What is "racism"?

Ever wonder what separates you from a non-human animal, say a squirrel? I know you haven’t, but I’ll tell you anyway: a squirrel is only capable of making group-level distinctions. A squirrel cannot see an individual acorn, or tree, or even another squirrel; all it can see are “something to eat”, “something to climb up” and “something to fuck or fight/play with”.

Non-human life forms cannot see a single individual thing, they only perceive by group designations instinctually fixed and only marginally modifiable by learned experience. What do you think “racism” is? A throwback to in group vs out group labels based on salient superficial characteristics that are easily demarcatable.

In other words, the racist is operating on a cognitive platform of a pre-human level, like some dumb beast out in the wild with an active algorithm of “dur this is good eat” or “dur dumb this is bad run”, only that idiotic level “thinking” is sublimated in humans in language and (the mere form of) emotion, so that people like you walk around with basically a squirrel-level brain but as if a squirrel could thrust its stupid non-thinking inner experience through a translator and push out something that looks like human speech.

Like the dog who can’t tell his master from other people who are visiting…
Or the pair of birds who are nesting in large groups of nesting birds of the same kind who magically find their own nest, with their own progeny among hundred of the same kinds of birds.
Animals can and do differentiate on an individual level, they do it based on their perception and interpretation of it.

So those racists can’t see the individual.
But those humanists, who have chosen to see even a larger group as the distinctive one, those see the individuals too…
Or how about everything values itself.

You are just no good at cooking up those narratives.
It’s because you suck at perceiving and interpreting reality.
All you have is a feeling and some picked up ideas about equality, individuality and valuing.

But maybe you are smart enough to know that you have no chance in an argument and so you try to frustrate me with this farce.
Who knows…

Esoteric secret teaching incoming → You can recognise strawberries as a distinct category AND differentiate between individual strawberries, like a spoiled one or a green one, at the same time.
But remember, if you do it with people, it’s bad. There you must be blind to ensure glorious future of shitlibs playing Khaleesi and reigning over brown hordes.

Racism is merely a cultural and racial mental platitude concerning identity where the word itself is nothing more than a negative connotation tied to established propaganda.

You have a group of utopian one worlders that are all accepting and encompassing towards everybody that wants to destroy traditional cultural mindsets not realizing the negative influence as a whole on diversification overtime left unbalanced. On the other opposing side you have cultural and racial traditionalists where culture or race are seen as real existential aspects to their everyday living.

This whole dichotomy of course is a consequence of globalism where globalists that form the current established power around the world want to see the more traditional and cultural isolationists annihilated completely hence why there is this prevailing theme of egalitarianism versus racism. Unfortunately very few can see through this interesting completely deceptive propaganda dynamic at work here.

What’s interesting is that both traditionalists and egalitarians see both of their opposing moral ideologies as being objective even in conflict with one another. Traditionalists see their racial and cultural outlook in terms of identity as being objective where anything contrary to it is deemed an immoral dilution or aberration.

Egalitarians view their all encompassing acceptance of everybody and permissive tolerance towards all as being objective where anything that implies exclusion is deemed immoral.

There is a level of problems for both ideologies going into the future that nobody seems to like talking about which I’ll briefly mention here. For the egalitarians where multiculturalism and multiracialism is paramount to reality preaching diversity is strength we see examples where previous cultural or racial majorities are fast on track becoming minorities on the plateau of extinction level events. If extinction level events transpire where whole entire cultural or racial identities become eradicated egalitarians are going to have a hard time explaining how an ideology of tolerance and diversity lead to it. With their aspirations inevitable cultural, racial, ethnic, and religious conflict is guaranteed where it is puzzling how an ideology that aspires to creating a conflict free environment creates environments rife with it.

For traditionalists the problem with their ideology in a globalist world is that in order to rejuvenate the kind of traditional society they aspire towards whole scale genocide, violence, or ethnic slaughter is needed to enact it as their preferred reality disappears altogether. The last seven to eight decades has been acting vastly against them. Violent forms of enacted segregation would be the only countermeasure.

Feminism and low birth rates in terms of fertility certainly isn’t helping either where unaddressed would make any aspirations on their part virtually impossible. I find it interesting that traditionalists never approach that subject in any grave seriousness concerning dialogue.

