[asabjorn]

> You claim not to know their true motivation, yet your entire argument relies on the assumption that they had malicious intent. You also note that “the act they claim to be racist may or may not be racist” and yet it is clear that you have assumed that it is not throughout your post.

The person(s) that attacked Singer used social justice activist techniques, claim of and demand for denouncing "white supremacy" in order to reduce a viewpoint opponents moral authority, where "white supremacy" uses the social justice unstated redefinition of the colloquial term to mean "policy or habitual behavior that could perpetrate outcomes not in alignment with social justice dogma".

This activist technique is a kafka trap with no good answer. Keeping that in mind its pretty clear where the accuser comes from.

As a side-note: a discussion/debate between viewpoint opponent break down if serious accusation are made without evidence, and a healthy discussion and work environment need to exclude such bad actors. Kudos to basecamp and coinbase for adopting policies that discourage such behavior.

[comte7092]

Just to clear things up, do you agree or disagree with my previous statement that “ people are treated differently by society as a whole, based on their race”? Further that white people have historically been placed at the top of a hierarchy by society at large, above other groups?

If you agree with both of those statements, do you believe white peoples are still given a higher place in society? Do you believe that to no longer be the case?

I’ll limit this to the United States.

[asabjorn]

> Just to clear things up, do you agree or disagree with my previous statement that “ people are treated differently by society as a whole, based on their race”? Further that white people have historically been placed at the top of a hierarchy by society at large, above other groups?

You are asking a question positioned using very low-fidelity and poorly scoped social justice dogma.

With Nigerians topping educaction and income stats clearly low-fidelity race characteristics is not a sufficient predictor of outcome. Likewise, asian americans have the highest median income so being majority does not predict the best outcome.

In addition to this, official identity based government and company policies create asymmetry in official hiring as well as promotion policies that favor BIPOC and women.

What does seem like a great predictor is being born into a family-focused culture where kids education is extremely important. This is a commonality between sub-cultures that do well, and skin color is no great predictor for culture. Some of the sub-cultures that does the worst have high rates of single parenting, including sub-cultures of white culture, and single parenting is also a great predictor of lower household income.

[comte7092]

I took it as a given that we could agree that there was an explicit system of racial hierarchy in the United States.

Call that social justice dogma if you want, but I’d consider it an objective fact.

Edit: because it seems to be unclear. The word “was” was in reference to the past. It’s an objective fact that there _was_ an explicit system of racial hierarchy in the United States.

[asabjorn]

> I took it as a given that we could agree that there was an explicit system of racial hierarchy in the United States.

When you think it's explicit instead of implicit you are in a minority even amongst social justice adherents. Social justice started focusing on "implicit" bias and racism because the instances of explicit racism in the 2000s were not numerous enough to support its activist objective of tearing down the system and replacing it.

The whole concept of "systemic oppression" is based around this realization, where social justice argue that capitalism fool people into being happy and content so that they don't oppose an implicitly oppressive system that traps them in a false reality.

> Call that social justice dogma if you want, but I’d consider it an objective fact.

The examples in my previous message show that it's neither descriptive nor factual.

Social justice prescribe a totalizing worldview that use an every-increasing set of politically motivated identity groups to further an activist objective. The objective is to tear down the system and the promise is a utopia once everyone agrees with the utopic vision.

[comte7092]

You’re arguing against a straw man, or at best an extreme minority viewpoint.

Given the history of the United States, wherein there existed both legal and extralegal forms of racial discrimination, the primary assertion is that while the obvious forms of racial discrimination have been abolished, there continue be forms of systematic racial discrimination. These people assert that this is a bad thing and it should be corrected. This is not about bringing about a utopia, but about righting a wrong.

None of this is “totalizing”. Indeed, even in the past, during slavery and Jim Crow, you had examples of successful black people and other POC (Web Debois, Fredrick Douglass). The argument is simply that POC face barriers that white people simply don’t face, not that those barriers are impossible to overcome.

[asabjorn]

Social justice is totalizing as an ideology, I was not referring to past racial discrimination.

In social justice activism "racism" is redefined to mean "inequitable outcomes". So of cause with this change of definition you can say the "group" experience racism when you really just mean that one group does better than another. DEI is the prescribed social justice solution, ignoring how the equity doctrine has destroyed every society it touched.

If you use the colloqial definition of racism then affirmative action, diversity quotas, DEI preferential hiring&promotion are all widespread policies that discriminate against white people based upon their race. DEI programs also use negative racial profiling and stereotyping. The claim that white people do not experience racism is therefore objectively wrong.

So social justice is arguing for explicit racist policies to fix "implicit racism", which really means "equitable outcomes"