Anyone who thinks that black people in the US aren't imprisoned because of massive structural racism; because they'd rather imagine it's about education and employment and family poverty and where they live and all that other shit: that's bullshit. All of that is racism. The school funding systems, the employment opportunities, which laws end up with huge automatic punishments and how you can avoid those if you are a white guy.
Yes, it's got layers. It's mostly a bunch of little shit that adds up across people's lives in the same way slightly loaded dice will see you win or lose a lot of money in the long run depending which side of them you're on, even though each game still looks pretty well fair. Every step of every process in your life ends up with a loaded chance that you will be worse off at the end of it. It's happening to millions of people, all the time.
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Vnonymous wrote:Dude, my personal definition of racism is "Treating someone differently, usually in a negative way, due to their race." That's the sensical definition that I support.
It's useless. It's a gigantic deflection away from the ordinary, everyday, grinding effect of small probability shifts on long-run trials. Like how you keep linking shit where a brown person hit a white person in a country full of white people: that's
you being racist, not them.
Hell, man, you're even at the wrong end of the dictionary.
dict wrote: [*] 1. a belief or doctrine that inherent differences among the various human racial groups determine cultural or individual achievement, usually involving the idea that one's own race is superior and has the right to dominate others or that a particular racial group is inferior to the others.
[*] 2. a policy, system of government, etc., based upon or fostering such a doctrine; discrimination.
[*] 3. hatred or intolerance of another race or other races.
The tumblr thing is where it doesn't matter if people believe in racism, or if they intend to create a racist state, it only matters what it actually is. If you live in a state that accepts worse cultural and individual achievement by minorities as no big deal, not worth making a fuss over, where the laws fail to
prevent that sort of thing, #3 just doesn't matter.
So when black people are eight times more likely to end up in prison, and everyone shrugs and says "but I don't see any (#3)
racism",
that's still racism. That's people assuming that blacks must somehow naturally end up there, even though they're "totally not a (#1) racist" about it. It might not have the force of law any more, it might be taboo to promote it, people may not believe in it at all, but it's empirically
still there, in the real world, and still the same real problem for real people.
That thing where various state Republicans took enormous numbers of black people off the electoral rolls before the 2012 elections, but said they were just taking people with the same name as a felon off, that's totally racism. The gerrymandering, school district lines, where the state budgets actually get spent, that's all racism too, even if the laws very carefully never say they're targeting a particular race, and neither do any politicians. It can't matter that they never say it any more.
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hyzmarca wrote:Racism isn't about power because motives and justifications matter.
By the classic dictionary definition that's true. This is an argument about changing that meaning, as the old one has become impractically weak as the nature of racism has changed in the west. It used to be politicians would rant about the superiority of white people, and now they don't, and the laws are now blind, but the real effect on people's live is pretty much the same. In a lot of ways it's worse now than it was a generation ago in the US, that whole white-flight thing was real and the funding for everything in black communities got fucked up, as did many job opportunities with changing demographics and mass changes in regional wealth distribution along racial lines. The whole war on drugs thing, the three strikes bullshit, it's hurting.
/EDIT
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The really devious shit, the nasty stuff, that ruins lives, that's where everyone accepts black people in the US get screwed, but you can't let anyone try to fix that, because
fixing it would be racism. That is some deeply Orwellian double-think creep, and I see a huge amount of it from commentators all over the show. That's the shit the US supreme court puts out, and it's devastating.
PC, SJW, anti-fascist, not being a dick, or working on it, he/him.