[jrflowers]

I showed the videos to my friend and he keeps saying stuff like “Seems like it’s racists making and sharing the racist videos” and “So if a person posts a bunch of racist garbage and then post ‘I’m not racist in my heart’ then the second post is obviously true?”

I keep trying to explain that no, it’s not real racism because if you can imagine that it’s not real, it must not be real but then he says “Who made you the arbiter of racism?” and “What purpose on God’s Green Earth does it serve anyone, in any context, to chime in unprompted that you choose to sort racism into real and fake piles? Like what do you get out of that?”

Anyway I explained that it’s fake racism because it’s just somebody that wants attention and he said “racists can want attention too” and “seems like you’re just doing gymnastics to invent excuses for people online that you don’t even know why are you doing that” so I don’t know what to tell him. I don’t think we’ll see eye to eye on this because he incorrectly defines racism as a “real phenomenon” that “affects real people” and is “perpetuated by people’s actions”, whereas I know that what he’s describing is fake racism, because real racism is a little thing people feel in their hearts.

Seems like anybody could plainly see that fake racism is when people say or do real racist things in the world and real racism is intangible, not really strictly “real”, but the guy’s a kook so ¯_(ツ)_/¯

[drdaeman]

Uhh, I see that really made a very poor word choice when I wrote “‘real’ racism”. My bad, words are hard.

Given that you’ve chose “fake” as the antonym, I think I can see where we differ, and that I misused the term “‘real’”. In my mind I would’ve picked something like “less intentionally”. I’m not even sure if I can imagine what a fake racism could possibly be like: racism is an idea, and I don’t really get what fakeness for ideas means.

I will try to remember and be more careful with the word “real” in the future. Appreciate your comments.

And, yes, that was real racism, of course - in the way you’ve used the expression. Or rather, there’s no such thing that “not real racism”, and “not ‘real’ racism” was a confusingly bad phrase.