I think if someone wants to take the entirely practical, “I’m hear to change minds” approach then the “Hulk smash” crowd have it right. The real point is to just make the fight as loud as possible to make sure the kids growing up hear about it and think about it and thereby come to their own conclusions (rather than not hearing about it, not thinking about it, and unconsciously integrating whatever the dominant message from their culture is). Racism is stupid, sexism is stupid. The louder we fight about it the larger the portion of the next generation will be on the right side of history.
If the goal is to care for all people as individuals rather than to take a Machiavellian approach, then maybe avoiding the word “racist” would be a good idea. That is a far cry from saying that a system where saying “racist” is banned would be a good space to have such a discussion.
That reduces discussion and problem solving of a real problem into yet another token conflict of ideologies. If the only way to teach is to be louder than anybody else, I think that is terribly cynical. Education works - and takes patience - because there are actual right answers, while ideologies are always just somebody’s agenda. That seems at difference to you saying that people will come to their own conclusions based upon reason.
Avoiding a word would be pointless. Saying that there are “good words” and “bad words” seems counter-productive to a goal of nuanced discussion. The point is that labels in themselves only define camps, rather than touch the inner workings of issues - or people. How many times and how loudly do you need to be called a “SJW” or “commie pinko” before you become convinced to come over to that side’s “reasoning”? It never works, because labelling people is not an actual argument. So I doubt very much that simply calling a person with racist thinking “racist” is ever likely to change their minds either. It is certainly not to spare their feelings! I am personally invested in the discourse to confront racism being effective.
I can see how you would think having loud angry contentless discussions and having people come to their own conclusions are at odds with one another. What I am suggesting, though, is relying on the fact that no one is going to listen to you or care what you say, and everyone will come to their own conclusions whether you like that or not, and whether you like their conclusions or not.
The people who have not already come to their own conclusions are people who are too young to do so. In the present, use the fact that the people who you are arguing with have already come to their own conclusions to make fights loud so that the next generation cannot ignore the subject even as they do ignore the content of the argument. They will think things through and have more enlightened opinions that you could have taught them.
You’ve been here trying to make actual arguments for a long time. How has that worked? If you surveyed the whole population and found everyone who had ever changed their values because they had been emotionally shamed into doing so by name calling or negative associations, and also found everyone who had ever changed their values because someone make a really cogent argument, I think the former group would be larger. But my main point is that neither group would be large. If you want society’s values to improve you have to wait for the kids to grow up.
I’m thinking now it was a wise move to be born and live in Canada…
And I got the number of Trump-spawn wrong - Ivanka’s real-estate husband was also seated at the table raising the number to 5 people who shouldn’t be there (we can leave Bannon, Pubis, and Theil for some other conversation).
A short point on this discussion: If I understand yours and popobawa4u’s sides correctly, your argument is “You have to be loud and generous with labels so that those growing up will later identify the sides in this and know that they saw each other as contentious” while popo’s is “If you actually want to change minds, name-calling won’t get you anywhere.”
I think you’re both right: Racists should be called racists. However, I am convinced that not everyone who voted for Trump is a racist, they just didn’t care enough about the racism. I still think that’s horrible but it doesn’t make them racist. I think many of them could be made to change their mind about what they did (and I mean honestly convinced not brainwashed) but throwing them in the pot with white supremacists will not achieve that.
I only recently finally finished reading the “The white flight of Derek Black” article that was linked here. He is a case in point: He, growing up a white supremacist, never really considered the other side and was reinforced by always automatically being labelled a horrible person. When he went to a fairly liberal college and his schoolmates found out who he was, the thing that actually got him round was an orthodox Jew inviting him to his Shabbat meals and, after a while, soberly discussing the points of their respective ideologies. (Well, that and studying history…)
I totally agree with popobawa4u in that nuance is so important in this. Yes, racists, sexists, abusers absolutely have to be called out, but it also has to be clear to all those in their sphere of influence which parts of their ideology are unacceptable and which are only debatable. Example: I think that different pay for equal work is unacceptable and everyone who defends it should be called out as sexist. However, although I think quotas for women in boards of directors etc. as is being proposed in some places are a good idea, I acknowledge that not everyone thinks this is a pertinent solution or even a just measure.
Anyway, maybe I only got your positions wrong. In that case, ignore all that.
Well, I think we can quibble over whether a particular word applies but that’s just alienating. I don’t think that most Trump voters were ballot-box racists, that is, I don’t think they were going to look for the most racist candidate despite economics, health care, etc. I also don’t think Trump’s racism helped him all that much at the polls because: 1) he didn’t actually have a great total votes number; and 2) ballot box racists presumably showed up to vote against Obama so it turns out you can’t win on racism (alone).
But yeah, the real question that we are looking at with horror is “did being so racist hurt Trump much/at all?” We feel like the answer ought to be that being racist should cripple you politically, and it turns out the answer is “It doesn’t seem to make much of a difference.”
If you want to change the minds of an old white person who doesn’t like Muslims your only real shot to do so is to have them make a really good Muslim friend - a friend who they care about personally more than they care about their political ideals - and then get the anti-Muslim person and the Muslim friend into a heart-to-heart on how these policies affect the friend personally. So if you are the alien from Spell My Name with an S then go to it. If you are a person on the internet, seems implausible.
Fundamentally, I think we can only say that actions are racist if they have racist effects. I would say a vote for Trump was a racist thing to do, whether that’s “helpful” in bringing Trump voters around or not.
I agree but that really wasn’t the case I was getting at - I think my Derek Black example wasn’t a good one… I am really thinking how to get many people to think about the consequences of voting for someone who represents these positions. As I see it, most agree now that the deciding factor was that for many people Hillary as president was even more horrible than Trump. Calling him racist over and over again apparently did not really change that.
(God, my sentence structure is horrible but I can’t phrase it any better. I’ll have to resort to the “not my mother tongue” defense…)
Well, the deciding factor was anything you’d like it to be. To win the election despite a dramatic deficit in popular support Trump needed everything to go his way. The election might have been decided by a stiff breeze.
