Is it wrong to be racist?

[~Zeta~]

A teacher came up with this question when a student in one of my classes said that the substitute was racist:

Is it truly wrong to be a racist person?

I argued it isn't wrong to be racist. It is perfect human for all of man's actions and decisions. If someone's different, it may be unsettling but it does not mean to give them a title and a bad reputation from stereotyping and recurring events. No matter what you do or say, there will always be racist people. There are those mindsets that people have.

What do you think?

Discuss.

[Patashu]

The ugly truth is that racism has a basis - if you take a random white person and a random black person in the USA, for instance, chances are the random white person is better off and has been incriminated for less.

BUT, this is only because racism exists in the first place! Racism is self perpetuating, because it forces that race into being an underclass due to lower levels of compassion and juries being more likely to sentence them/cops being more likely to sentence them.

Racism is useful, thus, in the sense that stamping all poor people or people who have done prison time in a visible place for life would be useful - you can use it as an indication of the kind of people to avoid, and it'll be right more often than picking randomly will be, but only because it is done in the first place.

[~Zeta~]

Originally Posted by Patashu

BUT, this is only because racism exists in the first place! Racism is self perpetuating, because it forces that race into being an underclass due to lower levels of compassion and juries being more likely to sentence them/cops being more likely to sentence them.

I wouldn't say that racism forces them as an underclass. In a social structure, it places them lower to that certain racist. Everyone is racist in at least one way. It's inevitable. So, where one race may be put down by one, the race being put down may thrive equal or perhaps envied.

Originally Posted by Patashu

Racism is useful, thus, in the sense that stamping all poor people or people who have done prison time in a visible place for life would be useful - you can use it as an indication of the kind of people to avoid, and it'll be right more often than picking randomly will be, but only because it is done in the first place.

On the other side, racism leads to major hate crimes, riots, badgering, and vulgar titles that still stand today. Depending on the person, the benefits could outweigh the wrongs, after all, most of the wrongs about racism is word and biased based.

[Zageron]

A mindset is grown, not cemented.
If your parents are racist, you are more likely to be racist. The same is if you are well off, and the majority of the people in the slums are darker coloured, you might come to say that 'dark skinned people are dirty' or 'people who live in the street get so dirty that their skin turns a darker colour, therefore dark skinned people all live in the slums.

I, personally, am only racist because of the media. When I see someone with a turban I feel slightly scared, same as when I see a huge black man I get worried for my safety.

This doesn't change the fact that hating another race or colour simply because of past influences is alright. Racism is NOT born with us, it is grown.

[MrRubix]

Not at all

[Izzy]

I would say yes. You can hate a lot of people that are a particular race but everyone should be considered an individual. If over the years you've met 500 people of a particular race and you didn't like any of them or any of their values or opinions then you could have the belief that it is very likely that you will not like anyone of that particular race, but that is a fallacy.

Edit: I'd like to add that the reason most people are racist is because of their upbringing and not their fault. I still think you should make an effort to think otherwise.

[TF_cyanide]

Originally Posted by MrRubix

Not at all

^ that.

nothing much else to say, although im surprised people here share the same opinion as me. i was usually the one debating all alone against everyone else in dragons fury. this is a good change <3 ffr

racism is as natural as lying.

[Dark-GFx]

There will always be men and women who don't like or won't feel fond of someone for inequalities that they have such as the color of their skin and such as where they come from regardless if it's wrong or right. Everyone is entitled to their opinion and i respect that but in my opinion i think it's wrong for someone to hate another man or women just for that inequality. I am personally not racist, hypocritical, or stereotypical on any of these kind of thoughts/ opinions but like i said regardless to what people will do to fight against these kinds of thoughts there will always be someone there against it.

[MrGiggles]

black "people"

Putting jokes aside, I'm pretty much with Patashu on this, except for:

BUT, this is only because racism exists in the first place!

There's many reasons for racism, and while it does tend to help perpetuate itself I think that's a very small factor in the whole thing. But that's just a small qualm with wording and I get the spirit behind the post.

[MrRubix]

Here is my general opinion.

It's completely stupid to ignore a statistical trend and pretend it doesn't exist because it hurts people's feelings and causes them disutility. Yeah, it may be hurtful to say "On average, this race suffers from these problems and this race is better at such and such and is generally richer/smarter based on these metrics" and so forth. But that doesn't make these things somehow untrue.

But "wrong" and "right" refer to moral scope, and in this case, it's typically a bad idea to assume that someone IS a certain way. It'd be like taking a number from a random distribution and saying that it's "wrong" to expect it to be between A and B with 80% probability, even if it's empirically true.

