Same thing for "systemic racism." I told people it's totally a real problem, but for crying out loud, don't shoot yourself in the foot but calling it that. Only the most open-minded 1% or fewer will cop to their own imperfection/racism. And we can see how the results have been a failure concordant with our country (usa)'s widescale partisan breakdown.
Like a dog farting in an elevator, nobody wants it. Except perhaps the accusators who are willing, it seems, to create more heat than light with revelation accusation.
chriscrisby•9mo ago
You can easily prove systemic racism exists by confessing your own racist beliefs. If you don’t have any then systemic racism might not exist.
jfengel•9mo ago
Systemic racism isn't about consciously-held beliefs. That's just plain "racism".
Systemic racism is the kind of racism you participate in without realizing it. A really clear example: calling for the end of affirmative action in college applications, but not considering things like legacy admissions. Legacy admissions favor people who were not discriminated against in the past. So by being "not racist", it promotes racism.
You want admissions? Yeah, lots of things I do end up participating in systemic racism. My theater troupe is pasty white, and one reason for it is that we were already pasty white. It doesn't look like a welcoming place for people of color.
We tried to do something about that, and we didn't do a great job of it. We put other things ahead of solving that problem. That's systemic racism. Nobody held explicitly racist beliefs, but the effect was discriminatory.
jfengel•9mo ago
Naming is a red herring. You'll hear over and over "Oh, sure, it's a real problem, but we can't deal with it while you're calling it that".
The name isn't the issue. No matter what you call it, people are going to object. They're not really objecting to the name. They're objecting to the fact that it makes them feel bad, and they're singling out the first thing they see as the excuse to do nothing.
sigwinch•9mo ago
The abstraction of Marx’s ideas after his death does suffer from poor naming. If the author is American, then likely agrees how it’s seen at continent scale among Afrikaners from South Africa. At smaller scales, down to the personal, it falls apart and explains nothing. Smartphone dating apps, for instance.
chillingeffect•9mo ago
Like a dog farting in an elevator, nobody wants it. Except perhaps the accusators who are willing, it seems, to create more heat than light with revelation accusation.
chriscrisby•9mo ago
jfengel•9mo ago
Systemic racism is the kind of racism you participate in without realizing it. A really clear example: calling for the end of affirmative action in college applications, but not considering things like legacy admissions. Legacy admissions favor people who were not discriminated against in the past. So by being "not racist", it promotes racism.
You want admissions? Yeah, lots of things I do end up participating in systemic racism. My theater troupe is pasty white, and one reason for it is that we were already pasty white. It doesn't look like a welcoming place for people of color.
We tried to do something about that, and we didn't do a great job of it. We put other things ahead of solving that problem. That's systemic racism. Nobody held explicitly racist beliefs, but the effect was discriminatory.
jfengel•9mo ago
The name isn't the issue. No matter what you call it, people are going to object. They're not really objecting to the name. They're objecting to the fact that it makes them feel bad, and they're singling out the first thing they see as the excuse to do nothing.