[Eddy_Viscosity2]

Why can't the banning depictions of mohammad also be 'perfectly reasonable' because it university classrooms are not places of intellectual freedom, they are places of indoctrination. I can't think of any good reason for a teacher to want to violate this policy unless they want to push their own agenda onto the students. See how generic your defense is? It can be used for anything you disagree with.

'I need a new butt', was a book on the schools reading list. Was firing that teacher perfectly reasonable also? Was a funny book about butts indoctrination?

Critical race theory is being muzzled at the university level by the government in florida. Are you angry about that overreach by state?

[yucky]

    > Critical race theory is being muzzled at the university level by the government in florida. Are you angry about that overreach by state?

Critical race theory needs to be treated the same as other pro-discrimination ideologies. Either they're all ok or none are ok. Picking and choosing one type of racial discrimination to support is in fact racist.

After all, Ibram X. Kendi who is generally regarded as the foremost proponent of Critical Race Theory argued in his book How to Be an Antiracist that, “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.” This is a fundamental position of Critical Race teachings.

Many would argue it's reasonable for parents to not want this sort of "good racial discrimination" being taught to their kids.

[ModernMech]

> Either they're all ok or none are ok.

Ibram X. Kendi is making a few points in the quoted passage.

The first is that it's not enough to just say "no more discrimination" after the entire system has already been set up to discriminate. That just results in a system that perpetuates discrimination.

To illustrate with an example: you and I sit down to play a game of Monopoly. Except instead of letting you play from the beginning, I tie you down and you have to watch me play the game alone until I control the bank, and have hotels on every space. At this point, I untie you and invite you to join me playing by the usual rules of the game.

"But that's not fair, you're obviously going to win." you say

"How is it not fair? We're both playing the game by the same rules."

--

The second point he's making is that there's no "end" to discrimination. The entire idea is just nonsense given the dynamics he describes, and it shouldn't be a goal much like eliminating all bias to appear fair and balanced, or vowing to never make a mistake again in order to be competent. Even if you declare it at an end, and try your hardest to end it in practice, discrimination still happens. It should be our goal to think long and hard about how to deal with discrimination rather than to endeavor to eliminate it.

[yucky]

Your analogy doesn't work because it assumes anything that happens to your ancestors necessarily affects you directly for every generation that comes after, forever. Your monopoly example is using a game that you and I play in directly against each other, when the reality is we have no idea how much positive or negative impact the ancestors of any given person has had on their lot in life.

Do you think people in Appalachia or a trailer park near you who have lived in generational poverty are some how benefited by their skin color? That would assume upper class people associate themselves with lower class, just due to skin color. But we know really that it's based on in groups and out groups. To test this, ask the average upper or upper middle class educated white person to describe the average trailer park dweller with the same color skin, and see their response.

It also assumes a lot of things based on skin color alone. If the concern is that we want to help those who need financial assistance, or educational assistance or whatever then there are ways to do that with means testing, not by relying on a Sherwin Williams color chart held up against your skin.

[ModernMech]

> anything that happens to your ancestors necessarily affects you directly for every generation that comes after, forever.

No, that's not what I said. The point is that the state of the system interplays with the rules governing the system. You can't ignore the state of the system and declare the game fair by looking at just the rules.

> when the reality is we have no idea how much positive or negative impact the ancestors of any given person has had on their lot in life.

I mean, we do though. Generational wealth is a thing. American slavery isn't even the distant past; the last person born into slavery died within living memory.

> If the concern is that we want to help those who need financial assistance, or educational assistance or whatever then there are ways to do that with means testing

Right, which involves a process of discrimination to correct for past discrimination.

> not by relying on a Sherwin Williams color chart held up against your skin.

Of course there are better ways to do things than this terrible strawman you built.

[yucky]

   > I mean, we do though. Generational wealth is a thing. American slavery isn't even the distant past

70% of generational wealth is lost by the 2nd generation, 90% by the 3rd generation[1][2][3], and it grows even more distant each generation after that. American slavery was around 15-20 generations ago, meaning there is almost zero generational wealth left in the same family hands from slavery. Also, a tiny percentage of American are even descended from a slave holding family in the first place..

So if 15-20 generations isn't long enough, how many more generations into the future would you say we need to discriminate against people based on skin color before we can call it enough? And what do we do about the millions of poor people with the wrong color skin, just keep discriminating against them due to their race and hope they don't take it personally?

   > Of course there are better ways to do things than this terrible strawman you built.

It's not a strawman though. If you're basing preferential treatment on race, how exactly do you determine that? Race isn't a scientific thing, so we have to either take people at their word or use a color chart. Is there a different method you had in mind?

[1] https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/generational-wealth:-why-do-...

[2] https://money.com/rich-families-lose-wealth/

[3] https://www.marketwatch.com/story/heres-why-90-of-rich-peopl...

[ModernMech]

> American slavery was around 15-20 generations ago

Maybe you missed where I said the last person born into slavery died in living memory.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_last_survivors_of_Am...

But the discussion of slavery kind of misses the larger point; that systemic discrimination was not in fact dismantled in America with the end of chattel slavery. Other systems replaced the intent, and those persisted long past the Civil War, well into recent history to today.

> It's not a strawman though. If you're basing preferential treatment on race, how exactly do you determine that?

No one is holding up color scales to people’s skin, and no one suggested doing so, certainly not me. That’s how your argument is a straw man.

It sounds like you are trying to make a different argument now, and if you want to make that one without building a straw man, please do so.

[Eddy_Viscosity2]

Well then I don't get it. Putting up depictions of Mohammad can easily be viewed as inflammatory discrimination against Muslims, but that's ok?

Again, I don't think this teacher should have been fired. But the arguments against it in these comments seem hypocritical when support is given to other types of censorship only because they happen to disagree with what was being suppressed.

[Eddy_Viscosity2]

> Although it was unnecessarily inflammatory in my opinion, it isn't a universal belief among Muslims that Mohammad can't be depicted and it certainly isn't a core tenet of Islam. If anything, one would argue that depictions of Mohammad should be treated the same as depictions of Jesus, Moses etc.

Exactly my point. Arguments could be made about the validity of any of these topics. There is no consistent basis, just 'This is censorship because topic is bad in my opinion, but other topic can be censored without issue because I disagree with it'.

[yucky]

   > Well then I don't get it. Putting up depictions of Mohammad can easily be viewed as inflammatory discrimination against Muslims, but that's ok?

Although it was unnecessarily inflammatory in my opinion, it isn't a universal belief among Muslims that Mohammad can't be depicted and it certainly isn't a core tenet of Islam. If anything, one would argue that depictions of Mohammad should be treated the same as depictions of Jesus, Moses etc.

[Eddy_Viscosity2]

Ps, side question. How do you make the quoted part of the comment come out in a different font like that?

[ModernMech]

Prepend a paragraph with two spaces