"Racism"

[Dill]

(03-14-2018, 07:00 PM)hollodero Wrote: I certainly believe the term is thrown around way too lightly, and way too often. 
As in "That's racist because [optinal: lenghthy argumentation full of rhetorical exaggerations and applying oversimplified "anti-racism" ethical guidelines]", my argumentation claims moral highground".

In addition to systemic, less personalized forms of racism, I feel there's also a lot of "real" racism around, often painted as "just honesty" and such, and it's getting increasingly loud and aggressive and attracts more and more people to lower their bar and let their own impulses free. In my country, that is, but I' suppose we aren't that different in that regard.

But in all that screaming, it sometimes gets hard to distinguish. Just sometimes... I feel being more or less rightfully annoyed with the over-sensitive rhetorics of the "left" plays its part in the so-called rise of the right, which is some kind of antidote to that. Exaggeration seldomly helps the cause.

Just a couple of points:

There is quite a long history of quality scholarship on race which is neither "just honesty" nor "screaming."  Sometimes it comes into social media at odd and unsupported angles, where it takes on a new life, glossed onto already existing unscholarly definitions and quickly shaped to uncritical, partisan purposes.

The latter happens in part because legal definitions of racism have real, institutional consequences for people's life opportunities, and in part because "the left" (as social liberals are called in social media nowadays) has momentarily won the long social/cultural struggle to define racism as an unqualified evil. I say momentarily because the Trump election signals concerted pushback against that definitional control of the terrain of social debates.

I think that is what you are marking when you refer to "lowering the bar."  Think of Bannon's embrace of the term "racist" during his recent speech in France, part of the struggle to win back the moral high ground from "the left," or at least the power to speak more negatively about racially defined groups without social/political consequences.