As for me I am a neutral observer as a nihilist where I could care less either way.

Hi Wyld, great topic. A couple thoughts on what you are calling ‘benign’ racism:

First, while I think I understand why you’re calling it ‘benign’, I don’t think that’s a very accurate label. If I understand you correctly, that kind of racism is benign in the moral sense, a ‘you aren’t going to hell because you haven’t heard the gospel’ racism. But its effects are just as harmful, and often more harmful because it’s often very difficult to prove and to remedy. Even in the US, most people’s social circles are fairly segregated, so benign racism is likely to be widespread, and have subtle effects at lots of levels.

Second, and speaking of subtle effects, I wonder how you would classify unconscious or ingrained racism, such as that revealed by Implicit Association Tests (IAT). Such tests reveal subtle differences in how people respond to different races. This does seem to fit your definition of “using race as a basis for primary judgments” (what I’ve seen described generally as “essentializing”), but isn’t based on lack of contact.

Omar, I don’t think I understand the racism/racialism distinction. Are you using a definition of racism similar to that offered by one of the characters in Dear White People: “Racism describes a system of disadvantage based on race”? In that context, the character argues that, “Black people can’t be racist since we don’t stand to benefit from such a system.” Is that what you mean by the “hierarchy valuation” of racism?

There seems to be a distinction worth making between racism as a systemic attribute (the Jim Crow south), racism as an individual attribute (a KKK member), and racism as an attribute of a specific act (crossing the street to avoid someone of a disfavored race). I’m not sure which, if any of these, is racialism and which racism; or perhaps I have just totally missed your point

A few clarification questions for the room:

• Is it only racism when it’s wrong (factually or morally), e.g. is it racist to say that British Islanders are more likely to get a sunburn that sub-Saharan Africans? Or, perhaps a better example, if all we know about someone is their race, it could affect (however slightly) our Bayesian inferences of probability, e.g. suppose that an Arab person is strictly more likely to be an Islamic terrorist than is a Japanese person – without saying what actions we should take based on that inference, and assuming the Bayesian inference is correct, is the mere inference racist?

• Is it only racism only when it’s conscious or intentional, so e.g. is someone a racist if they pause before associating a black face with wealth, intelligence, etc. but who would, given more time, reject that prejudice upon reflection?

• Is racism a moral or only a factual failing? The “benign racism” distinction seems to be a distinction between immoral and amoral racism. Is that an appropriate distinction? If we know we’re biased based on an IAT, what are the moral implications? It seems fair to say that it is not immoral to have such implicit associations, but knowing that one has them, it would seem immoral not to act to correct them (if we believe that they harm others).

I’m not sure about the first question. It does seem that the label of racism is only appropriate when the judgement being made is open to dispute, and further only when the judgement is somehow negative or consequential in some specific way (compare e.g. a Bayesian inference about an individual’s height with an inference about an individual’s intelligence).

To the second, I would say that unconscious racism is really racism. The broad definition of racism like the one Wyld provided seems to be what most people mean, and other uses of the term like that used in the linked scene from Dear White People seem too contingent. But if we accept such a broad definition, it seems like it should include even automatic actions that tend to treat people as members of a group first and as individuals second.

Finally, I tend to think racism is less a moral failing than is generally assumed. This again seems pretty close to Wyld’s position: much racism is “benign”, it isn’t malicious or evil but merely mistaken, misguided, uniformed. Harmful though it may be, it is without malice and therefore not morally wrong, only factually mistaken. I am conflicted, though, about how this applies to e.g. the member of the KKK. Certainly nearly all members of the KKK have beliefs about race that do not track reality, so there is a mistake of fact baked in. If a person were to believe that all races were equal and equally morally worthy, but that we should suppress a certain race because it would benefit that person, that seems like a strong case for an immoral racism. I’m not sure, though, that anyone fits that description.

Reply from Lyssa to one of the van-clan’s representative genius member.
The true heirs of Nietzsche, and the coming neo-Abrahasmic/Marxists.
Christianity minus Jesus, with a new messiah…Judeo-Christianity/Islam 2.0

If race were only about color, pigmentation, then a Black Bear would not be a different species from a Polar Bear.

