“While the rule on hate protects such groups, it does not protect all groups or all forms of identity. For example, the rule does not protect groups of people who are in the majority or who promote such attacks of hate.”
> “While the rule on hate protects such groups, it does not protect all groups or all forms of identity. For example, the rule does not protect groups of people who are in the majority or who promote such attacks of hate.”
So according to this rule, a racial minority can call members of a "majority race" sub-human, but not vice-versa. And yet, majority/minority are regional properties. How do you know a redditor's region in order to moderate their comment appropriately? Or are reddit employee regions the only ones that matter?
It's clearly a farce. Majority/minority status is a red herring. It's used only to enable reddit and mods to selectively apply the rules for their own ends. The fact is, it's unethical to call any race sub-human, regardless of whether the majority shares your views.
> According to academia, this is correct: racism only exists in the context of class based oppression.
Which is silly on its face. If two opposing races that hated each other held equal power, they might not be able to get the upper hand on the other, but they still hate each other solely on the basis of race. Is this the "non-racist" utopia they're after?
I don't know how widespread this belief is but I personally know people who believe this and it seems to be only spreading in the current heavily polarized environment. It is truly astonishing to witness
But that policy is not even talking about racism, however defined; it's talking about hate. Hate is hate, no matter who it's directed to. Prejudice is prejudice.
So we can never denounce hatred and bigotry without being hypocritical? We don't want to be hypocritical, right? So we should never denounce hatred and bigotry! Brilliant!
I am super, super tired of "if you denounce bigots that makes you just as bad as them."
> So we can never denounce hatred and bigotry without being hypocritical?
How do you get from "don't hate the haters" to "don't denounce hatred and bigotry"? Seems like you're missing a step like, "denouncing entails hatred". Do you actually believe that's true?
There used to be this notion of condemning the act and not the person. It actually used to be a progressive principle arguing for criminal justice reform geared more towards rehabilitation than punishment. It's sad that this nuance has been lost.
If you can't denounce without getting into dehumanization, you're guilty of exactly the same kind of hate that the most virulent racists in history are guilty of.
These redefinitions probably grew out of "critical theory" which is taught in social studies. The initial protests citing this line of argument seem to have started on college campuses, so there might be some merit to saying it grew out of academia.
Well, when people are arguing over the meaning of words - in this case "racism" - it is sometimes useful to reference what the "experts" think. There are entire fields of study within academia dedicated to this topic (often but not always including the word "critical").
Of course, whether or not said people have anything meaningful to say on the topic is not broadly agreed upon.
> “While the rule on hate protects such groups, it does not protect all groups or all forms of identity. For example, the rule does not protect groups of people who are in the majority or who promote such attacks of hate.”
The majority where? I can't find any specifics on what the majority qualifier is applied to (ex: the community in which the speech occurs, the geographic community of the user, etc).
It's even worse than that. People can honestly disagree about whether the term "racism" accurately describes something or whatever, but that's a far cry from actively condoning ("..this rule does not protect...") the whipping up of hate towards a majority of the population. The internet is full of nihilists and misanthropes who genuinely hate everyone and everything - I'm sure they can't wait to abuse this weakness in every way they can possibly think of. All for teh lulz, of course.
I don't understand this. For all of my life I thought racism = discrimination against someone due to their race. In the same way that sexist = discrimination against someone due to their sex. Ageist = discrimination against someone due to their age. Is this not the clear cut definition anymore? At what point did it diverge?
An '-ism' is an ideology which is used for organizing the world. The big difference is whether it's an individual ideology or a systemic ideology.
1 person renting out property = a rentier. Private ownership of land = capitalism.
1 person not hiring women = a misogynist. Companies not offering parental leave and assuming the primary caregiver is the mother = sexism.
Zuckerberg saying "young people are just smarter" = a bigot. Focusing on algorithms in software interviews which new-grads will have an easier time solving = ageism.
It's very common to call a prejudiced or discriminatory individual a "-ist" because the individual is subscribing to an ideology. But, that's emphasizing the individual rather than the society. If you only look at individual people as racist, they feel like isolated cases which don't have good solutions. Furthermore, you're absolving people who aren't explicitly discriminatory but who are still supporting systemic discrimination.
- This company will hire anyone who's qualified, but they're full of ivy-league graduates because they rely heavily on campus recruiters. Even though they aren't prejudiced when hiring, they are classist because they cater to high-class people.
- This bank will offer a mortgage to anyone with a steady paycheck and a safe-investment property. However, due to red-lining and racial covenants, Black people weren't able to purchase safe-investment homes so they didn't get good mortgages.
Granted, it's an uphill etymological battle because the individual usage is so common. When people argue for the systemic definition, they're arguing that we should focus on processes rather than individuals.
If you haven't noticed, we've spiraled down to the point where group think determines what is real, not facts or logic. If you can convince thousands people to scream that something is racist, then it "becomes" racist, no matter whether it meets any factual concrete definition of what racism is. Once this behavior started, it was then used as justification to change the definition of racism to something it never used to be.
Reddit's definition seems more contextual, it weighs the dynamics of current economic, cultural, institutional, etc... racism
Here is the Oxford dictionary definition:
"The inability or refusal to recognize the rights, needs, dignity, or value of people of particular races or geographical origins. More widely, the devaluation of various traits of character or intelligence as ‘typical’ of particular peoples. The category of race may itself be challenged, as implying an inference from trivial superficial differences of appearance to allegedly significant underlying differences of nature; increasingly evolutionary evidence suggests that the dispersal of one original people into different geographical locations is a relatively recent and genetically insignificant matter."
So according to this rule, a racial minority can call members of a "majority race" sub-human, but not vice-versa. And yet, majority/minority are regional properties. How do you know a redditor's region in order to moderate their comment appropriately? Or are reddit employee regions the only ones that matter?
It's clearly a farce. Majority/minority status is a red herring. It's used only to enable reddit and mods to selectively apply the rules for their own ends. The fact is, it's unethical to call any race sub-human, regardless of whether the majority shares your views.