[blahblahblogger]

> This won't be true no matter how many times you repeat it. "As a white person", I have been accused of racism. My response was to apologize and attempt to do better in future. I have largely been successful in those better attempts. When I have fallen short, I have apologized again.

Your experiences as a white person is not universal. The line you quoted is to accuse them -- your response seems to imply that you admit that when accused you were being racist?

The problem is that it is absolutely not okay to have to denounce yourself if you have done nothing wrong. Nowadays the accusations fly at a moment's notice, people jump to the most uncharitable of interpretations.

It would be better if the world followed some aspect of HN's guidelines: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

[jollybean]

" it is absolutely not okay to have to denounce yourself if you have done nothing wrong."

There are cases where offence is highly subjective and in some of those scenarios it's just polite to say sorry and move on. Not as admission of having done anything wrong, but just as a matter of recognizing the other persons position.

Obviously we don't want to get caught up in individuals aggravated and systematic abuse of that, i.e. to see everything as a slight, but it's definitely worth considering.

I speak a little bit too loudly - not too much but a bit.

Rarely someone will ask me to be more quiet on a plane. Sometimes rudely. I just say 'sorry' and move on. There's principle here other than just getting along. If it was 'removing a statue' I would think a little bit harder about it.

[jessaustin]

... your response seems to imply that you admit that when accused you were being racist?

I admitted that, I apologized for it, and I wasn't immediately struck dead by lightning. My nonwhite friends or coworkers wrinkled their noses for a moment, then continued as if they had forgotten about it. It's not as though I had surprised them. White Americans of a certain age (say... 14?) who claim never to have done or said anything racist might be fooling themselves, but they aren't fooling anyone else.

Even more scandalously, in addition to apologizing for momentary racism as described above, I've apologized before when I wasn't convinced I had done or said anything wrong. I didn't get struck by lightning then either!

Not only did I suffer no adverse consequences from these episodes, but it's certain that very few white Americans have suffered any adverse consequences from similar episodes. (If e.g. a teacher in a public school recites the Ku Klux Klan Kreed while beating a minority student with a stick, she might get fired, but I would consider that a different level of racism.) TFA pretends for a moment that some relatively innocent whites have suffered due to this phenomenon, but no actual examples are given or linked. Then TFA quickly transitions to a complicated argument about unanimity.

When we're young, it seems like a great injustice to set aside our own point of view in order to validate someone else's point of view. In a sense, it is a sort of injustice. However, injustice is common in this world. The reason so few people get angry about stupid rude shit like "You are so articulate!" (to use an example TFA apparently considers harmless) is because that would be a recipe for getting angry all the time. Going through life having to regularly just swallow that shit is a burden. If all I have to do to lighten that burden just a bit is to occasionally apologize and try to improve, I don't see why I shouldn't. TFA denies that reality, so it makes life in USA worse.

[jollybean]

If someone called you a thief, would you apologize?

And then apologize again for not proving well enough that you're not a thief?

Anyone who does something bad i.e. racism or theft - should apologize.

But we're arguing about the nature of the crime, whether or not there is crime etc., that's the whole point.

If you can be put on your heels arbitrarily, without any objective credence ... well then it's going to be hard for you. When groups impose that variation of social justice on others, then it's going to be a real problem.

[jessaustin]

There is no essay entitled "who gets to define what's ‘theft?’" Theft is a well-defined crime, at least with respect to material property.

Actually, your confusion is understandable, because racism is also quite well-defined. Racism is a property of our society, that 1.1% of black Americans are incarcerated, compared to 0.02% of white Americans. (even worse, more than 1 in 25 black men between 25 and 44 years old are incarcerated) [0] Racism is a property of our society, that the average white household holds ten times the wealth of the average black household. [1] Racism is a property of our society, that CIA and other executive-branch officials who created and profited from the 1980s crack epidemic will never answer for their crimes. [2]

Racism is that property of our society, that any attempt to somewhat balance these tilted scales is always drowned out by sophomoric false equivalences, like the idea that white people suffer as much from accusations of racism as BIPoCs do from racism itself.

The pathetic whinging recorded on this page makes clear that all of this is much harder for those who worry about who gets to "define" racism, than it is for me.

[0] https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2020/10/30/prisoners_in_20...

[1] https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2020/02/27/examining...

[2] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/gary-webb-dark-alliance_n_596...

[jollybean]

I'm not confused.

Also, I object to your 'sophomoric' view that racism is 'well defined' by the fact that 1.1% of the African American population is in prison etc..

The more likely reason is that African Americans commit significantly more crime, which is consistently validated by the somewhat more objective victimization surveys which correlate quite well with rates of incarceration.

We can then get into structural arguments about inequity which 'cause' said crime, but those points also have to stand up against the fact that other marginalized people (i.e. non African American PoC) are considerably less likely to commit crime, and that although poverty does correlate with crime, it's only a soft correlation, whereas the African American composition of a neighbourhood, unfortunately, has almost an absolute correlation with high crime.

That said, racism does exist, but the 'pathetic whinging' of those who somehow think that the term 'Master' really has anything to do with it, is ironically killing real hope for progress by discrediting their own Social Justice movements as virtue signalling pedantry.

How about we let Barack Obama, first African American President define what is 'racist'. We'll see some reforms in the Justice System - some of it more controversial than others, but we definitely won't be worried about the term 'Master Bedroom' or 'Master Branch', thankfully.

[jessaustin]

It would be plausible to imagine that the average black person commits say, three times the crime the average white person commits. (Plausible, but probably not true.) It would be a form of insanity, however, to think they really commit 55 times the crime, which would be in line with those incarceration figures. One name for that sort of insanity would be "racism".