[jcims]

>No it doesn't. A law does not become racist when one race disproportionately breaks it, otherwise every law everywhere would be racist.

I think you'll find there are quite a few folks that disagree with you on this point, some feel that laws can be considered racist exclusively because of disproportionate impact on specific communities.

Personally I think it just boils down to how people define the term 'racist'. When I was growing up (many moons ago), the term was used primarily to describe intent, but now it has expanded to include outcomes.

[kevingadd]

Intent is an increasingly imaginary concept when decisionmaking is partially or completely performed by neural nets and checklists. As such, outcomes end up being the important thing to examine.

[jcims]

"The road to hell is paved with good intentions."

I agree that it's important to examine outcomes. It's actually the fundamental measurement of a decision and if we recast 'intent' as 'desired outcome' then its clear why paying attention to it is important.

My problem is that I was taught that 'racist' describes an ugly mindset that would confer malice. That may be true in some cases where outcomes disproportionately affect certain folks, but it's clearly not always the case and implying otherwise just distracts the conversation.

[TeMPOraL]

Agreed, but this cuts both ways. Intent has a lot of moral judgement attached to it - if we're redefining a word to be primarily about outcomes instead of intent, we should also drop the implied moral assertions around it.

[kevingadd]

Mmm, I'm not so sure. Certainly the things it means about the person responsible for the decision are a little different - lots of people accidentally put policies into place that harm minority groups, etc. But if the outcome is the same and a person in power chooses not to fix it, it really doesn't matter what their intent is, it's a moral failure not to help the people who need your help if you're able to do so. I don't really care whether they say slurs in their spare time with friends, I just want my elected (and un-elected) representatives to do what they can to prevent people from dying of starvation or preventable diseases.