Re: Racism
Posted: 2019-01-22, 19:14
A later contributor to the same discussion tried to draw a distinction between "racial" and "racist". Suspecting it might be tendentious, I asked him to elaborate. He responded with a drawn-out art analogy.
I think one of the chief issues with discussions of race is that race isn't quite like anything else. There are parallels to other forms of discrimination (used in the broadest sense of making judgments based on superficial criteria) but there always seem to be as many important differences as there are similarities. In this case, people are not objets d'art and do not have creators who are in any way comparable to artists. For sure you can't draw a parallel between artists and races. (If anything, the parallel would be to schools or movements, but that falls apart because an object doesn't have the agency to assert its identify as an instantiation of a particular movement.)
But of course the most important thing missing from this analogy (as with most attempted racial analogies) is the power relationship: Objects are not oppressing other objects the way persons oppress other persons. If you leave out that element, then the whole example becomes pointless.
I think one of the chief issues with discussions of race is that race isn't quite like anything else. There are parallels to other forms of discrimination (used in the broadest sense of making judgments based on superficial criteria) but there always seem to be as many important differences as there are similarities. In this case, people are not objets d'art and do not have creators who are in any way comparable to artists. For sure you can't draw a parallel between artists and races. (If anything, the parallel would be to schools or movements, but that falls apart because an object doesn't have the agency to assert its identify as an instantiation of a particular movement.)
But of course the most important thing missing from this analogy (as with most attempted racial analogies) is the power relationship: Objects are not oppressing other objects the way persons oppress other persons. If you leave out that element, then the whole example becomes pointless.