An AI bot didn't try to do this. Someone at Meta, who was likely none of the things in the profile, decided to do this.
There are numerous fake social media pages where posters oretend to be a minority, but are run by state actors to sow division in the US. Those have been extremely successful in fooling people; I wonder if its success is related to pre-existing biases readers already have in terms how they think "others" talk.
Are you truly advocating that people should no longer be proud of their cultural identity? Are you applying that to all the folks in tech who proudly identify as Christian or Jewish? Does it apply to Italian Americans and Indigenous people? What about folks who are proud to speak endangered languages, like West Flemish or Romani?
Both my parents were born here, they've explained our lineage, but I literally don't care. I'm an American, America is my culture and country.
A hell of a lot of people want to "just be American" and a lot of Americans won't let them.
People who are "just angry and will direct it at whatever" can be very dangerous, as we've seen in the US even this week and in every school shooting and terrorist attack for years.
This is, terribly, the American experience. It used to be the Irish and the Italians before we decided they were "White enough." It doesn't mean we should just ignore it and accept it. If you're mad, that doesn't give you a pass to be a racist asshole to the first person less pale than a porcelain plate you see.
If anything, the fact that people have to know and cope with random Americans being this exact sort of racist asshole to them is the reason they form their own communities and see themselves as Black Americans or Asian Americans or any other sort of national or racial group.
The label “X-American” (replace X with a foreign country) should not exist. If you identify as this you are marking yourself as different from Americans. Take this article for example:
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.ndtv.com/world-news/six-ind...
Why do they need a coalition? The Motte is “they’ll be discriminated against if they don’t stick together”, but the Bailey is they will push for pro Indian initiatives (see H1B abuse, etc) at the expense of Americans. Ironically, this is also the cause of the discrimination they’ll face. It’s a healthy response to people who don’t care about Americans.
That's okay, more varied culture enriches, and I enjoy the added richness.
>...and have a “what’s in it for me” view of [insert anything here].
That unfortunately describes a huge share of human beings on this planet.
> The label “X-American” (replace X with a foreign country) should not exist
I disagree: I think it's totally okay for people to recognize a part of their identity (key words: a part of, since a person's identity comes from many sources), rather than being forced to hide it.
> If you identify as this you are marking yourself as different from Americans.
Each individual (Americans included) is different from all the other billions of individuals on this planet (other Americans included), and that's okay. It would be weird to try to be forced to deny that totally-okay fact. Thus, a self-described Hoosier or Floridian or Cheesehead or Californian or Plumber or Texan might differentiate themselves similarly without renouncing any "American-ness". Adding one of many possible identity labels (whether race or origin or sports team or profession etc) doesn't negate all others.
> They will push for pro Indian initiatives (see H1B abuse, etc) at the expense of Americans. Ironically, this is also the cause of the discrimination they’ll face.
Ironically, this claim is itself racist: Asserting that people of a certain race are coming to get you because of their race, and thus discrimination against that race is justified, is racist (and a tired racist trope at that).
Unfortunately though, most racists I have seen are racist simply because they feel the other race is different from them, and feel that their victims are bad and/or deserve less than themselves. I've seen racists remark with nothing less than anger and disgust at baby pictures of children of other races. Babies, dude.
For another example, I'll open up and share an unfortunate case I had with a family member when we were visiting a science museum: Upon seeing how many non-white people were there, said family member made several off-color remarks to me. But these people (many of them children) weren't abusing anything, they weren't doing anything "at the expense of Americans". They were just normal people, many of them likely citizens, learning and having a good time. Them being interested in science isn't a problem, and they weren't stopping anyone else from coming to the museum. It's just that they were disproportionately represented among the sample of Americans interested in science. Good for them, science is good.
Except it doesn't. Look at the places that have the "happiest" people on earth, e.g. Denmark. They are monocultures where nearly everyone has the same traditions and history.
And in recent times they have had a lot more immigrants, and it's causing a lot of chaos.
