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This seems like a flaw with the most pure form of anti-classificationism that could be addressed by a minor adjustment to a tit-for-tat strategy, which is mostly where my position is. It would be ideal if people mostly just didn't talk about race. Other people do talk about race, and therefore it makes it very difficult to communicate or model them if you just naively pretend that race doesn't exist while everyone else does. If you just let all the racists run around being racist but don't acknowledge their motivations then you can't even talk about them coherently, let alone come up with strategies to combat them.
Instead, it seems like the best strategy is to only talk about race on the meta level. You do not define categories for people, you do not treat people differently based on what categories other people put them in. But when other people put people into categories, you acknowledge that they have done so and respond accordingly, and discuss the categories that exist in their minds. People are not forgiving Mike Tyson because he is black on the object level and his black skin causes him to emit forgiveness pheromones or something, people are forgiving Mike Tyson because they have categorized him as "black" in their minds and have allowed him to inherit all of the baggage about victims and oppressors that our society associates with that. This seems acceptable to mention and criticize.
Race does matters in the real world as a self-fulfilling prophecy because people treat it like it does. But if more people adopt this form of anti-classification then discussions about race become rarer and rarer since fewer people would bring it up in the first place on the object level, and thus the amount race matters would exponentially decay as it being discussed less would make it matter less which would make it be discussed less, back and forth.
I agree. I think hard classifications in any subject where the classes created aren’t material to the discussion tend to limit the discussion while creating very fertile ground for anti-intellectual arguments and thought terminating accusations.
The truest statement I’ve ever read about racism is that accusations of bigotry are what The Last Psychiatrist called “cognitive kill switches”. No matter what the actual conversation was about, up to and including flavors of ice cream, the minute someone accuses another person of racism, the conversation is now about defending that charge of racism. If I say that vanilla ice cream is racist because it’s white, we are not going to be discussing ice cream but rather the claim that vanilla is racist. This doesn’t generate light, just heat. And further, at least as long as the discussion is about policy issues, you can’t get to the point of actually solving the problems because quite often a proposed solution will be considered racist, or the way the conversation is had is racist, thus it goes unsolved. Police brutality was probably solvable before it got mixed up with BLM. Lots of people were talking about excessive force and looking for better solutions to those problems. But, once policing became a racial issue, simply saying something like “the police are too likely to engage in violence where none is needed” meant silencing blacks. So nothing can be done about it unless it tickles the right people’s fancy.
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