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What do you think I mean when I use the word racist? What do you think most people mean?
So your argument is "Racism is completely sensible and well-reasoned, so please don't use that word because it's a boo-word."
Exactly. This is the point you are missing. I understand that you are arguing that beliefs that are conventionally called "racist" are actually perfectly fine and reasonable beliefs. Go ahead and argue that.
I reject your objection to the word itself, not because I disagree with your ideology, but because I refuse to stop using a word just because you would prefer it not be used because it has negative associations. If I say your beliefs are racist, and you feel like that's a boo-word and I'm saying you're just like the KKK (which I am not btw), you are entitled to point out how your beliefs are different from the KKK's.But you are not entitled to tell me "Yes, I believe in racial discrimination and segregation, but don't call that racism because racism doesn't exist." You would like us to use some more politic, less pejorative word, but "racist," whether you like it or not, is an actual word that describes actual beliefs. The dispute is not over whether those beliefs exist, but what we should think about them.
Absolutely not. It's more akin to you saying "I do not believe in God and I think religion is fake and gay - but don't call me an atheist, that's a boo-word."
Let’s take a step back and check the extent to which you and I actually disagree.
Do you believe that there is such a thing as a slur? By this, I mean a word which is inherently designed to contain within it the implication that the thing being indicated is bad? And such that there would be no way to use the word in a value-neutral way?
Take the word “faggot”, for example. If I call a gay man - let’s call him Travis - a faggot and he protests by asking me to stop using that word, I can defend my usage of it in two ways. One of those ways - riffing, perhaps, off of the famous Chris Rock bit, is, “I’m not calling you a faggot because you fuck guys. I’m calling you a faggot because you’re mincing all over the place, acting all effeminate, and a man shouldn’t act like that. A straight guy can be a faggot too, if he acts faggy. Nothing specifically gay about it.” But of course, Travis is well aware of the history of this word, and that it was always designed and intended to target gay men, and simultaneously to conglomerate a number of behaviors commonly associated with specifically gay men and to anathematize those behaviors. So Travis understands that I am either mistaken or (more probably) lying.
The second way I can defend my usage of the word is to say, “I’m not saying it’s a bad thing to be a faggot! Being faggy is a totally normal and reasonable thing for a person to be.” Travis would likely respond, entirely reasonably, “Then why didn’t you use a word that doesn’t carry an insulting connotation? Why not call me, I don’t know, a queen? It’s not something everyone likes to be called, but at least it’s not a word that someone has only ever used to insult me.” If I were to reply, “No, I’m going to continue to say faggot. Everyone knows what it means, and yes, the vast majority of people who use it and/or have ever used it meant it insultingly. But I don’t think it is, so I’ll keep using it.” Do you think Travis would believe that I am being fully up-front with him?
By tabooing the word “faggot” and forcing me to describe him in a more value-neutral way, or at least to disaggregate the various assumptions contained within the word, Travis can at least get me to try and explicitly demonstrate that the various aspects of a supposed “faggot” are, independently, things worth caring about or drawing attention to. I would also need to demonstrate that such aspects do, in fact, typically come together in a particular package, and that the person whom I’m currently calling a faggot possesses all of those aspects.
What I’m saying is that “racist” has always been a slur. That it was coined by someone who intended it to refer to a cluster of things he thought were bad, and that it was popularized exclusively by people who all agreed that being racist was a bad thing. And that it is impossible to use in a value-neutral way due to its history. With which parts of this do you disagree?
Doesn't all of this apply to words like "wrong", "selfish", or "boring" as well? Sometimes people create words to refer to things that they think other people shouldn't do. Not all of those are slurs.
I continue to believe that the word "racist" is perhaps the best one-word description for the policies you've said you'd like to pursue. You see racial divisions between people as extremely important and would like to completely restructure society along its lines; I consider the extent to which you care about this, the extent to which you think racial division is important, to be extremely irrational - so irrational that the only way I can really try to understand it, though I would keep this to myself normally, is to start postulating things like trauma, depression, a ridiculously sheltered upbringing, and so on, to explain to myself how someone can get to where it seems like you are. I don't say those things as insults, I'm just trying to really make it clear that "that is racist" to me is not "you hate black people", it's kind of a statement in the epistemic universe of "you are depressed"; it's my own observation that you probably have a certain bias.
Setting the prescriptive stuff aside, at least descriptively, basically every American, including almost every attendee in the crowd at CPAC, would agree that the policies you're calling for can be accurately called "racist". The crowd at CPAC would immediately, reflexively jump to your defence once they saw that I was a left-wing person calling someone racist, but if you honestly explained your beliefs in front of the crowd in the way that you did above, there would be much clearing of throats, embarrassed murmurs, and rapid changing of subjects coming from the crowd.
Define “extremely important”. I think that they have some importance. Do you believe they have none? Can you honestly tell me, after, for example, the mass rioting and looting in the summer of 2020 - committed by people who saw themselves as part of a racial group or otherwise on behalf of that racial group, and believing that the distinct experiences of that racial group mark them as divided from mainstream “white” society - that racial divisions have zero relevance to American society? Surely this is not your claim.
Again, what specific ways do you imagine I wish to “completely restructure society”? Americans are already engaged in a Big Sort - masses of people moving from one state/region to another for reasons of cultural affinity and political polarization - and have been for decades. This has been true as well of black Americans, who have been migrating back to the South - to Atlanta and the surrounding area in particular - in order to be in cultural and special communion with their own identity group. This process is accelerating, and I believe that it will continue to accelerate as America continues to polarize along political and racial lines.
