Yep. There are two competing beliefs about what will end racism. 1) Focusing intensely on race to become alert to how racism operates on many implicit levels. 2) Treating race as irrelevant to normalise evaluating people individually & make casual racism socially unacceptable.https://twitter.com/IonaItalia/status/998068548156166144 …
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The rationale for the second one is that racism is reliant on social norms and therefore can be most effectively addressed if society ceases to attach social or moral significance to race and frowns upon people who do so.
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The first way is identity politics and the second way is universal liberalism. Often the difference between them comes down to beliefs for & against cultural constructivism but not this time. Both anti-racist approaches accept that racism is a cultural construct.
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Our tendency towards tribalism is innate, of course, but applying this to skin colour is not. In fact, race is something we forget about fast when part of a group with shared aims whilst always remaining conscious of sex. (Pietraszewski et al. 2015)
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The IdPol lot actually come closer to believing racism to being innate in this case tho they don't think it is biological. They think it is so deeply embedded in culture that we simply can't help being racist. Therefore, addressing the symptoms won't help. Have to get at the root
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The universal liberals are not convinced of this. We tend to think that by making expressions of racism socially unacceptable, cultural change can happen pretty fast and this does, in fact, appear to be what has happened in the last 60 years re: sexism, racism & homophobia.
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Therefore they fear that identity politics which seek to renormalise thinking in terms of race is likely to be counterproductive & serve only to reignite racial tribalisms which were being overcome.
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When uncharitable, the universal liberals will accuse the IdPols of being racist and the Idpols will accuse the UniLibs of pretending problems don't exist because they themselves are not personally affected by them.
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Sometimes these accusations can be justified but more often they can't and both groups genuinely seek the end of racism but just disagree on how to achieve that. So much conflict between the identitarian left and the universal liberals comes down this.
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End of conversation
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