Quote:
Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield
I can’t say just about everyone is involved in systemic discrimination. There’s no way to make that leap. Everyone is a huge group. We could find a small percentage of everyone is responsible. We could find roughly half of everyone is responsible.
I’m avoiding using involved because that’s a broad term that could be used to assert everyone within the system is “involved” in discrimination simply because they deal with or work within the system. Using that measure, the entire population of the world from countries which deal with the US is involved in systemic discrimination.
I am comfortable staying that a significant portion of the US population is responsible for perpetuating systemic discrimination. I think a fair reading of available facts and data allows that. How significant? I don’t know. That’s the argument of degree I previously referenced.
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So now you are that much closer to understanding. You asked how the broad definition of racism could be useful. Here's the answer. We live in a racist society. Pretty much everyone in that society, without regard to individual views and attitudes, is involved in some way in perpetuating that racism. The broad definition of "racist" captures this, at the cost of blurring distinctions between individual attitudes that you find really important. In particular, you think it's really important to distinguish between people who are consciously and intentionally bigoted, and everyone else.
I don't disagree that your distinction has some value, but I don't think it has as much value as you do. (Partly because the word "bigot" has the meaning you want for "racist.") And you don't seem to have any other word to use to capture that sense in which everyone is complicit.
I will say this: If everyone is a "racist" then calling someone a "racist" becomes tautological, not particularly descriptive. That supports an intuition that the narrower sense of the word is more useful. On the other hand, using "racist" to describe actions or things or institutions that fit the broader sense is quite valuable, because that stuff is all around us and there really isn't another good way to say that. So that is very descriptive. Of course, if one isn't really concerned at all with that sort of thing, one doesn't need a word for it. Eskimos had lots of words for snow, but none for structured derivatives, or so I've heard.