My hope is that this process leads to a gradual self-segregation of blacks into something roughly approximating a discrete de facto ethnostate, at which point the process of formalizing that reality can begin. None of this would require a radical restructuring of society. My model for this is the Velvet Divorce in the former Czechoslovakia, in which two distinct ethnolinguistic identity groups decided voluntary to part ways and to pursue the political sovereignty of their respective identities. The subsequent population transfers can be achieved peacefully and non-coercively, likely with substantial financial assistance and redistribution by the federal government.
This is honestly very amusing to me. I really think you need to talk to more people who disagree with you. I think you will find that a surprising number of fairly well-adjusted, reasonable, world-wise people have views not dissimilar to mine. I’m certainly not “ridiculously sheltered”; I attended very diverse public schools for my entire upbringing, in arguably the most racially-diverse major city in America. (San Diego) I’m not “traumatized”, and though I dealt with some mild depression during my mid-twenties, I have a decent if unfulfilling life, a steady full-time job, and an active social life. My belief in racial differences and racial friction is a direct result of ample observation of those realities throughout my life.
I understand that it may be very difficult for you to empathize with someone who has observed the same realities as you have, but yet who has reached profoundly different conclusions about how to interpret those realities. I’m not consumed by hate, nor do I spend all day perseverating about race. My boss is a black woman, with whom I have an excellent professional and personal relationship. The majority of my coworkers are non-white. I have zero issues interacting cordially with them. Yet this does not prevent me from noticing consistent patterns, nor does it require me to shy away from what I consider uncomfortable implications of those patterns. I take public transit every day, multiple times a day, which affords me ample opportunity to observe those patterns. I watch the news. I consume online commentary and video content. I read about history. Why is it so confounding or difficult for you to grapple with the idea that a person who does so could reach the conclusions I’ve reached?
I think you’re really underestimating the groundswell of people who are starting to flirt with a lot of the same observations I’m talking about. Go read the comment sections under police bodycam videos on YouTube. Some portion of the American populace - I will not pretend to have an accurate read on the actual numbers, since most of them at this time are still only willing to express such opinions anonymously - are beginning to reach the “we don’t have to live with this people anymore” stage. White flight has happened before in this country more than once; why are you so confident it won’t happen again? It already is happening again! What do you think people mean when they say they want to move to an area with “good schools”? If you ask them if it’s “racist” not to want to live around underclass black people, most of them would probably say yes. And then they would carry on not wanting to live around underclass black people.
The people at CPAC can prostrate themselves before the altar of Martin Luther King all they like, but a substantial number of them are beginning to suspect that perhaps there is in fact some reliable correlation between “color of skin” and “content of character”. They can say it’s a result of “culture”; the practical effect will be the same. In the aggregate, on the macro level, black people and white people have radically different preferences and do not actually thrive when forced into close day-to-day contact with each other, such that they are made to compete for public space and political power. If you disagree, how about you lay out a case for why, instead of just dismissing me as mentally ill?
Uh ... no, I don't think I will try to define the word "extremely" for you? Was there something unclear about the words "extremely important"? I consider this is a silly and pedantic demand.
If you're willing to radically restructure all of society to take racial differences into account, then you definitely think they're extremely important. I don't think I need a more precise definition than that.
Do you deny that you consider racial divisions extremely important? I don't see how you could deny that, so this entire line of argument just feels like a waste of time.
You are correct that this ridiculous strawman that probably a only single-digit number of Americans believe is not my position, yes.
Because they're so obviously and immediately falsified by the daily experience of people who live in racially mixed areas, and by the history you say you've read, that I have to visualise your brain as metaphorically surrounded by the things they put on horses' heads to prevent them from seeing sideways.
God, I hope you're wrong. That's all I'll say about that.
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I agree that racist has inherently negative connotations for historical reasons. ("Racists" in the past wouldn't have used the word to describe themselves because it was essentially a universal belief. Segregationists in the 50s did not call themselves "racists" but they probably would not have shied away from the label either.) I do not agree it is a "slur." You compared it to calling someone a "faggot," but I think it would be more comparable to calling someone a "homosexual." A term that is both descriptive and at one time had very strong negative connotations, and still does with some people. If I call someone a homosexual because he's mincing around acting effeminate, it would still reasonably be understood as an insult. But if I describe people who engage in same-sex relations as "homosexuals" and am told that I shouldn't use that word because it's a slur, I'm going to ask them who decided that.
You advocate racial discrimination and segregation as reasonable and desirable, and you would like to taboo the word "racist" because to most people, "racist" has very negative connotations. I can understand why you would like to persuade people to use words without that baggage to describe your beliefs, but that does not mean anyone should feel obligated to accommodate you. Even here on the Motte, if someone just dismissed you with "Wow, you are such a racist," they would likely get modded, but describing your beliefs as "racist" is accurate. You may object to it, just as there are in fact gay people who now object to "homosexuals." Maybe you will be as successful as the "queer" community is at pushing for linguistic shifts. Or maybe you can rehabilitate the word "racist." But you are not the sole determiner of what a word means and how it is used, and just because it would suit your agenda to taboo the word or claim it "isn't a real thing" doesn't mean it does not, in fact, describe a real thing.
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