for whoever they are applied to. This is why I think the only practical or effective approach is to devise systems of structural equability. The made-up rationalizations about why group X supposedly deserve to be exploited are insubstantial, and don’t say anything about the process. It arguably didn’t work, because it has tended to be based upon delusion.
Sure, but the causes are trivially easy to understand, there’s just not very much to it. This involves the psychology behind bias and exploitation more than the history. The history is crucial for providing examples, but not for elucidating the process or possible options. I think that on a large scale, most of human societies do live in the past without being aware of it. The best reason for knowing the past is to learn from mistakes to make decisions which work in the present and the futures.
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