Varied culture divides. It creates "us" and "them" groups, this is baked into our tribal psyche as humans.
> Except it doesn't
I'm sorry to hear that you personally don't like the richness that other cultures add, but on the plus side, I do! :)
> Varied culture divides. It creates "us" and "them" groups, this is baked into our tribal psyche as humans
It takes someone seeking to divide, to divide. Embracing your culture and a part of your identity doesn't inherently divide anything. Ironically, the division often happens when someone says 'THEY embrace a culture I don't embrace, that must mean THEY are dividing us".
I recently went to an Ethiopian restaurant, enjoyed it, chatted with the owners, and didn't feel like they were dividing themselves from me, despite them embracing their culture. It'd be a shame for most restaurants to shut down because they embrace a culture that you don't embrace.
Have you considered the possibility that you are the one dividing people based on the components of their identity and culture and deciding which components are okay for them to have (because they match yours) and which aren't? Removing all culture but yours would be pretty boring (nothing personal, this goes for any monoculture).
My take on the comment was that so long as a trait is relevant to some people, it will be dispised by some other people. Either it's completely benign or it's somewhat polarizing. There are few things that only range from neutral to positive without detractors.
A person describing themselves as being Christian is only signaling that they are a follower of the Christian faith to some degree.
They are different for that reason. Christian doesn't have a physical appearance associated with it (well, other than say vestments or pendants).
All Christians are Christian.
Not all Asian-appearing folk are culturally Asian, not all culturally Asian folk are Asian-appearing. Even the concept of "Asian culture" (I do of course accept that such a concept exists) is super general in a much wider ranging way than the Christian faith. Maybe that explains it better.
To illustrate it in another way, imagine some LLM prompts:
"Hi ChatGPT, can you make me a poem written by a Christian about their faith?"
"Hi ChatGPT, can you make me a poem written by a White person about their culture?"
There is just a fundamental... grammatical wrongness(?) about the last one in my mind, I'm not sure that I can explain it if it's not already obvious.
That’s your racism.
Also, poetry is, mostly, white culture. You probably think that statement is racist.
(Shrug) If you didn't build it, what could possibly justify taking pride in it?
Pride in inborn cultural identity gets you things like Nazi Germany. It's not a win for either individuals or societies, only for intermediate subgroups whose interests rarely coincide with either.
Removing racism does not mean removing race.
but it's dumb to discriminate against coincidental attributes.
Anything that a bot can do and possess I have no difficulty in its being labelled as doing and possessing those things.
Otherwise I do have problems, although theoretically a bot could exist as a piece of art and in that case we should forgive these lying claims to qualities they cannot possess by the current standards our society holds for artistic practice.
If you choose to describe yourself by the colour of your skin first and foremost then you're telling everyone that you think that's relevant information which is, well.. the entire problem - you're telling everyone around you that you think it has predictive power.
But that's what racists are, people who think the race of a person has predictive power with regard to their nature, culture etc.
People being loud and proud about their marginalised identities is not a problem. The pushback, and the pushback-to-the-pushback, and the pushback-to-the-pushback-to-the-pushback (the so-called "culture war") is a problem to the extent it gets in the way of solving the root problem (marginalisation, bigotry, and abuse), but statements of pride help address the root problem.
Rather than criticise "drawing these cultural battle lines", please fight the fight you think people should be fighting. You won't find yourself short of allies, should you make the effort. (Effort includes educating yourself about the relevant issues: it's pretty easy to find highly-specific resources. If you're completely stuck, and somehow have lost access to Wikipedia, visit your local library.)
The thing that I feel that this silly AI bot draws into sharp contrast is the idea that there can simultaneously be "asian/white/black culture" - as a generalised thing, not a person's experience in a neighbourhood or a country, literally just "white/black/asianness" (or whatever), and obviously the connotation there is that skin colour is intrinsically linked to culture, but then we expect people to pretend that skin colour has no correlation.
You can't have it both ways, it's a contradiction.
