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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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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I think that the problem here is that both rationales assume that racism is ONLY a cultural construct. It is a cultural construct in the sense that it defines "race" and specific prejudices culturally. But tribalism (the true foundation of racism or religious prejudice) isn't.
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Maybe one day race will not be taken as the foundation for belonging or not into a group. But I doubt human beings will one day be able to be completely non-tribal. If it's not race, it's religion, or ideology, or social attitudes that cause division and prejudice.
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Accepting that humans are tribal allows us to refocus the perspective from eliminating racism to reducing the damage that racism causes as much as possible. You can't retrain people into not having prejudices, but you can create institutions to protect the rights of minorities.
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If society protects rights and ensures that the reasons for tensions (like lack of access to good services or to jobs) are reduces, then through normalization and force of habit, people let their prejudices matter less and less, and those who express it are seen as wrong.
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But you'll never get complete agreement. SOME people will continue to harbor prejudices with potentially harmful consequences, and there's little you can do about it except ensuring that those people don't get in a position of power.
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Wanting to COMPLETELY erase racism through cultural bombardment of anti-racist messages is like wanting to COMPLETELY erase smoking through cultural bombardment of anti-smoking messages. We have horrifying images on cigarette packs. People still haven't stopped smoking.
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Yeah racism and prejudice in general are innate and will never go away unfortunately. It isn’t a social or cultural construct. This is my problem w/ da Left. Either they deny human nature exists or in Helen’s case they get it wrong. Helen, stop creating ur own alternate reality
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After having looked at the way they're executed: -The first way is doomed to failure and worse; it's doomed to exacerbate the problem. -The second is the only path forward - though it will be long and rocky.
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