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This criticism only works if you assume that the target of it believes that “racism” is a priori a bad thing. What do you say to someone who doesn’t believe that this is the case, or who at least has a substantially different understand about what “racism” is or what specifically about it is bad?
Racism is effectively the rejection of individual variance/merit in favor of group variance/merit.
To the degree that we still live in a Christian-influenced Western Enlightenment Culture, racism is a priori bad, because the emphasis we place on individual merit is a key trait of Western Civilization.
What did you think the parable of the Good Samaritan was about?
"Racism" has changed so much over the past fifty years that the "Racist" and "Anti-racist" positions have swapped. It used to be that teachers were racist and didn't let the Black children into the Advanced Placement classes because "Blacks are stupid". Back then the anti-racist position emphasized individual variance/merit. The clever children go in the top stream and the stupid children go in the bottom stream. Ideally the stupid children benefit from being kept out of the top stream; it is miserable and harmful to be in a class for which you are unprepared and which leaves you behind.
But one notices that the top streams are White or East Asian or Brahmin. That drives a re-alignment. Accepting individual variance/merit is the new racist position. Modern anti-racism looks to the statistics for groups, and expects all groups to be represented according to head count, regardless of individual merit. (and there is the extra, weird twist where Black under-representation is the fault of Whites, because Whites are bad (and, if they object to this condemnation, fragile (which oddly enough, earns them mockery not gentle handling)))
Racism hasn't changed at all, its just been reboxed and rebranded.
However if you prefer, let us taboo the term "racism" and instead discuss "racial identitarianism". Racial identitarianism is a priori immoral and anti-western as it encourages the devaluation of individual merit.
The same should also be done for "sexism" -> "sex/gender identitarianism", which not only covers feminism/gynosupremacy, but LGBT/homosupremacy too.
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That's not racism. Racism is much a simpler Us and Them.
Are you trying to claim that all deliniations between ingroup and outgroup are "racism"? or are you arguing against any form of delineation that isn’t based on race?
No, the inverse. All racism is ingroup-outgroup.
Squares are rectangles, not the other way around.
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“The West” had racial chattel slavery for centuries, which coexisted quite comfortably with a robust (far more pervasive and sincere than nowadays) Christianity. (The same “Western Civilization” very comfortably celebrated hereditary monarchy and nobility, again a slap in the face to “individual merit”.) The “West” you’re grasping at is a phantom. That it existed in the heads of so many does not make it real or coherent.
“Racism”, in the sense that Yglesias is using it in the OP’s linked essay, is simply the recognition that although there is a substantial variation among individuals, it is still not only possible to draw reliable probabilistic conclusions about a given individual’s likely traits based on observable characteristics (many of them immutable), but also that in the absence of detailed information about that individual, it’s often necessary (or at least valuable) to make those probabilistic assumptions. Once more fine-grained detail about the individual is available, then it becomes possible to adjust one’s assumptions. This is entirely consistent with a belief in broadly-predictable population-level averages.
Chattle Slavery (as distinct from other flavors of compelled servitude) was something of an aberration in the West. To the extent that it coexisted, that coexistence was never "comfortable". The tension between Christian doctrine/ideals and the political and economic expediancies of colonizing the New World was arguably a major driver of intra-Western conflict from the 17th through 19th centuries. As @The_Nybbler quipped a couple weeks ago, if Thomas Jefferson had survived to see the ACW he probably would have said "I told you so", as this conflict, along with the recognition that it must eventually come to blows, was widely acknowledged at the time.
“Racism”, in the sense that both Yglesias and yourself describe is about devaluing individual merit in favor of an emphasis on group differences/membership. That is why it is "a priori bad".
How? How does it “devalue individual merit”? I genuinely have to wonder whether you don’t understand what I’m actually talking about, or are just unable to accurately model the mind of someone who believes as I do.
There are many observable qualities about an individual which can allow someone to make probabilistic assumptions about that person! If you see a man with a long black beard, olive-colored skin, and wearing a keffiyeh, you can pretty safely assume that the man is from the Middle East. Given that assumption, you can assume that he is most likely Arab, although there is a smaller possibility that he’s Kurdish or even Yazidi. If he is Arab, there’s a high likelihood that he’s Muslim; depending on which country or region he’s from, one can assess the probability that he’s Sunni or that he’s Shia. If he is Muslim, you can assume that he probably drinks alcohol either rarely or not at all; that he eschews pork; that he prays daily, etc.
