Quote:
Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield
If you act differently around a black person than a white person is that racism? Of course the answer to that is, it depends.
Is the effect of acting differently around a black person perpetuating racism? Again, it depends.
If you act differently around women than men, are you sexist? It depends.
The existence of pervasive racism, and whether any individual white person is racist, are two different concepts. Racism is unquestionably pervasive and its impacts are often unnoticed, and a big part of it is unintentional acts by, as you note, white people who think they are woke.
Where things go off the rails a bit is when people argue that most or all whites are racist because they're born into a racist system and indoctrinated, even subconsciously, with racism. There is of course some truth to that. But as a simple matter of logic and statistical probability, it can never be the case that because whites are born into a racist society most or all of them to some extent racist.
Maybe that's not what's being asserted. Perhaps I have it wrong. But it seems to me that there's an emerging definition of racism asserting that because society is flooded with racism, anyone born into that society is to some extent racist. The idea sounds logical, except that it's not. It's arguing that the society into which you are born determines your thinking whether you like it or not. If that's true for racism, it's true for almost anything. People would be almost fractal mini-representations of the society into which they were born. That logic doesn't work for me.
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I think simply stated, the idea is perhaps you and I can't necessarily see what we might be doing differently that could be harmful. Of course we don't intend harm in such cases, but would you listen to someone tell you what harm you might unintentionally do? You don't have to listen, but then you can't say you don't want to do harm, or that you do not do it. I agree complicating the issue is that everyone has a theory about what we might be doing wrong, and half might be nonsense, but that doesn't mean there can't be some education somewhere, does it?
