[hx87]

My best guess is that mjolk perceives that your hypothesis is the following:

* Americans (as individuals) are racist,

whereas your hypothesis is:

* America (as a society) is racist.

The latter acknowledges that a society can be racist because of past actions even if all present members are non-racist, whereas the former assumes every member to be guilty of racism unless proven innocent. That's a very strong (and in my opinion, inaccurate and unfounded) accusation towards individual Americans, and it shifts the burden of proof in a way that is unjust towards the accused.

In short, the challenge is to diagnose and fight systemic racism without unjustly blaming individuals caught up in that system, even if said individuals appear to be the beneficiaries. The same is true for the fight against sexism.

As for the "all people can be racist" issue, remember that because systemic racism against white people is minuscule, the personal majority of racism that white people do experience is personal racism, an in this area minorities are just as bad as white people, if not more so. As an Asian-American I have encountered some personal racism, the vast majority of that from blacks and latinos while in middle and high school.

[taneq]

This ambiguity with the usage of the word 'racist' is part of a common motte-and-bailey gambit used by progressives when discussing race and discrimination. After starting with accusations of racism (meaning that the individual will discriminate against others according to their race), they retreat behind their redefinition of the word, claiming they just meant that systemic bias does exist. When this claim (which is hard to refute) is accepted, they take the acceptance as an admission of individual discriminatory behaviour.

You can see this in action above where jolux starts out using the first definition ("there is a high probability you have at the very least some implicit bias against non-white people") then switches back and forth.

[jolux]

Yah, I don't actually think mjolk or you are willfully discriminatory, and I think you misunderstand. Because implicit bias is subconscious, it requires conscious effort to recognize and and correct it. I'm not saying and will not try to argue that people say and do things that they know to be racist because they want to be racist, because nobody does want to be racist. However if it is so probable that you have implicit bias against non-white people I would ask why is it a bad thing to try and change that?

Also it doesn't really matter to the person being discriminated against whether it's a question of individual will or implicit bias, and we are still responsible for both. I will even argue that there's a high probability most white people have a lot of explicit bias as well, the reason I didn't mention that is because you can't test it empirically in the same way as implicit bias.

[hx87]

> However if it is so probable that you have implicit bias against non-white people I would ask why is it a bad thing to try and change that?

It's because most people by default adhere to a toxic combination of virtue ethics and retributive justice. Under that system, if you do bad things, the obligation isn't on you to improve yourself and your actions, but on others to make you suffer because you are a "bad person". People don't want to suffer, so they reject the initial premise.

Virtue ethics has its positives, but retributive justice needs to die in a fire.

[reitanqild]

> whereas your hypothesis is:

> * America (as a society) is racist.

If that is what jolux meant I have misread too.

To me it reads like jolux is speaking about us as individual racists, which more or less obviously is easily interpreted as an attempted insult.