So, yes, based on your outward properties, I can make an assumption of other qualities based on statistical expectation. However, it would be foolish of me to say that someone IS that way before I have a chance to witness the variables. The reality may differ from the expectation. But I can still say that the more and more random samples I take from the distribution, the more and more we'll see a convergence to certain averages.

That's all.

[MrRubix]

Patashu: Racism is only partially self-perpetuating. A lot of it has to do with resources/geography in the first place. When you have access to resources, it's easier to leverage your position and become richer/better off through economies of scale, whereas if you're **** out of luck, you remain **** out of luck. Repeat over multiple generations, and you catalyze a variety of other trends. Some people are just born luckier than others.

If you happen to be born near an ample water supply and area with land that could be cultivated, it's much easier to focus on more advanced, complex things that ultimately create synergies and thus more riches... whereas the person born in a place with very scare resources or poor leadership is going to be focused primarily on survival and survival only.

There are COUNTLESS examples of this, but the general idea is that racism is obviously the result of race, and race is the result of geography, the environment, resources, etc.

[fido123]

Race is simply the ethnicity of a person. The ethnicity of a person does not define who that person is, what that person does, how that person thinks. The only thing the ethnicity of a person effects is how somebody looks. Why can't we judge people based on the character of a person instead of where they were from originally? Obviously there's more to it than that but at it's core, that's all racism is.

[MrRubix]

Originally Posted by fido123

Race is simply the ethnicity of a person. The ethnicity of a person does not define who that person is, what that person does, how that person thinks. The only thing the ethnicity of a person effects is how somebody looks. Why can't we judge people based on the character of a person instead of where they were from originally? Obviously there's more to it than that but at it's core, that's all racism is.

Except that is a very naive and statistically untrue way to look at it. Granted, it's always a good idea to get to know someone first before making too many generalizations.

[ledwix]

Originally Posted by MrRubix

Here is my general opinion.

It's completely stupid to ignore a statistical trend and pretend it doesn't exist because it hurts people's feelings and causes them disutility. Yeah, it may be hurtful to say "On average, this race suffers from these problems and this race is better at such and such and is generally richer/smarter based on these metrics" and so forth. But that doesn't make these things somehow untrue.

QFT.

Statistical information just needs to be carefully analyzed. But it definitely EXISTS and gives us facts about the world. I imagine lining all humans up by height, recording their genders, and then making a chart showing the overlap between the male distribution and the female distribution. There will obviously be considerable overlap, and at the same time, it will be just as obvious that men are, on average, several inches taller than women. If anyone is offended by that, then well, they're offended. But that doesn't remove the facts or remove the information it gives us about how to prepare for situations in which we are designing products where the height of the average person who will use the product is relevant, for instance.

Knowing how to make generalizations is how we learn stuff about the world. Life begins almost exactly as a dream, a wishy washy stream of chaos, and we learn to sharpen that image of what goes on around us as we move along and learn general facts about the world that often apply to multiple things. Suppose one wasn't allowed to make ANY generalizations. Then you get nonsense like this: "Don't ask me if I'm in college just because I look college-aged. Stop stereotyping me." "What, you asked me if I speak Mandarin? Is that just because I'm from mainland China? You racist!" The incentive for chit chat with people we just met would go down the drain.

At the same time, knowing when to apply those generalizations, how accurate those generalizations are, (i.e. the size and shape of the distribution) and when to make conclusions based on those generalizations, is also how we learn more sophisticated things about the world.

In essence, I am saying that racism is a smaller category of the body of statements that would most often be considered racist. Some things are facts, while other things are unjustified slippery-slope speculations. I think statistics should be far more emphasized in the math curriculum.

[Vendetta21]

Indigenous Africans suffer from centuries of inbreeding and malnutrition and that has a huge factor on trying to improve living conditions in Africa.

But trying to apply geographic traits, such as gang culture, to the broader category black people, is pretty much wanton bigotry.

[qqwref]

Completely depends on the degree.

If you're taking statistical trends and assuming Asians are more likely to be good at math, blacks are more likely to talk a certain way, etc. before you meet them, that's reasonable. Making decisions due to observed patterns is an extremely useful skill. Of course, I'd expect an intelligent person to be ready to immediately think the opposite about an individual if they see evidence that that person doesn't fit the trend.

On the other hand, if you're discriminating in the sense of hating everyone from a given race, or considering them all inferior or incapable of something a normal person could do - or even attacking someone you don't know just because of their race - you've got a problem. Logic can't justify something like that.

