If you're Jewish and you vote for Biden you hate your religion and hate Israel

[Dill]

(03-19-2024, 09:23 PM)CJD Wrote: In an academic sense, prejudice +power = racism makes prefect sense. I'm just saying you could make the exact same argument with "racism + power = oppression/ systemic racism". The changing of the words in the equation, one of such has colloquially been used for decades by that point to mean an interpersonal transgression related to race, serves no purpose unless you just want to say, "um, actually, black people can't be racist against white people." Which is a sentence that is only said when you want to piss off a white person that you just said something racist (or "prejudice ") against.

I think you make a good point here in the bolded, though I don't think the people working up these distinctions back in the '80s were thinking about how to gain leverage in one-on-one arguments with white people.  They wanted some way of distinguishing people who weren't acting on racist assumptions from people who were in ways that actually affected others' lives. Calling both "racist" just seemed to muddy the waters.

In the case of CRT, the desire was to move away from defining individuals as "racist." So a white employer who didn't like blacks, and said so standing around the water cooler, but was "color blind" when it came to hiring was a better fit for "prejudiced." Same for a homeowner who didn't like that a black family moved in next door, but didn't act on that knowledge. Waste of time denouncing individuals. Changes in law and policy were the goal. But that "structural" target also meant recognizing how unconscious racist assumptions could be built into the everyday normal of all people, black as well as white--or better said, developing already existing notions of that recognized by black writers going back to the 19th century.

In another arena, the public schools, school psychologists were interested addressing school/classroom discrimination. They could hardly do that if no one could define "racism" or measure discrimination. Not sure, but I believe they were the ones primarily responsible for the prejudice/racism/discrimination triad--"prejudice" meaning holding negative attitudes towards other groups which were not acted on, but could easily be with the right incentives.

I know from my own readings that social scientists have complained about shifting definitions from discipline to discipline and across time have made it hard to consistently measure discrimination.

(03-19-2024, 09:23 PM)CJD Wrote: And the right has, predictably, taken the academic definition and went on TV and said, "you hear that white people? Apparently, the left doesn't think saying hateful things to you I'd a bad thing. "

The left, in my opinion, does way too many things like this that give dishonest right wingers free ammunition to fuel the outrage machine that's sole purpose is to convince people to elect people that do not have their best interests at heart. 

I wonder what the alternative to silence is, then.

It is hard to see how anyone could identify and discuss structural racism without giving
right wingers free "whitelash" ammunition, especially if such discussion moves into the public school system.