[pure_simplicity]

Conservative black, sorry. You failed the guessing game and proved my point that skin color correlates with opinion about as poorly as maths ability does (i.e. not meaningfully).

MLK preached judging by Character instead of Color, which is referred to as color blindness.

Also, the moderates of his era were moderate relative to the political landscape of their era. This is not a universal indictment, but a very culturally situated and contextually dependent statement, unlike the universal and timeless principle of color blindness.

[spennant]

I read jrm4’s comment a little differently… It’s not that one’s skincolor correlates to opinion, but that it necessarily informs it. It’s pretty evident that people of similar skin tone and experiences may differ in opinion (just look at any family). Because of this, my takeaway wasn’t that it was the only thing that informed one’s opinion, but skin, as one of our society’s integral method for categorizing people, is intractable from the opinion forming process, particularly around matters concerning race.

[pure_simplicity]

Skin color is a very passive trait. You can choose to make it as important or unimportant as you want. People who overemphasize skin color tend to be bad people. As such, I advise you to just not pay any attention to skin color, because as soon as you try to involve race or skin color in your judgment, you by definition become racist (no matter how well intentioned you think you are). The only way to not be racist is to leave race out of the equation and judge based on universal principles, thereby treating everyone equally (and we can debate which principles are universal).

Because of that, calling your opinion a black opinion is literally an invitation to your conversation partner to become racist in their judgment, since you are trying to get your conversation partner to focus on your race when they are considering your opinion. The only right way of treating that additional and unnecessary information is to ignore it, but if it can only rightly be ignored, then it shouldn't be shared in the first place since it is an impediment to constructive dialogue.

Skin color is as important as the paint job on your car: for some people it means the world, for some people it's just a paint job. It's liberating to not care about race, you should try it.

[jrm4]

This is, without question, the most naive thing I have ever read on this entire site.

People will and do treat you differently because of your skin color. And how people treat you affects you, whether you think so or not. Either you live in a hole and never come out, or you haven't yet fully comprehended what's going on around you.

It's NOT simple. It's not "getting called names all the time" or anything like that. It takes time to fully get.

[pure_simplicity]

I'm not denying that some bad people will treat you differently for your skin color. What I am saying is that how you respond to it is far more important than how people treat you (for most situations in our modern society, though some situations can be insurmountably overwhelming). Rather than me being naive, it is you being too black and white in your thinking when reading my comment (by making a false dilemma).

I've experienced neo-nazi racism against my person because of my skin color (and I mean literal self-identified neo-nazis, not merely a label given through the slanderous designation of some intolerant leftist). Despite those experiences, because I chose not to succumb to a mentality of victimhood those people's hateful attitude and behavior did not have the harmful effect on me it could have had.

However, if you believe that racism is as pervasive as the air we breathe, and the country is systemically racist, and white people suffer from implicit bias (and mysteriously it's only white people, kinda racist huh?) then I have to disagree. Racism exists, but the vast majority of people are good people. These days, the real racists (besides the tiny minority of actual white supremacists) are the so called 'anti-racists'. Their anti-white rhetoric to me is as appalling as the anti-black rhetoric of white supremacists. They forget the golden rule, don't do to others what you don't want done to you.

[shashwatak]

Color-Blindness is not the same thing as Judging the Content of Character.

Of course, we all deserve to be judged based on the content of our character and not on superficial markers like skin, gender, etc, etc, etc.

However, broadly and statistically speaking, people from different economic and racial groups tend to have differing experiences, largely because of systems and not really because of any individual experience.

This is the core thesis of Critical Theory (and it’s subset Critical Race Theory): in the court of law, one must consider all of the details and context of a person, as they necessarily have an impact on an individual’s experiences.

[pure_simplicity]

The moment you make race a factor in your judgment, by you have become racist by definition. The only right way to treat people is without regards to race / color, but by judging them according to universal principles.

The fundamental flaw of CRT is that it denies color-blindness. It doesn't matter that CRT claims to have good intentions for making race a factor in your judgment, it is still racist. The (progressive) eugenicists of yesteryear had good intentions too, but were horribly evil. Somehow progressives keep falling for the same trap and history keeps repeating itself. It's like racism is baked into their DNA. In every era they attempt to judge based on race and justify it with their ostensibly good intentions. It was racist then and it's racist now, but somehow the current iteration of left wing racism is just as socially acceptable and fashionable as every previous iteration.

Also I have a problem with the view that systems are the main reason for individual experiences. Two factors make up your life: your environment and your decisions. Your decisions are the most important part. No matter how good your environment, you can ruin your life by your decisions. No matter how bad your environment you can improve your life with your decisions. Constantly externalizing blame is a surefire way to short circuit the learning process that leads to self improvement. Having said that, I do agree that systems should be improved and tweaked, but it should be done carefully, because it's far easier to damage a reasonably effective complex system than to improve it.

[shashwatak]

> The moment you make race a factor in your judgment, by you have become racist by definition.

This is not true. I just googled "racist" and it says "prejudiced against or antagonistic toward a person or people on the basis of their membership in a particular racial or ethnic group, typically one that is a minority or marginalized.".

Simply considering race doesn't automatically make it prejudiced or antagonistic.

And of course, there's also the concept of "structural racism", which is what CRT aims to help us dismantle.

[pure_simplicity]

If you look up the definition of racism you find:

"Discrimination or prejudice based on race." - from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

Since discrimination based on race is racism, once you make race a factor in your judgment (even if it's one factor out of many) then you are discriminating based on race and therefore racist.

It doesn't matter if you are trying to help a specific race or hurt another race, privilege or oppression, they are two sides of the same racist coin. You may think you can justify your racism by appealing to historical racism, but it doesn't change the fact that you are being racist.

I happen to think that all racism is evil, I don't care about your intentions or which group it's directed at. After all, even Hitler claimed to have good intentions. There has yet to arise a racist that doesn't believe that he is doing something good. That's why I think trying to excuse some forms of racism while condemning others is arbitrary and hypocritical. Ends don't justify means. If you actually want to help people, find a way to do it that is not racist.

Edit: forgot to respond to CRT / structural racism

If by structural racism you mean anything other than laws/policies that are overtly racist or intentionally designed to target certain races despite having no overt racist language, then I agree that that is a problem. If you however conclude from a disparity in outcome that racial discrimination must be the cause of the disparity, then I think you are committing a logical fallacy (affirming the consequent).

The fallacious argument is:

(1) If there is structural racism then you will see disparity in outcome for different races. (2) there is disparity in outcome for different races (3) therefore there is structural racism

There can be any number of reasons to explain a disparity in outcomes across races. The existence of the disparity is not enough to prove racism. What I find is that the accusation of racism is made too easily, because there is political currency in victimhood. It's sad because tilting at windmills obstructs the actual progress that can be made at solving real problems, because we are distracted with thought-policing our white neighbors.