> Racism is very much a matter of intent.
No. Unconscious bias, which by definition does not include intent, can still be a form of racism.
I do agree that sometimes other forms of bias or prejudice is taken for racism. Many times it's a class issue; many richer people want to avoid poor people but if people of color are far more likely to be poor, they're more likely to be avoided.
I think there's little utility to this version of racism outside of discussions about sociology. In particular, there's no real way to show someone is not racist given this definition. So if someone was determined to be unconsciously racist, there's nothing really to do be done about it since there's no way to get a "clean bill of psyche".
The point is not to label people as racist, but thoughts, beliefs, and actions as racist.
Of course, we don't have to go back in time at all to see this sort of thinking, but, for the sake of the example, I thought it worked better.
Just because the people in these examples claim they aren't motivated by racism doesn't mean they aren't (at least partly) motivated by racism, maybe even unconsciously.
If I care about the suffering of my own race, but not those people over there because they're a different race - that's discrimination. That's my point about intent, the mother may feel she is just "indifferent" but the impact is certainly racist.
I think you are defining racism so narrowly it only defines people who state "I'm superior to this race" where their actions alone can never be racist unless they say that.
I already replied to the tornado comment but weather can't hold beliefs, it's a non sequitur that doesn't support your argument.
Let's say you have the "non-racist" slave owner. No matter what they personally believe about the equality of individual humans, they create a world where the people who come after will believe fundamentally different things about races.
You can't say, slavery IS wrong, but we are going to do it anyway because we are selfish. The act is racist, because the people who come after you will justify your decisions and cement a racial worldview that you contributed to.
I really hope you read this CNN article in full but here is a quote that I believe directly applies to your argument:
> "When some whites talk about racism, they think it's only personal -- what one person says or does to another. But many minorities and people who study race say racism can be impersonal, calculating, devoid of malice..."
http://www.cnn.com/2014/11/26/us/ferguson-racism-or-racial-b...
Lets flesh out the pricing algorithm example. Lets say a home security company want to provide per zip code prices. The inputs they use are population density, crime rate, and availability of installers. This will lead to black neighborhoods being charged higher rates (since they statistically have higher crime rates).
Even though they have instituted a policy systematically favors one racial group over another I don't think your little racism is the right term because at no point did they consider race. In fact, the world is so backwards that they would have to either purposefully overcharge white people or undercharge black people to not charge the two groups differently.
They are literally damned if they do and damned if they don't. Either way they are racist by a legitimate definition of the word.
The best solution I can think of is to try and make the world as race blind as possible while trying to improve disadvantaged communities. So we should remove names from the hiring process when people. Yet, your sister has a point, CoC need to develop a culture of education and hard work. Its a tough problem that needs help from everyone.
Well, I don't know. The thing I do, and it feels like water dripping on stone, is I call out small assumptions whenever I see them, and I always, always draw attention to communities of color as being people, citizens, deserving of all equal opportunities (and pointing out how some law, algorithm, or assumption is denying them one).
It's a real gentle advocacy, but it's also easy to stick to because it's absolutely the right thing to do once you see how stacked against CoC the system is
There's nothing wrong with this, in fact it is probably the correct thing to do, but you can really quickly become that guy. Oh, there's Johnny again, acting like we're all a bunch of racists and we don't understand the daily struggles people have. You can get tuned out really quick, if it's presented in terms that compare one group to another, the implicit assumption that because you're not in that group, you've had it easy. When people feel confronted in that way and they know they haven't had it easy, they're less likely to care whether they are racist. That's the impression I get from the groundswell of support for someone like Trump. The small-racists aren't supporting him because they hate other people, they supporting him because he act like he cares about them and at least rhetorically will stand up for them.
I guess what I'm saying is, it's important not to lose sight of the fact that the goal must be to stand up for all groups of people and to deny bigotry in all of its forms.
Like the big-R Racist is the white power asshole who wants to create a white ethnostate--that's one that's easy to spot, and most of us can say we're not that.
The real pernicious damage to communities of color comes from the little-r racism that SO SO MANY people carry around totally unthinkingly. Like even my pretty progressive sister will spout off something like "well if they'd just work harder, or get a better job," when in reality there's a well-documented bias against hiring people with "black" names.
The big-R Racism is easy to defeat, because most of us see it as pretty noxious.
The little-r racism is so much tougher, because it's encoded into laws in innocent-seeming ways, it's encoded into algorithms in software (e.g. charging various rates by zip code, but zip code in many places ends up being a proxy for race, and who in this decade checked to make sure the assumptions you've encoded aren't just screwing over minorities), in a lot of unconscious biases (e.g. that AAVE is an uneducated form of english, not its own dialect).
How do you call people's attention to that little-r racist stuff?
Well, I don't know. The thing I do, and it feels like water dripping on stone, is I call out small assumptions whenever I see them, and I always, always draw attention to communities of color as being people, citizens, deserving of all equal opportunities (and pointing out how some law, algorithm, or assumption is denying them one).
It's a real gentle advocacy, but it's also easy to stick to because it's absolutely the right thing to do once you see how stacked against CoC the system is.