But moderns love to reduce concepts to the ridiculous, to then easily dismiss them.

Dogs & wolves have a shorter genetic distance between each other than Negroids & non-Negroids

https://www.scribd.com/doc/102190687/Dogs-wolves-have-a-shorter-genetic-distance-between-each-other-than-Negroids-non-Negroids

Crow, are you trying to define the term by example? Otherwise, you seem not to be responding to the topic of the thread, which is not “Vent Your Racial Angst,” but rather, “What is ‘Racism’?” Or were your quotes and pointers meant to be responsive?

Do you see yourself as being racist (or rather, as parroting people who are racists)? Do you see the answer to that question having moral implications, or is it merely empirical?

This actually isn’t true. Political Correctness is authoritarian, and is a hallmark of the left, and personality analysis bares this out:

blogs.scientificamerican.com/bea … rrectness/

That’s why there’s actually more censorship, repression, and such as you state coming from the left right now- being liberal vs. being conservative isn’t a very good predictor for being an authoritarian. Maybe it was a generation ago when being conservative meant being an evangelical, and being a liberal meant being a hippy, I don’t know.

Racism isn’t examined in detail because there’s no incentive to do so from the people who most commonly use the term. Specifically, if racism actually means something distinct, then that imposes a limit on who can be called racist. That creates a strong disincentive for the left to pin down what racism actually is, of course. Maybe they wouldn’t be able to call immigration reform racism if the idea wasn’t so nebulous, who knows.

I think three distinct things are called racism:

1.) Hatred or ill-will towards people because of their race. This is the most classic example. People who want to shoot all the mexicans, or think giving blacks the right to vote was a bad idea, or whatever.

2.) Enacting policies that disproportionately affect race. This is the most obscure example: People who want voter ID cards would be said to be racist because such a policy affects blacks more than whites. It doesn’t matter if the person who wants the policy fits into category 1 or not, the policy is racist, and if they don’t abandon the policy once this is made known to them, they are racist too.

3.) Noting or asserting differences between races. This is the most benign and most common example. If you comment that black people might eat fried chicken more than other people, or that asians might be better at math, etc., that’s racist. It doesn’t matter if the stereotype is positive or negative. Lately, even acknowledging that there is such a thing as race can qualify, unless you’re a leftist talking about the plight of blacks.

The political game played around race issues is to point out that somebody is guilty of 2 or 3, and then using equivocation on the meaning of ‘racism’ to imply that they are therefore guilty of 1. Nobody would give a shit about 3 were it not for this equivocation. 2 makes it easy through statistics (faked or otherwise) to condemn virtually any policy a progressive wants to condemn as racist- being against a minimum wage hike, wanting a secure border, even the wrong stance on abortion could be racist. 3 creates a situation where the progressive in any conversation becomes a moral gatekeeper- if anybody other than them so much as mentions race, it’s easy for the progressive to pressure the other person to prove they aren’t a racist; “What do you mean ‘you people’” being the classic example of this.

So with Trump for example (and I imagine virtually any other politician the left doesn’t like, you will find the following pattern over and over: Politician makes a statement that qualifies as racist under definition 2. Progressive points this out in a way that subtly implies they are racist under definition 1. Politician defends themselves, which invariably means they are guilty of 3. Unless they word their defense very very carefully, whatever they said that qualifies under 3 is asserted as being further evidence that they are guilty of racism variant 1.

You could only claim this about racism in sense 1 as I described above. But like I pointed out, all sorts of things are called racist to which this analysis wouldn’t apply.

A familiar analysis. Of course the problem here is that because of how 2 and 3 interact with 1, virtually anybody can be called racist for any reason if a progressive is losing an argument. If you combine that with your analysis of what a ‘racist’ must be like and how their minds must work, then you have a pat reason to dismiss anybody that has been so-labeled as some sort of crazy person who doesn’t deserve to be interacted with rationally. Now, if you want to let go of the idea that people who want strong borders, mistrust radical Islam, oppose gay marriage, etc. etc. are inherently bigoted, and reaffirm that your description above really only means to apply to people who are guilty in sense 1 as I defined it, then all of the above may well be true- but you’d then also have to admit that you aren’t making a statement very relevant to western politics since you’d be talking about a vanishingly small number of actual individuals.

