> So victimhood is a learned behavior after a certain age. As a brown guy with kids in the school system, that's why recent trends in education alarm me. I don't want my kids to be taught that there's this amorphous but pervasive "systemic racism" and "white supremacy" out to get people who look like them, but which they can't do anything about. It's dangerous experimentation with kids' psychology. Growing up as one…
Macro vs micro. Appropriate advice at the individual level is often very different than, and sometimes the complete opposite of, appropriate advice at the demographic scale. It's fine to tell your brother to quit the shit and pick himself up by his bootstraps or whatever; it's both inappropriate and ineffective to translate that notion into social policy. Systemic racism is a macro concern. Talking about it, and what…
Are these really opposites? Hannah Arendt famously tied those together in her work "Eichmann in Jerusalem".
She pointed out that Eichmann, convicted architect of the Holocaust, wasn't necessarily a sociopath, but instead an extremely average and mundane person who relied on clichéd defenses rather than thinking for himself, was motivated by professional promotion rather than ideology, and believed in success which he considered the chief standard of "good society". Banality, in this sense, does not mean that Eichmann's actions were in any way ordinary, or even that there is a potential Eichmann in all of us, but that his actions were motivated by a sort of complacency which was wholly unexceptional
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eichmann_in_Jerusalem#The_bana...
The question that gets skirted when discussing "systemic racism" is this: what does this actually mean? How does it manifest itself? make it concrete?
The notion "systemic racism" covers a vast territory of human interactions and feelings. Mostly the uncomfortable one's that aren't easily discussed: indifference, complacency, egoism, irrational fear, insecurity, mistrust and so on.
Right now, there's another post on HN's frontpage about toxic workplaces. A toxic workplace is the result of emergent behavior of many individuals in that workplace. Both leadership that acts complacent rather then address human issues, and workers who don't feel engaged, incentivized or motivated and put their own interests, frustrations, irritations, fears,... up front.
In that regard, formal public policies - social, economic, political,... - are also a representation of emerging behavior, the fluctuating emotional state of a large group of individuals, a community, and the norms and values which grow prevalent and come to dominate collective thinking as time marches on.
Eichmann himself didn't pop up overnight, after all. He ended up becoming because both personal circumstances and factors, as well as the larger societal and environmental circumstances pushed him in that direction. That doesn't excuse what he did, but it does explain why it happened. And it's a relevant lesson to keep in mind when discussing inequities in modern day terms.