Any of these assumptions could be wrong! He could be born and raised in the U.K., or America, or Canada, and not be from the Middle East, though he’s dressed in a manner more common in that part of the world than it is in Anglo countries. He could be a Greek or a Persian, and not one of the ethnicities I previously named. He could be irreligious, even though most Arab men are not. He could even be a Christian, or a Druze, or, as mentioned, a Yazidi. If he is Muslim, he could be Sufi, or from some other fairly small sect. He could be a non-observant Muslim who professes Islam but still drinks alcohol and doesn’t pray. He could even be a white guy in a costume, wearing a fake beard and some bronzer!
Still, though, I think you would agree that my initial assumptions about what’s most likely to be true about him are broadly accurate and representative of reality. In order to discover what’s actually true about him, I would need to personally get to know him, or somehow otherwise obtain accurate information. Without being able to do so, I may need to rely on probabilistic assumptions.
The same types of assumptions can be made about a woman (likely to be able to become pregnant, to be sexually attracted to men, to have interests more common among women than they are among men, etc.) even with the full knowledge that some not-insignificant portion of women have some other combinations of traits. You can do it with people from different parts of the world, people who dress a certain way, etc. If someone has MS13 tattoos, I would have some major concerns about hiring him to babysit my kids, unless he has a very convincing story about why he came about those tattoos by totally innocent means.
Literally all I’m saying is that race carries useful, if not perfectly dispositive, information that can be used to make similar probabilistic assumptions. The question of “individual merit” doesn’t even enter the occasion, because the entire point here is that we usually do not have very much information about the “merit” of strangers. We have to use other methods to predict their behavior. Most of the time this process is pretty low-stakes, and we can assign both low confidence and low salience to our assumptions while we wait for more fine-grained info to become available. If I have to make an important snap judgment, though, stereotypes are far more useful than simply pretending as though I have no information to go on.
Again, I think you would trivially recognize this as true when it comes to all sorts of categories of people! Old people are likely to be weaker and less energetic than young people, even though there are wacky outliers who run marathons at age 90. Fat people probably have less self-discipline than skinny people, and are probably going to be worse at basketball, if you’re picking people to be on your team. Most of these assumptions are totally non-controversial outside of the contrarian upside-down world of academia. Why, then, is race the one category from which we must totally taboo gleaning any useful information?
It devalues individual merit by arguing that you should focus on group differences instead of individual merit.
6 paragraphs of why that's actually a good thing doesn't change the underlying argument.
Nowhere did I say anyone should “focus” on group differences. In fact I made it very explicit multiple times that when fine-grained information about an individual is available, you should use it to override the assumptions you made before you had it.
You didn’t make any effort to actually engage with the specifics of any of the examples I brought up, the distinctions I drew, etc. This is by far the most common outcome of my interactions with you. You just repeat some stock phrases and act like they’re knockdown arguments for every situation. It’s very tiresome, and I feel that you’re an especially poor ambassador for the general constellation of ideas you ostensibly advocate.
Ive been around the internet enough to know that engaging with the specifics of a Gish Gallop is a fool's game. That's why I didn't.
No matter how much you try to hedge and caveat you are still trying to argue that knowledge of group differences is more valuable and informative than fine-grained information about individuals, and that is a premise that I reject.
Nah man you shamelessly ducked. Massive L.
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I am literally and explicitly arguing the opposite, and you’re just obstinately insisting otherwise, despite (again) not actually demonstrating that you’ve made an attempt to understand the specific arguments I’ve made and why.
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I presume you are neither omniscient nor psychic, able to gather masses of true, fine-grained information about an individual from a glance? You are arguing for explicitly, dogmatically ignoring any information about a person that you can gather by inference. Yes, you can do Bayesian inference by always having a completely blank prior and admitting only facts in a specific category, but you will get worse information than if you had calibrated priors and allowed use of all information.
In short, your argument appears to be that people should cripple their judgment-making facilities for moral reasons. You can hold to this moral system, of course, but you haven’t made any argument for why anyone else should.
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