The best way to combat racism is to realize that only racism type 1 is actually a problem, and once acknowledging this to realize further that this entails that racism is in fact quite quite rare among the usual suspects- white people in the English speaking world. At that point, everybody should be able to calm the fuck down about ‘racism’, as actual racists (other than Black Lives Matter) are basically marginalized and without political power, and have been so for decades outside of places like Africa and the Middle East.

Seems like this should cut both ways. An agreed definition would make accusations of racism much stronger.

This isn’t true. Being judged in advance of being known can feel bad, even when the judgments are good. People tend to see themselves as rich and complex individuals, who are unique and special. To be summed up by one’s race alone is to suggest that you are totally fungible with the next white guy to come along.

This also goes to the validity of accusations of racism in the case of 2 or 3. It’s obviously possibly to design a policy with a disparate impact on race without it being motivated by hatred or ill-will. But hatred or ill-will is not generally made explicit. It similarly seems obvious that imputing hatred or ill-will based on actions is legitimate, and that it will be necessary in the absence of type 1 racists freely admitting to their racism. When, for example, someone supports voter ID laws when voter fraud isn’t a problem, so that the effect of the law is just to disenfranchise a bunch of legal voters of a particular race, and that outcome was known going in, that seems best explained by at least an indifference to the concerns of members of a particular race, and quite possibly ill-will towards them.

Similarly, most noting and asserting of racial difference is woefully uninformed. If people are attributing pretty clearly cultural things to race, or making blanket statements that echo prejudices but aren’t actually based on any real information, and they don’t stop doing that when confronted with their mistakes, then, again, that looks like at best an indifference to the concerns of a particular race, and at worst ill-will towards them.

So, yeah, 2 and 3 aren’t conclusive evidence of 1. But they can absolutely be strong evidence of 1.

Uccisore : that is a very well thought out and considered analysis

If what is “racism” wouldn’t constantly change, progress, then there would be no so called social progress.
You push your social agenda step by step, the browning of White populations.

There is totally no White genocide going on.
But it’s morally good that White countries get diversified which means less White people.
We actively oppose those who are against it but it’s also a natural event.

So why…
It’s because they are afraid of the White race.
It’s White race angst which motivates them.
They are afraid of standards (Hitler), standards which would disqualify them socially in a given society.
And so they seek shelter in the term humanity.

Excellent breakdown, you are right of course. The pressure of politically correct liberal fascism now in American society is so strong that people deliberately avoid even mentioning race. Other than to condemn supposed racists, of course, for example people will call Trump racist because he wants border security, when in fact “having a border” is something that is already the case, should be the case, and has nothing to do with race or racism. Just as pointing out that having a border that doesn’t work is stupid is also not racist, nor is it racist to say that rapists and criminals are coming to the US from Mexico illegally. If anything Trump was guilty of a little hyperbole when he said that, since he didn’t qualify the statement with numbers or a percentage of criminals versus non-criminals out of all people who come here illegally from Mexico, but he certainly isn’t racist for saying any of what he said. Not did he say “all Mexicans are rapists” as Tim Kaine and plenty of leftie media claimed he said.

Your analysis of types 1-3 of “racism” is really good, by that I mean it is accurate and clearly explained.

The Modern will accept the flexibility of morality, and the ideals they support, but will not be able to stomach the idea of amorality, because despite his “tolerance” for the multiplicity of perspectives he still desperately holds onto the idea of a common thread running through them, binding them all in a shared humanity.
No matter what you tell him, the moral angle will be dominant in his psyche.
He will not deny a common moral foundation, but only how this is expressed and the equality of all of these expressions.
The possibility that morality is a survival tool, with no relevance outside social structures and human brains, will never register.
All morals, like all idea(l)s will be, for him, equally valid… or equally selfish and subjective.
This is his ethical foundation.
He is incapable of connecting ethics to past/nature, the moral instincts that emerge from there, and how they then relate to noetic, mental projections and idea(l)s.

Only if the agreed on definition relies on easily-observable phenomeon as criteria. If the agreed on definition of racism references a person’s innermost thoughts or attitudes, then such accusations will still often be weak or hollow. Everybody seemed to agree what a witch was in the 17th Century, after all.

