Try and understand what I am saying. Of course it’s not wrong to accuse a racist group of being racist, and it’s wrong to accuse a group that is not racist of being racist.
Accept when an offense is taken to the word. I don’t believe it’s possible for me to be called a racist and not find it offensive.
Thomas Sowell’s Intellectuals and Race is pretty central to my understanding on this issue at this stage.
A better term for race might be people groups in a kind of historical sense. It may do well to see the term as a social construct, but neither is it possible to not recognize the differences between people groups. Sowell is brilliant in his analysis of why some groups developed differently than others.
And the case of Breitbart being labeled alt-right or white nationalist is an example, that I think your opinion about, can help me better understand your direction (and meaning).
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Everyone has needs.
They can’t all be met.
It is not the obligation of society to fulfill the wishes of every member, That would be an unattainable fantasy.
I do not have a problem with it.
The parable is not about the late arrivers.
The parable is about those who complain that God hasn’t made everything “fair” in their eyes.
Just as the story of the prodigal son is not about the prodigal son — the story is about the older brother who complained when he compared his lot to that of his brother.
For a troublesome parable, try the unrighteousness servant who was too proud to beg and too old to dig.
A lot here to catch up on (and I haven’t, so sorry if this has already been covered), but if someone says “You’re a racist!”, they don’t mean that you are part of institutionalized racism, they mean that you are a bigot as an individual. It seems a little odd to separate the racist from racism.
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A better term is needed. Otherwise it looks like a Marxist word game.
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Figures. He is regularly cited by people who refuse to understand what other people, especially minority academics calling for racial justice, are trying to say.
Agree to disagree about Sowell’s brilliance and positive contribution to any discussions of race and society. White nationalists love to quote him to prop up their racist ideas specifically because he is Black and they think if they find a Black person supporting their racial biases, then they aren’t really biased or advocating racist positions. But Black people can certainly internalize their own oppression.
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I disagree. People use words with multiple senses all the time and we do just fine. The real issue is the right’s co-opting of vocabulary, defining things pejoratively, and then refusing to acknowledge when other people are using words with different senses. If you won’t let your conversation partners define their terms and proceed accordingly, you aren’t interested in conversation, you are just trying to win rhetorical jousting contests. No progress will be made.
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The problem I find with those calling for racial justice, the loudest, is they seem unwilling to account for racial disparities that are not caused by racial injustice.
It’s hard to build momentum in a movement without starkly divided lines. Once nuance and careful deliberation is admitted, it feels like the outrage will dissipate, and change can be painfully slow.
Justin Gibboney is someone who I like too.
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This word requires more careful use.
Yep, that’s the Gospel. It’s not about wishes. It’s about equality of outcome to a high minimal level of well being. Golden rule level. So that there is righteousness. That’s the only meaning of the word.
Mutually agreed upon terms should be one of the basic rules for engagement.
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I think a lot of that is because they feel like it’s a deflection and they have been shouting into the void for so long without acknowledgement that systemic racism is a real problem and there are lots of ways things could be addressed and improved. Those conversations get derailed with “But whatabout…” all the time.
I also like Justin Gibboney.
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True, but you also can’t spend all your time arguing over what words “should” mean. You have to hear people out and try to understand them on their terms. And when there is a broad consensus outside your group about what a term means, whether it is “gender” or “racism,” the time for debating definitions is not when people are trying to express or solve problems related to gender or race.
It’s easy to understand, and I’m hopeful the best voices will carry the day.
Not if I’m being called a racist. Too much baggage there.
Why can’t we just say that the term racism now includes institutionalized racism instead of… (what’s a better way to say “getting in a huff”? ; - ). When some kid or younger adult at home in his basement bedroom gets sucked into racist thinking by antisocial media, couldn’t we also say that he has been duped by [not institutional] racism? We need to be able to use adjectives instead of forbidding them. For any given discussion we can specify what we mean, and it might be implicit what we are talking about anyway.
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That is just the opposite of what is happening with the terms racist and racism.
It has been asserted that academia is 100% united, with no disagreement, in defining those terms differently than their common use in society.
Tricky. When I taught it was in a school where ‘blacks’ and ‘whites’ (please think whatever terms d’jour you are best acquainted with) were the largest groups with ‘Latinos’ a sizable third place. Plus we were a new-comer school so we got students who were at various stages of learning English with native Spanish speakers being the most numerous.
While on a practical level adults including teachers need some stability in their lives I and most of my colleagues always recognized our our black demographic largely coincided with our poorest demographic. As a result, whenever we needed a new math teacher our department would meet the candidates and make recommendations which were almost always determinative. We always took the strongest candidate who was also black unless there were over riding considerations. In general we went with visible diversity so that more of our students could ‘see’ themselves among their teachers. The staff as a whole and administration felt the same way.
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Yeah - there doesn’t seem to be a lack of troublesome ones. The ending on the wedding banquet parable and the under-dressed attendee is a burr in my saddle too.
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