Re:A Difficult Situation
by dinkumthinkum on Thursday March 21, 2013 @11:13PM
(#5421171)
Nonsense. She wrote in all caps that a class of people "CANNOT" be racist in all caps like a loony bird. She wasn't making some deep intellectual point. Come on. It was stupidity. It's not the same as a layperson describing gravity in terms of some basic understanding of Newtonian physics and a physicist describing it in terms of general relativity. It was just dumb.
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Re:A Difficult Situation
by shantanubala on Thursday March 21, 2013 @11:23PM
(#5421203)
> It's not the same as a layperson describing gravity in terms of some basic understanding of Newtonian physics and a physicist describing it in terms of general relativity. It was just dumb.
You're mixing up what I said: a sociologist describing a social phenomenon is analogous to a physicist describing a physical phenomenon.
In the tweet, Adria colloquially used the word "racism" in a way that's different from colloquial usage (she used the sociologist's definition and not the Dictionary.com definition), but that doesn't make her stupid or a "loony bird."
Do a couple tweets, screwups, or overreactions deserve this kind of outrage?
> You're mixing up what I said: a sociologist describing a social phenomenon is analogous to a physicist describing a physical phenomenon.
Sorry, no. All academic disciplines are not analogous and equivalent. The sociological re-casting of "racism" that we are referring to here is an opinion, and not even a majority one at that (among sociologists).