Sure, that’s true. But there’s a thousand ways in which a person can be summed up and made to feel less rich and complex- class, occupation, dress, accent, ideology, religion, etc. etc. I think the reason why race stands out as being especially bad among these is still because of implication towards racism variant 1.

But imputing hatred or ill-will isn’t required for somebody to be a racist. There’s all sorts of (if the left is to be believed) benign or passive or even internalized racism where the person bares no ill will at all. You can, apparently, be racist without realizing it or having much of a view of any particular race whatsosever. So it’s not that type 2 or type 3 are signs of type 1, is that type 2 or type three are racist in themselves (to the progressive), and the reason that is bad is through an equivocation on meaning. If I call you racist because you observed that black people prefer a certain kind of alcohol, the implication that you are racist type 1 can’t be escaped, and that’s why a person will rush to deny type 2 and type 3 accusations.

In general it's certainly true that there can be situations so unambigiuous that it's hard to think of an explanation other than a person's unexpressed ill-will toward some race or another.   But who the policy affects can't be the whole story If it were that simple, Affirmative Action would be non-controversially condemned as racist by the exact same criteria, and so would any black college, black scholarship, etc. etc. The BBC is now expressly hiring for positions declaring that only non-white minorites are eligible.  The ideology that makes political gains through accusations of racism will, of course, have explanations for why [i]none of this[/i] is a sign of ill-will or indifference to the concerns of a particular race. 

I don’t know that most asserting of racial difference is making a biological claim. For example, I can say “Why is it that black people are so loud at the movies?” or “Black people are such good dancers” without impling that there’s some genetic trait bound to African ancestry that causes those things. I may just be making an observation about the people who are black in my society, and the explanation could be cultural, economic, or something else. And it depends on what you mean by confronting somebody with their mistakes. There’s a difference between somebody persisting in their stereotype after you show them reliable data that demonstrates the stereotype is false, vs. somebody persistening in their stereotype after you berated them ‘generalizing’. The first is actually a defeater for a position, and if they keep the position it’s fair to ask why. The second is merely an assertion of your ideology, followed by their rejection of it, in classic “presented without evidence, dismissed without evidence” style.

Yes they can. Here’s a problem though, or perhaps a litmus test: If a person was actually concerned purey about 1, and was using 2 and 3 as ways to evaluate the existence of 1, then such a person would have to immediately concede that the biggest, most threatening examples of racism in western consciousness right now are Black Lives Matter and Arab attitudes towards Jews. Those two things are the cause of so much violence, so much hatred, and threaten race relations on the planet to such an extreme degree that concerns about what some white guy thinks about the NBA or why Republicans ‘really’ didn’t vote for Obama fades to near total insignificance. And yet, the people who talk about racism and make political headway in loudly combatting racism are invariably presenting the situation as if the KKK is still the gold standard in racial tension in the world today. That simply cannot be explained by people merely trying to identify who is guilty of race-based hatred and trying to put a stop to it.

This too seems to cut both ways. Any definition that constrains the left from abusive accusations of racism will constrain the right from plausibly deniable racism.

As an aside, I don’t think racism nor the abusive accusation of racism divides cleanly by left/right. Many on the left abuse the presumption of good faith that being on the left affords them (particularly between minority groups), and the right increasingly uses ‘racism’ as a buzzword (for examples, to criticize affirmative action, which doesn’t seem to meet your definition 1).

My impression is that race is used more often than the others. One piece of evidence that comes to mind is that we have terms for sexual attraction to members of certain races: “jungle fever”, “yellow fever”. Especially in an era where sexuality is commonly believed to be an innate characteristic, that’s telling.

And some of those other characteristics actually tell us quite a bit about a person: accent tells you individual origin (rather than ancestral origin), and dress and occupation depend on individual choices. And class is a term that’s also ambiguous, but I think of it as much more like culture than race, which, like accent, tells you something about personal history and life experience.

Another way to think of the difference is asking how wrong you’re likely to be in judging someone based on their race vs. accent, dress, occupation, or class. If you look at someone like Sasha Obama, basically any prejudgment you’re likely to make based solely on her race is going to be about as far off the mark as a it gets. Prejudgments based on accent, dress, occupation, or class is likely to be pretty close (except to the extent they bake in prejudgments about race).

