Quote:
Originally Posted by Adder
Your reflexive attitude is to deny it. Yes, that is a symptom of it.
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My reflexive attitude is a dislike of stupid concepts. It is stupid to take a word and expand it to an extent where it is meaningless.
To say the following -- "Everyone in this country is a racist" -- which you have said, is simply, in a nutshell, stupid.
Imagine going into court and making the case, "You honor, I intend to prove that everyone in the US is racist." You'd be laughed at.
You can play with the word on a board like this, or any other forum where people sympathetic to the notion behind your expanded definition will give its linguistic and logical failings a pass, but that does not mean the general public will accept your view. The word has an accepted meaning and an accepted use.
My deep rooted dislike for this sort of thing actually has very little to do with this particular word. It has to do with something I see on both the right and left these days: A desire to replace facts with narratives, and often extreme narratives.
We of course live in a racist society. This is fact. But when you choose to say that everyone in the society is racist, you're now trafficking in narrative. That you claim it is essential that all people in the US acknowledge that they are racist does not prove that all people in the US are racist. That is illogic of the worst kind. Here's another fact: you cannot prove that all people in the US are racist. Your only argument there is the assertion all people born in the US are racist because the US society is generally racist. This argument is flatly absurd because it allows for no outliers. It's like arguing that all residents of the US make the average US income.
When the illogic of these arguments is exposed (the general public can see right through this sort of stuff, which I think irritates the shit out the left), its proponents then look to academia for cover. This is how we wind up with books filled with elliptical and incomplete arguments on things like "[insert subject] theory." These books rarely apply any rigor in their analyses. They often read like papers attempting to dispute global warming or claim the singularity is imminent. But they support some extreme view, like everyone is a racist, or everyone is a sexist.
The left usually has altruistic reasons for engaging in this behavior. It wants to shape narratives because if a narrative takes hold, it can change the way people think, and change the world for the better. The right can be a bit more sinister, disputing facts to create narratives of doubt on things like climate change. But they share a common strategy: Elevating a story over the actual facts.
The actual fact is no one can credibly say everybody in any nation is sexist, ageist, racist, [insert other 'ist's here]. Can't be done. What can be said, however, is to say that a society generally is [insert 'ist']. We can look at how groups are treated and say, based on empirical evidence, society is [insert 'ist'].
No narrative, no "enlightened" and nebulous expansion of the definition of a word will change this reality and allow any man anywhere to ever say with any credibility "all residents of X country are [insert 'ist']."
