Who gets to define what’s ‘racist?’ (2020)

Re:Who gets to define what’s ‘racist?’ (2020) by noobermin on Friday August 20, 2021 @09:52PM (#28253357)

One of the problems is in the framing you gave. Intersectionality is supposed to be a framework of understanding power amongst different groups but often gets applied to an individual basis which is ironically a very much against a sociological way of thinking. One of the prominent ideas in the now controversial (for silly reasons) critical race theory is to emphasize not individual actions or traits but to recognize systems and reckon with those hopefully through policy.

The individualization of racism for example feels like a failure both in how it offends people and also how it leads to policy prescriptions that don't really solve the underlying power relations.

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Re:Who gets to define what’s ‘racist?’ (2020) by dragonwriter on Friday August 20, 2021 @10:05PM (#28253428)

> Intersectionality is supposed to be a framework of understanding power amongst different groups but often gets applied to an individual basis

Intersectionality is about the experience of privilege/disadvantage/discrimination differing, on a way that is not a simple linear combination of effects, by combinations (“intersections”) of group memberships. While it applies to groups, there's no magical lower bound on size for its applicability, and when you consider more axes of differentiation, the size of the groups represented by distinct intersections approaches one.

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Re:Who gets to define what’s ‘racist?’ (2020) by evv555 on Friday August 20, 2021 @10:17PM (#28253486)

"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."

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Re:Who gets to define what’s ‘racist?’ (2020) by noobermin on Saturday August 21, 2021 @07:33PM (#28261564)

What I'll say is if your goal is to change society's power relations to make society more egalitarian, then dealing with individuals only is expressly impotent to bring about change because atomized individuals, disconnected from each other, cannot bring about change.

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Re:Who gets to define what’s ‘racist?’ (2020) by evv555 on Friday August 20, 2021 @09:59PM (#28253397)

>Intersectionality is supposed to be a framework of understanding power amongst different groups but often gets applied to an individual basis which is ironically a very much against a sociological way of thinking.

Marx subscribed to this way of seeing individuals as mouthpieces for the collective. So did people like Marcuse. You know, one of the influential thinkers from "Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School of Marxism". Name sound familiar? You are giving these people more credit then they deserve.

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Re:Who gets to define what’s ‘racist?’ (2020) by noobermin on Saturday August 21, 2021 @07:28PM (#28261516)

That's actually a very non-Marxist way of viewing society and kind of a poor reading of people from the frankfurt school actually.

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Re:Who gets to define what’s ‘racist?’ (2020) by evv555 on Sunday August 22, 2021 @08:59PM (#28271258)

CRT as it's applied is very much a performative extension of how people are reading Frankfurt thinkers. Your reading is out of sync with the orthodoxy not mine.

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