There are two ways to go when you get to things that aren’t based on ill-will. You can say that some differential treatment on the basis of race is not ‘racism’, or you can say that some ‘racism’ isn’t immoral. I think the latter is better, because the former just asks for too much subjectivity, and includes it in a way not always recognized so that you get the equivocation you mention.

But do you see something sinister going on here? One more benign way to look at it is that the term ‘racism’ was used for generations in a climate where most race-based differences in treatment were of the explicit, immoral, ill-will variety, and we’re now at a point where that kind of racism is all but extinct, and so almost all uses of the term are to refer to what used to be the edge cases. As a result, the same word is being used differently in different speaker communities, and the dialogue is suffering because not enough conversations like this one happen. So the disagreement seems legitimate, even if it’s perpetuated by emotion and politics.

I don’t think it’s about biology, but I do think my previous point was unclear here. Let me try to be more rigorous.

There’s a spectrum of things we can say about any group. On one end, for any collection of people, there are statistical artifacts that just happen to be true, but are not caused by any criteria of the grouping. So, there’s probably some digit that appears more often than others in the social security numbers of white people, but that’s just the result of statistical noise, and a generalization about that is illegitimate even if it’s true.

On the other end there’s actual things that fall out of the definition of race. Like, ‘white people need sunscreen’ is my go-to: to be white means, among other things, to have a certain amount of melanin in ones skin. That’s perfectly legitimate.

Then there’s stuff in the middle, like “black people are so loud at the movies”. The first example shows that even if it’s true, it’s potentially illegitimate. And we know it’s not just falling out of the definition of blackness, because we can provide plenty of counterexamples. One way it could be illegitimate is if it’s true that poor people are loud at the movies, and most black people are poor. Then there’s some connection between race and behavior, but it’s not directly causal, and it seems illegitimate to point out the racial connection when there’s no additional information contained in it. More on this below in response to your next point:

Another response to the claim that “black people are so loud at the movies” is that it suffers from pretty clear biases: we ignore all the quiet people in the theater, and focus on the loud people. Give just that, the observation is really only that most of the loud people are black, not that most of the black people are loud.

I think there’s other problems with the claim (e.g., pre-existing ideas about black people will change recall), but let’s go from here. Has presenting this point about the nature of observation and generalization and bias (in a statistical sense) been sufficient to confront someone with their mistake? I am berating that person for generalizing, but I’d like to think I’m doing it in a meaningful way: the generalization is illegitimate; they really don’t know what they’re purporting to know. Shouldn’t that be enough to prevent that person from continuing to make a claim that they have no basis to make, and to suggest that there’s something else going on if they don’t stop?

I don’t have sufficient information to make a comparison between them. I do think BLM (or rather, parts of it) are hurting race relations and are racist in the ill-will-towards-a-specific-race meaning of the term (aside: I know you aren’t the person to discuss this with, but I’d be interested to talk to someone who doesn’t consider anti-white racial animus to be ‘racism’). And absolutely common Arab attitudes towards Jews is a problem. But I’m not sure how much we have to choose between them. As it happens, I don’t hang out with a lot of Palestinians or anti-white BLMers. Most of the racism I have the opportunity to confront is my own, and after that it’s mostly the subtle prejudice of bad statistics.

Racism is making decisions based upon race … pretty damn simple.
But that means that “anti-racists” who attempt to balance out the races (while actually attempting to eliminate one at a time), are in fact racists. Of course they see themselves as saints, thus “good racists” … much like “good Nazis”.

So checking a box on a form to indicate one’s race is racist?

As is a doctor choosing the best medical treatment and/or nutritional blood balance for any given patient.
As is specifying the appearance of a criminal suspect.

As is all of the lying to the population, playing hypnosis games, and psychological ploys concerning races so as to manipulate the population toward a chosen racial design.

Some people must be racist in order to honestly complete their honest job. But the issue is and has always been those who are racist by prejudgement and/or behind the scenes so as to manipulate a population (presuming, lying, deluding).

Presumption, prejudice and population manipulation are the issues, not the racism itself. The same problems arise in far more than merely race issues. Pointing to racism as the evil in society is like pointing to honesty as the evil in society. You have to lie in order to do it.