preach!!!
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Wow. So many (white?) folks on this thread exhibiting so much ignorance about what racism is, and how it works. Racism is the belief in the superiority of one race over another. Look it up. There’s no symmetry to it. If the dominant race look down their noses at a minority, that’s racism. If members of the minority call them out with phrases like “typical dominant-race person”, that is not racism, because it’s not part of any assertion of superiority.
Come on folks, get woke.
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Some people become the change they seek while others become the thing they seek to change. You seem to be using racial majority privilege as an excuse for prejudice and bigotry. That white privilege exists is not an excuse to judge people based on the color of their skin.
No one here has denied the systemic racism of our society. What people are objecting to is the overt prejudice you support.
I think the concerns are about prejudice more than racism.
So you provide a list of things which one person noticed about their life, and now state that they apply to “typical white people”, based on what evidence, exactly?
Wait, you come back with those goal posts! Put them back where they were before!
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Please explain how pointing out prejudice is goal post moving
You don’t think that saying “typically white people do horrible shit” comes with an implication of “and we don’t”, and thus a further implication of “therefore we’re morally superior”?
White privilege and common white tendencies have long been a topic of academic study. Plenty of research demonstrates the truth of most of those statements about white typicality. I trust you can find some of it; I’m not your Google servant.
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FTFY. Not doing horrible racist shit isn’t about superiority. It’s just basic courtesy.
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Yes, systemic racism is real in this nation. But don’t confuse something being a topic of study as validation of it’s objective truth. For a much greater span of time the topic of black inferiority and tendency was a greatly studied and researched topic. That does not mean the conclusions drawn from such interest are in any way an objective truth even though the intelligentsia of the era insisted that it was so.
But let’s not move the goalpost. When people point out that prejudice (racial or not) is not something that should be supported, steering the discussion towards the social injustices resulting from systemic racism is simply a ploy to diversion. It does not address the topic being discussed and is not productive to the conversation being had ie… viewing races with prejudice is a morally deficient and ethically bankrupt act no matter what color your or someone else’s skin happens to be.
You can continue to steer the discussion towards one of systemic social injustice in an effort to justify racial prejudice as being a valid point of view if you would like but for me, personally, I can’t stomach the racial prejudice and bigotry you’re selling.
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Edit: This post stands as a memorial to my poor circular reasoning, elegantly skewered by a later post which went missing in the moderation.
Plenty of research demonstrates the tendency of black people to have less academic qualifications and more criminal records too, but I don’t go around saying “the typical black person is prone to criminality and poor education” because it would be really fucking racist.
Oh jeez, not this shit again.
Anyone can be an asshole, it should go without saying.
Anyone can be a bigot or have prejudice, but racism requires power, both political and monetary.
POC generally don’t have much of either.
Racism, above all, is the power to define someone else’s reality, and being able to force them to accept that definition as fact.
*Waits.
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These anti-abuse algorithms are broken by design. Twitter and its shareholders (blessed be Their names) have no interest in reducing a significant portion of their user base, which would happen if they spent money (i.e. incurred new costs) by implementing a proper algorithm and hiring and training human moderators.
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The way these algorithms enforce these things reminds me of teachers that would have the bully and the victim both go to detention. Except sometimes not the bully even.
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Yet prejudice and bigotry do not. Genie Lauren exhibited racial prejudice and was rightly vilified for that just as anyone who exhibits racial prejudice should be.
Never argue definition. Dictionaries are not and never have been intended as an arbiter of language. Accept the opposition definition and explain why an action was wrong rather than insisting it was an example of the word being contested.
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Racism, Oxford English Dictionary:
- Prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against someone of a different race based on the belief that one’s own race is superior.
1.1. The belief that all members of each race possess characteristics, abilities, or qualities specific to that race, especially so as to distinguish it as inferior or superior to another race or races.
Yes, there’s that “especially so” caveat in 1.1, but that doesn’t mean “exclusively”.
Racism, Cambridge Dictionary:
- the belief that people’s qualities are influenced by their race and that the members of other races are not as good as the members of your own, or the resulting unfair treatment of members of other races
I guess this supports your definition if you assume that you can claim it’s not racism as long as you only think people’s qualities are influenced by their race and treat them unfairly without believing that they aren’t as good as your race.
Racism, Collins Dictionary:
- belief in or doctrine asserting racial differences in character, intelligence, etc. and the superiority of one race over another or others: racist doctrine also, typically, seeks to maintain the supposed purity of a race or the races
- any program or practice of racial discrimination, segregation, etc., specif., such a program or practice that upholds the political or economic domination of one race over another or others
- feelings or actions of hatred and bigotry toward a person or persons because of their race
See definition 3, standing alone.
Edit: And I’ll note that the discussion has now been carefully shifted away from whether or not the remark which occasioned it was a nasty bigotted thing to say, onto the different topic of whether or not it’s technically racism, which is a very familiar rhetorical trick… from the Far Right.
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Thanks. I think what people are missing here is that institutional racism (including in companies like Twitter) enables often unconscious crappy behaviour on the part of my fellow white people. Privilege-blindness in and of itself leads to a whole host of nasty outcomes (possibly including the design of the Twitter algorithm in question). That’s before we get to the policies that directly support active racists.
Openly question and take away the institutional racism (which is self-perpetuating in that it encourages its beneficiaries – knowing and unknowing – not to change it) and it becomes more difficult for white people to actively or passively engage in crappy behaviour.
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Then I’ll repeat her statement here: repeating racist dog whistles is typical of white women.
That’s not a controversial statement, even if it isn’t accurate. The context-free counterexample you are providing isn’t racist unless it promotes a an explicit stereotype, such as “black women are typically promiscuous at a young age” which is something society has laid on black adolescents for generations. To even be prejudiced, it would need to not be said explicitly to and about someone and be spoken to a general audience about all white women. As is, it’s the same as saying “you’re just like all the others” which is as benign an insult gets.
Now the second example is obvious snark, but it is in fact telling someone to kill themselves - not a threat by any measure, but it’s still grounds to be described as harassment. However, it’s still not a very strong insult.
And that’s more the point - this algorithm doesn’t understand speech and is made with such oblivious coding that it easily lets actual slurs that are extremely offensive regardless of context through while focusing on poorly trying to discover the context of conversations. It’s filtering minor offenses by any measure while letting flagrant things sit around for a long time when an algorithm should be able to remove it within seconds of review.
It’s not really surprising it gets accused of bias, since it obviously is extremely biased. I doubt it’s sophisticated enough to target black twitter accounts, but someone did program it to hold weak statements about race in a greater magnitude than actual slurs against gay people. That’s definitely worth bringing attention to.
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You:
“I don’t do racist shit so that I can feel superior to those who do”
Normal human person:
“I don’t do racism because it’s wrong”
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