And here we have, err, a computer program, or the output of one, pulling in all of this stuff and claiming that it has a culture based on experiences of being a skin colour that it doesn't and can't even have.
It's just madness on every level!
No, the "intrinsically" connotation is not there. Read any book (or Wikipedia article) on the subject, or at least explain your reasoning in enough detail that someone can explain to you why you're wrong.
(I do agree that the AI bots were farcical.)
(I'm not saying that it's a good thing, responders seem to be assuming that).
Meh, whatever, one day maybe we'll be able to have sane discussions about this. Probably not.
I didn't think that's how the term racist is normally used. A definition:
a person who is prejudiced against or antagonistic toward people on the basis of their membership in a particular racial or ethnic group
Big difference.
I mean, do you believe that people should expect to be subjected to the weirdest and most hostile takes on gender relations and treated as potential rapists or sluts unless and until everyone uses gender neutral pronouns (even silly bots mostly identify as male and female at the moment)? If not, what is it about racism that obliges victims not to affirm their identity if they wish to cease to become victims?
I disagree, because one can powerless while simultaneously being prejudiced and antagonistic to others. Which means that anyone can be racist.
It is an odd way of calcifying late-20th century American upper class anxiety. If we can't give the engineers a different moral goal, it will become the default mode of knowledge. A more immediate problem than "AI will kill us" is the dev teams determined to avoid "erasure" or "digital genocide" or whatever they'd call a race/culture-agnostic AI.
I hope you take the time to educate yourself on this sooner than later.
This seems to put the burden on the minority. Without getting into details it does not make sense in my mind to put the burden on the party with less power.
Are dog breeds a 'social construct'?
Are species a 'social construct'?
From Wikipedia[0]:
A social construct or construction is the meaning, notion, or connotation placed on an object or event by a society, and adopted by that society with respect to how they view or deal with the object or event.[8]
The social construction of target populations refers to the cultural characterizations or popular images of the persons or groups whose behavior and well-being are affected by public policy.[9]
Social constructionism posits that the meanings of phenomena do not have an independent foundation outside the mental and linguistic representation that people develop about them throughout their history, and which becomes their shared reality.[10] From a linguistic viewpoint, social constructionism centres meaning as an internal reference within language (words refer to words, definitions to other definitions) rather than to an external reality.
>Are dog breeds a 'social construct'?
>Are species a 'social construct'?
Species are a social construct[1]. Dog breeds are not a social construct[2]. However, human races are not equivalent to dog breeds[3].
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_constructionism
[1]https://old.reddit.com/r/AskSocialScience/comments/ad58x6/is...
[2] https://old.reddit.com/r/biology/comments/rfapt7/are_dog_bre...
[3]https://evolution-outreach.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.118...
1. Breaks down especially with the existence of mixed race people. Did you know that there was a term for Americans born with 7 European great grandparents and 1 black one? Many of those were born into slavery and treated horribly for being black.
Which touches on 2... But also, the Irish were not considered white. I've seen horribly racist British illustrations of the 19th century comparing Irish people to Africans. In that century in the United States, Italian and eastern European immigrants were also not considered white.
When you consider these ridiculous corner cases, and how their perceptions have changed over time, it makes you aware that the categorization itself isn't really based on logic and reason or facts, even when generalizations hold up "better". Yes, for the most stereotypically appearing people, we'll probably correctly guess their ancestry a lot of the time based on things like appearances. But it falls apart pretty quickly. You don't need to get into extreme outlier cases as above for you to miss something when you treat racial categories as unambiguous facts.
Ok, so "black" or "White" are not absolutely clear labels that we can use to describe every single person ever. No shit... Still, Morgan Freeman is black and Margot Robbie is White, and I'm White because both my parents are White, and if there's a serial killer roaming the streets then knowing if he's "black" or "White" is very useful information so I know what to be on the lookout for, etc.
It's like those insufferable people who can't wait to point out that "A tomato is actually a fruit!" any time it comes up in conversation. Ok, so what? "Race is a social construct!" Ok, so what?
Obviously black and white skin colours exist as do things like physical features.