[Patashu]

Originally Posted by MrRubix

Patashu: Racism is only partially self-perpetuating. A lot of it has to do with resources/geography in the first place. When you have access to resources, it's easier to leverage your position and become richer/better off through economies of scale, whereas if you're **** out of luck, you remain **** out of luck. Repeat over multiple generations, and you catalyze a variety of other trends. Some people are just born luckier than others.

If you happen to be born near an ample water supply and area with land that could be cultivated, it's much easier to focus on more advanced, complex things that ultimately create synergies and thus more riches... whereas the person born in a place with very scare resources or poor leadership is going to be focused primarily on survival and survival only.

There are COUNTLESS examples of this, but the general idea is that racism is obviously the result of race, and race is the result of geography, the environment, resources, etc.

Of course it's not the only cause, but it's a major cause in countries where multiple ethnicities co-exist and the only difference between them is their respective 'momentums' and how they're perceived by others (= how kindly they're treated, how harshly they're prosecuted, etc). If every black person in the US suddenly lost all the traits that everyone used to differentiate races but we somehow tracked them over the generations, they'd rise up from being an underclass, as there's no way to discriminate against them - except by their lower levels of wealth, and white poor people are better off on average than black poor people, because of racist effects (like choosing who to hire for a job, being more likely to prosecute and find guilty for petty crime, etc etc)

[MrRubix]

What you're describing is not really a "cause" but rather a perpetuated effect resulting from the pre-established class systems to begin with. If two races in a society had equal statuses, we would expect a 50-50 shot at seeing one eventually outpace the other, and this is NOT what we see. Yes, we may see cases of discrimination against choosing who to hire, but I ask you who's doing the hiring to begin with?

ALL of this, at its very core, stems from the fundamental geographic distributions and resource access. From there you can extrapolate every other effect. You imply that if you removed differentiating factors (I am assuming by this you mean physical appearance or things along those lines?), there wouldn't be much difference in the underlying factors. This is, in fact, untrue. Probability alone shows you how you can take a handful of traits and figure out how likely it is that that person came from a specific distribution.

Studies like these have been done ad nauseum.

It's a little misleading to say that racial perception is a "cause" because, while technically true, it's not very meaningful. Racial perceptions exist because they are largely reinforced by kernels of truth. You can't remove the indicators and imply that the underlying traits are somehow indistinguishable, because that's demonstratively false.

[xxxim_a_noobxxx]

I think it's alright to have pride for your race but to generalize a race based on something is wrong.





EXP:say someone of a different race caused me some sort of emotional pain it would be that person to blame not the race itself..

[Iam90]

Originally Posted by MrRubix

What you're describing is not really a "cause" but rather a perpetuated effect resulting from the pre-established class systems to begin with. If two races in a society had equal statuses, we would expect a 50-50 shot at seeing one eventually outpace the other, and this is NOT what we see. Yes, we may see cases of discrimination against choosing who to hire, but I ask you who's doing the hiring to begin with?

ALL of this, at its very core, stems from the fundamental geographic distributions and resource access. From there you can extrapolate every other effect. You imply that if you removed differentiating factors (I am assuming by this you mean physical appearance or things along those lines?), there wouldn't be much difference in the underlying factors. This is, in fact, untrue. Probability alone shows you how you can take a handful of traits and figure out how likely it is that that person came from a specific distribution.

Studies like these have been done ad nauseum.

It's a little misleading to say that racial perception is a "cause" because, while technically true, it's not very meaningful. Racial perceptions exist because they are largely reinforced by kernels of truth. You can't remove the indicators and imply that the underlying traits are somehow indistinguishable, because that's demonstratively false.

I think you're missing a point here, which is that "racists" in the classic sense of the word don't reinforce their racial perceptions with the kernels of truth you're talking about - they reinforce their racial perceptions through superstition, religion, misguided biology and bigotry. And, subsequently, they devalue a race for being "inferior."

It's not that certain factors such as geography and resource distribution don't advantage certain races over another; Jared Diamond covers that amply. It's that most racists view a race as inherently advantaged over others through the very fiber of their being, and then make the further value judgment that such a race is somehow less valuable/less human for being disadvantaged.

You're muddling up peoples' concepts of negative racial perception; it's quite obvious that when people ask the question "is it ok to be racist?" they mean "is it ok to view a race as inherently inferior, and is it ok to dehumanize/devalue them as a result?" to which none of your points are answers.