this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2023
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Don’t You Know Who I Am?
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You cannot in good faith compare people who have suffered because if their skin color to those who have not, when talking about situations where skin color comes up.
Are both situations racist by pure definition? Sure. Just like punching a man and punching a child are both punching. One is much more wrong.
Fuck all that noise...
One racially motivated act (say hitting someone because of their skin color) is not any more or less racist depending on the race of the victim. If you believe that, it is by definition a racist value you're holding.
There's a difference when it comes to contextual, social and historical factors. Like the word cracker is insensitive but doesn't carry the hateful connotations and discrimination that the N-word possesses.
But anyone trying to say it's more or less appropriate to hate on any single group is just demonstrating their own implicit and explicit racial biases.
This is only true if you don't think the severity of the damage correlates to the severity of the racism. If we go with your definition, then all racism is equivalent, and we can't tell any apart. That seems like an arbitrarily limiting and useless way to think about it. Why would we not want to be able to compare how severe each racist act is?
This is only true if you think all groups are equally strong and equally oppressed by each other and the system. But if that's not the case, then I would say it's OK to be mean to the ones who are stronger or less oppressed. It's a means of coping with the inequality. Just like we normal folks like to mock billionaires, while they're actively causing suffering.
If one person engages in a racially motivated attack on another individual, it is not any more or less racist if the victim was black or white.
If a man was walking down the street and was beaten to death by an angry mob based entirely on the individual's race, is it less racially motivated if the victim was one race over another?
Are we punishing people for the sins of our ancestors? Does historic racism against one race justify mistreatment of another thru a retributivist mindset?
This backwards hypervigilant, hypersensitivity and hypocritically encouraging implicit and explicit racism as morally permissible retributivist actions needs to stop. Racism is racism. We need to respect each other as equals if we want racism to stop. You're calling for unequal treatment/enforcement of social policies based on one's race. Fuck that noise.
Ok, so you're conflating the terms "racist" and "racially motivated". Yeah, if you do that, then your point makes sense.
Two different actions with different impacts can be different amounts of racist, but both could be equally racially motivated. For example, it's way more racist for someone to want to murder a black person than it is for someone to be afraid of a black person and cross the street when they're coming. Both are equally racially motivated, but different amounts of racist. See the point? More impact = more racism.
And if we can agree that it's the 'impact' that makes something more/less racist, then we can see how a white person saying X and a black person saying X could be different amounts of racist, depending on the impact. If a Latino would call a white person the N word, that's less racist than calling a black person that. Right?
I couldn't tell you. All of the racism that's present today, and still ongoing, means we don't know the answer to that. Find me a place where this happens and I'm happy to learn.
It’s reductive to take that as saying “it’s more appropriate to hate on white people”. They worded it a bit poorly imo but the analogy they’re responding to is still crappy. There isn’t an issue of black women assuming white men don’t know the origins of RNA, but there is an issue of men assuming women don’t know anything about “nerdy” things like film. Obviously they assumed wrong with Ed Solomon, but the analogy is still in bad faith because it’s wouldn’t be for the same reason.
This specific situation described in this post is an issue of "women assuming that the man offering his take on a subject was ignorant about it and driven by machism" (as that's exactly what they accused him off when they called his offer one of "mansplaining").
(In fact what makes this a bit of a story is that rather than just saying "No thanks", they instead explicitly accused him of offering an ignorant opinion driven by sexist)
Surelly both the "men assuming women don’t know anything about 'nerdy' things like film" and "women assuming that men offering their own take on a subject are ignorant and driven by sexism" are equally wrong?!
How is instantly presuming such bad things about other people purelly on the basis of the number of Y chromossomes they were born with, less sexist if its acting/voicing prejudice (quite literally: they prejudged the other person) from XX persons towards XY persons than if it is from XY persons towards XX persons?
It's kinda the whole point of this whole comment thread: prejudice is prejudice and its discriminatory to excuse it for some people but not for others purelly on the bases of some having being born with certain characteristics and the others not.
You’re making a lot of assumptions about what I said. It doesn’t excuse it, I directly said they were wrong in this instance. My comment was directed towards the absurd comparison of women incorrectly assuming a white guy was mansplaining and a black woman who knows about the origins of RNA being dismissed. It’s really ignorant to equate the widespread, discriminatory assumption of women and black people being stupid and uneducated to two women not giving credit to the MIB writer lol. The former affects your education, livelihood, and career and the latter is funny at best and manufactured rage at worst. They are not at all equivalent.
I just want to clarify this again because this is just a Reddit-tier mentality that’s super brain dead: just because I’m saying this guy isn’t a tragic victim doesn’t mean I’m a crazy radical feminist that hates men.
I think I see what you mean.
That said, "some discriminations are not all that bad compared to other discriminations out there" doesn't look like a hill worth fighting on, as excusing some discrimination (as long as it comes from people who genetically look similar to victims of discrimination) isn't exactly a moral high ground.
If you really are against discrimination then surelly you are against treating and judging people differently based on being born with some characteristics or others, rather than seeking to excuse (or at least lighten the blame) for some because they just so happen to share some genetic characteristics with other, unrelated, people who were victims of discrimination in the past.
You stop discrimination by going against discriminatory acts and practices, you don't do it by keeping the framework of categorizing people on their genetics and treating and judging them based on such categories, and just switching around the categories deemed implicitly "worthy" and "unworthy".
The story here is that two people acted in a discriminatory, prejudiced way towards a third person and that action turned out to be the pinnacle of being wrong AND showed them as massivelly sexist (those two thing were what made it a story). Their actions speak for themselves and trying to use their genetic makeup to lighten the judgment of those actions is the dictionary definition of discrimination. Had they been victims of discrimination previously from the other person, then absolutelly, but they were not, they just prejudged the other person on his genetics and then proceeded to accuse him of sexism.
As a brown person. It doesn't matter what color you are. Someone's race shouldn't matter at all when comparing how fucked up something is unless it's directly culturally relevant.
A white guy vs black woman RNA paper writing PhD being told gtfo is equally offensive. Race only matter like if you told the white guy vs black woman something like a joke about picking cotton or the white guy a joke about him fucking his sister.
Telling someone "you don't matter / you are the enemy" for over a decade and to millions of people is how an actual white nationalist movement became a thing. You can only tell people how horrible and evil they are until they start to believe in it.
What if that person is white of Jewish origin? Or Irish? Heck, I know a Lebanese guy who's whiter than me and has red hair...
Mocking a culture that has been abused because of their culture (Jews) is worse than mocking a culture that has not been abused for their culture (Karens). But mocking white looking people for being white isn't the same as their culture. It matters what you mock.
Don't punch down. It's not more complicated than that. And if you're not sure if you're punching down, don't punch.