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How do you define racism?

popoi said:
It has at various times and places been an explicit prerequisite for access to power, and in many more times and places an implicit one. This is the wrongest take I've seen in quite some time.
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Do you have any examples of White skin being an explicit or implicit prerequisite for access to power?
 
BobTheCoward said:
I am an econ major. Words that have a common meaning there sometimes have a completely different meaning in the social sciences.

Neither definition is wrong. The definition of words are axioms themselves.
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The article linked in my previous post talks about this. The proponents of the Prejudice + Power definition have attempted to push that as the only definition for political reasons.
 
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There's certainly room for looking at many ways that racist motivations are manifest and that among the most egregious are institutional and systemic oppression. But yeah, even as progressive as I am, I can't get on board with excusing individual acts of racially (or any immutable quality) motivated judgment of other individuals or groups. Differences in scale or degree of harm done are relevant, but they shouldn't be used to dismiss the individual offenses. I was taught that was 'minimization' which is a form of dehumanizing tactic.

ETA: it could also be described as a form of gatekeeping, where only certain opinions or 'types' of people are allowed to participate in the discussion.
 
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shuttlt said:
The article linked in my previous post talks about this. The proponents of the Prejudice + Power definition have attempted to push that as the only definition for political reasons.
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We should probably debate the conditions in which we accept new social sciences developments and test this subject against it. That way we can ensure we are being intellectually honest.
 
shuttlt said:
I don't understand this argument. You begin by stating that you think the meaning of racism has always been prejudice+power. You then give an example of prejudice+power being a bad thing. I don't see how the two relate. Don't you need to show that that was the common meaning in what ever period you are talking about?
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The example given was one that can (hopefully) be agreed was an instance of racism and A Bad Thing. The purpose of bringing it up was to point out that the prejudice+power definition better captures why the Thing was Bad, which makes it more useful for describing Things That Are Bad Now.
 
Macgyver1968 said:
Can we all just agree that white, straight ,CIS, men are the problems with everything that's wrong with the world?
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That works for me.

psionl0 said:
Racism is the lack of firmly held belief that all white people are evil and must be shot on sight.
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Or that one too.

At least those definition are just good old fashioned ignorance based racism. It's this "power" dimension that is problematic. Everybody acts like its self-evident that White people possess "power" that non-Whites do not. Why? What is it about the world that you could use as evidence that White people are powerful?

The fact is that White people are no more powerful than any other arbitrary grouping of people. People who pretend that White people have "power" and that therefore, only White people can be racist are the one's who are creating racial divisions. They're bigots trying to justify their bigotry
 
Shame I and loads of others can't comment on such an interesting thread.

But apparently the rest of the world's millennia of history on the definition of racism is irrelevant when you can just look at the US
 
cullennz said:
Shame I and loads of others can't comment on such an interesting thread.

But apparently the rest of the world's millennia of history on the definition of racism is irrelevant when you can just look at the US
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I don't see why you can't comment. The belief that only white people can be racist is global.
 
popoi said:
The example given was one that can (hopefully) be agreed was an instance of racism and A Bad Thing.
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I certainly agree.

popoi said:
The purpose of bringing it up was to point out that the prejudice+power definition better captures why the Thing was Bad, which makes it more useful for describing Things That Are Bad Now.
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That is to say that it is a political move to re-purpose the word? If there are endless debates on the meaning of the word "racist" caused by this definitional change, I fail to see how it is a more useful definition. It's not like during the anti-slavery movement, or the civil rights era they struggled to say that they thought institutional racism was a bad thing.

What is the problem that is being solved by this change? I see no good and lots of harm. You create a bunch of people who think there its OK to hold and act out on bigoted racial opinions because they can't be racist, you get the backs up of a lot of people who would otherwise agree with you, and you create a bottomless pit of sophistry where people pretend that they are entirely ignorant of the definition that has been in play for 100 years.
 
I find the following definition to be quite sufficient:

If awareness of someone's ethnic background causes you to speak with, act towards, or think about them in a way that differs from how you treat people of different eye colors, you are racist.
 
Molinaro said:
I find the following definition to be quite sufficient:

If awareness of someone's ethnic background causes you to speak with, act towards, or think about them in a way that differs from how you treat people of different eye colors, you are racist.
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Yeah those gingers - sub human they are!



;)
 
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