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

[CJD]

(03-20-2024, 09:19 AM)Dill Wrote: 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.


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.

If it were only used in an academic sense, I would agree with you 100%. The problem is the misuse by people who don't care about that and only use it to offend.

I had a black friend from high school who announced on Facebook that he was planning on unfriending all of his white friends because he can no longer trust that white people are good people following the 2016 election.

His white friends commented that this was racist and that he shouldn't paint with a broad brush.

His response was, "black people can't be racist."

That's a flagrant misuse of that statement, but it doesn't matter. I've seen similar comments in social media posts throughout the years and the response is predictable.

Interestingly enough, I "made the cut" to not be unfriended because I have a black wife. Not really relevant to the story, but I thought it was interesting.

My sister in law (my wife's sister) has a best friend who thinks interracial relationships between white and black people are absurd because white people are bad people. When I ask her how she can be friends with someone who would so blatantly disrespect her sister's (my wife's) marriage, she says, "oh well, she's not racist. Black people can't be racist. She just doesn't like white people."

I understand why some black people don't like white people. I think it's natural (if not unfortunate) to be distrusting of a race of people who, for generations, oppressed you and people that look like you.

What I don't like is when people who do not feel that way defend that thinking with a sentence that has no meaning other than to comfort them that they aren't friends with a racist person.

In our society, a "Racist person" is a smear that is reserved for only the worst people. It evokes images of klansmen and nazis. Pure filth who are irredeemable. 

If a white person were friends with a klansman, but said "ah, they have this one bad quality, but other than that, they are a good person" we'd toss that person aside as a racist person as well for endorsing this racist's viewpoint by ignoring it.

But a prejudice person? That's just a person who has thoughts that differ from the mainstream due to their own personal experiences.

It's used as a cover for the same behavior that would be called racist if a white person did it. 

It's intentionally divisive and, whether it has academic standing or not, does alienate a lot of people. I think it's harmful.

Admittedly, this is a personal issue for me.

And yes, I acknowledge that no matter what you do, a rational thought can be misused by ignorant people, but this particular one is so obvious in its potential for misuse that it would have been better if it never existed in the first place.