[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".