The social construct is that people tie those to identity. Both within and without the group. But then it seems as if that is self-perpetuating.
People can have perfectly valid reasons to dislike culture, so if we tie culture to appearance, then people are going to make judgements and dislike people of certain appearances as a logical consequence of that, which sucks.
But ethnicities still exist. So would it not be valid to be "ethnicist" (ie. very specifically racist), like "Those Sami people are so x" or "Gosh those Bantu people are y"?
One example is Rome. Every region or province, even Italia, consisted of different ethnic groups. At one point there was a diverse group in a small area called the Latins. The Romans were a single ethnic group in Latium who first took over and assimilated the other Latins who were distinct, then whole peninsula absorbing Etruscans and celts and Greeks in the south and others, absorbed people from all over Europe and north Africa and Asia minor...
But it's fashionable among young internet white supremacists to say these were all pasty white dudes.
The truth is it's an anachronism to compare racial categorizations from two different time periods where differences were not seen in the same way or with the same context. Afaik the Romans didn't really have a construct of race that was the same as our modern ones. And they assimilated and erased many distinctions over time.
What's stopping me from identifying variation in the frequency of different traits between ethnic groups in the current day? It's not a virtue to pretend not to notice such things (or, indeed, to be truly incapable of the most basic pattern recognition).
I think the argument could then be made that if you identify traits common to closely related tribes (eg. indigenous East African) that are noticeably different from the frequency or magnitude of these traits in a different cluster of closely related tribes (eg. indigenous Scandinavian) then there should be no reason to pretend to ignore them.
It's equally fair to observe that the offspring of those very same bushmen when transfered to a Scandinavian country may spend more time word processing or catching trains.
As an example, slavery in the US created an artificial category or label of black people out of many unrelated peoples, calling them inferior by nature and using that to justify unethical systems.
Like, if all the black people would just stop identifying as 'black' racism would be solved?
Maybe I'm misreading your comment, but all of the responses to this suggest to me you're on a different planet than I am. Alternatively you drank the early 2000s kool-aid that "people don't see race" and thought that was actually working until people started identifying as the thing they get criticized on the internet for being.
In my country (Eastern Europe) racism is approximately non-existent, but nobody was putting gas on fire for decades or more. I know a black guy that is quite famous around here, do you know what he never said? "I am a proud black person". He is a great person and people love him.
Can you provide some examples of racism? I am aware of some against Gypsies 40-50 years ago, but it is gone these days. Even that, it was against the culture, not the people, Gypsies going "modern way" were fully accepted, but traditions like kid marriage or living a nomadic life in carriages was not.
That isn’t to say that I think central or Eastern Europe are outliers — I have personally witnessed at least as much racism in countries considered to be more progressive, like Sweden.
The point is, to say it’s virtually nonexistent is plainly untrue.
2. The second part of your analogy is the "I know a black guy" trope that happens in the US. It's a pretty common thing, and no one believes people are 'not racist' just because they 'know a black guy'.
How are they treated now? Asking my past 2 managers, both Jews, Israeli citizens doing business in Eastern Europe, they are happy with the current times. This fire is also put out.
No it's not. Acknowledging the current situation is not an assumption and does not doom us to push every single aspect onto future generations.
Culture is real. The way to change part of culture is not to simply deny that that part exists.
We should not be in the business of telling other people which aspects of themselves they can and cannot identify with. Admonishing black identity is perpetuating this cultural eradication, and so it is not the neutral position you think it is.
That's all tangential from the topic at hand anyway. On-topic, Liv is a great example of the corporate appropriation of culture.
I find this stuff absolutely fascinating, that even an AI bot tries to do this sort of thing.
It just strikes me that there is no world in which racism will ever die out as long as things like this are happening. You can't have it both ways.
If race is just melanin content then we have no issue. That's the win case.
If your race is something that you need to proudly announce (because you personally feel that it has cultural connotations in most/many cases), then race is always going to be an issue, because of assumptions of those cultural differences.