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Conversation

As a general rule, I assume that racism is probably not a motivation for most things. Not that it *can't* be, only that it's culturally inflated to the point where I automatically adjust downwards. There's *lots* of other often-worse motivations for things that aren't racism.

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Like, I think a lot of what's perceived as racism would be more accurately described as: *cultural bias *classism *religious fear *unintended outcomes of innocent upstream things *gender role problems *genetics

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And to reiterate - this doesn't mean I don't think racism exists. I think it absolutely does, where it does it's horribly damaging to the people who suffer from it, and we shouldn't dismiss racism as "oh it's just classism or something" in cases where this isn't true.

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My point is more- when I was religious, we believed that Christians were persecuted, and so any info that involved Christians having a bad time was reinterpreted as persecution. Now, some Christians *are* persecuted, and this is awful! But *also*, I shoulda been more skeptical.

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And to claim authority of identity, I am a woman and think a lot of the claims of sexism against women are overblown and can be attributed to other things, and I automatically downgrade the chance something is sexist when I hear about it. But this doesn't mean sexism isn't real!

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I just think it's a very general human feature - when a powerful narrative hits us (like one involving underdogs), it's typically powerful *because* it has truth, and then once it grows teeth it becomes a bigger caricature that's powerful *regardless* of the truth.

6:55 PM · Mar 17, 2021

Replying to

And it can be extremely hard to figure out how to knock down the false caricature without also knocking down the important truths inside of it. Lots of people get reactive and aren't interested in preserving any of it. It's a really hard, triggering, and messy process.

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Yep. Humans are not as rational or enlightened as we like to think. We're deeply tribal creatures. We love a story that centers us as underdog protagonists with a villain to fight. The problem is when complex social phenomena gets used to push narratives around group guilt.