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On Being Midwestern: The Burden of Normality

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Re: On Being Midwestern: The Burden of Normality

#261

Post by humanrebar »

weberc2 wrote: post #209
closeparen wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The modern left-wing view of racism is as a systematic, structural power relationship between races. Individual decisions branching on skin color is neither necessary nor sufficient to get there, although it can and historically has contributed. For example, divesting from your neighborhood out of concern for your property value when PoC start to move in does not necessarily reflect an individual racial bias. It coul…

The problem with this view is that it describes correlates instead of causes, and worse--that it confuses the two: most people understand racism to mean something like "differences caused by race", and thus something that is morally reprehensible. Your example is one that is caused (though indirectly) by racism, but others examples are not causal but correlated (or at least so indirectly causal as to be meaningless)-…

It's a very obvious example of a motte and bailey argument.

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Motte_and_bailey

Re: On Being Midwestern: The Burden of Normality

#262

Post by stcredzero »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #249
stcredzero wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because frankly Marx was not broadly concerned with discussions of morality and oppression of 'groups' in a general sense as you seem to be implying...Marx's analysis was almost purely an economic one Your point ascribes to me a sense of morality to me as a sneaky way of putting words in my mouth. "as you seem to be implying." In reality, I need no more than the Marx's subsumed sense of morality/justice in Marx's ana…

Look you're free to use language (and downvotes) however you want, but I and others are merely pointing out that you are applying a very broad brush which basically amounts to "I can see similarities here, so I'll just call them the same thing" -- Marx may have had a 'subsume[d] sense of morality' in his analysis of capitalism but that doesn't mean anybody who has a similar sense of morality about another topic is no…

Look you're free to use language (and downvotes) however you want

I've not downvoted you, at least in this thread. HN doesn't let you downvote in threads you participate in.

"I can see similarities here, so I'll just call them the same thing"

Isn't that how it works, especially with ideologies and models?

Socrates is a man, all men are mortal, not all mortals are Socrates.

Yes, but I'm talking about specific principles, not just species membership. Socrates spoke greek. He lived in Athens. Not all mortals are Athenian, but Socrates surely was an Athenian. There is a specific problem when one deals with people as groups, as in race and class, in that one tends to throw individuals under the bus for not towing the line of the group. Historically, this can number in the tens of thousands or the tens of millions.

Re: On Being Midwestern: The Burden of Normality

#263

Post by humanrebar »

gilbetron wrote: post #116
Veelox wrote: post #61

I grew up in the Midwest and moved to Silicon Valley. I think that people here don't understand what this author describes as "Midwestern history is a study in racial quarantine." I would go as far as to say that racial is the wrong word to describe what happens in the Midwest. I think that communities in the Midwest have tighter cultural restrictions on what it means to be "one of us." This can be affected by where…

Yeah, I describe this as "exotic-ism", many midwesterners don't really like different things from them, except in a tourist sort of way. However, I think that even if someone in their town is the same as them except for skin color, they'll still treat that person a little different. It's a stretch to say they are colorblind except for cultural differences.

What you're describing generally fits under the umbrella of xenophobia. You can qualify it as "cultural xenophobia" if you want to distinguish from dislike of aliens in particular.

Re: On Being Midwestern: The Burden of Normality

#264

Post by throwawayjava »

stcredzero wrote: post #257
throwawayjava wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Which is precisely what Marx claims to do, with essentially the model which Marx claims does so. Again, no. Marx's characterization is much more concrete than that, and really cannot be separated from notions of class and capital and commodity-form without rendering the term "Marxist" nearly meaningless. Or at least synonymous with much less politically-charged ideas like "materialism" or even just "politics". Sepa…

really cannot be separated from notions of class and capital and commodity-form without rendering the term "Marxist" nearly meaningless. The Intersectional claim is basically that inherent markers like race have become a functionally like a marker of class. Separating Marx from those things is like separating Jesus from Christianity. You just keep on asserting this without specifying why -- probably because you find…

> The Intersectional claim is basically that inherent markers like race have become a functionally like a marker of class.

Hm. Unless closeparen edited their comment, I've very confused, because that's not at all the claim that closeparen made.

In fact, the "all racism is really just a form of classism" is more common in conservative circles than leftist circles.

> So you're saying there's something magically special about the very specific formulation?

No, not at all. It's just one more idea. And it has a name. That name is Marxism. Use each name for the thing that it refers to, and nothing else.

> "Marxism" in such broad-brush terms is certainly not meaningless in any case.

Not really. Marxism refers to the political philosophy laid out in Capital and popularized in texts like the Manifesto. It refers to Marx's synthesis of a bunch of specific ideas -- Hegel's dialectics, materialism, the labor theory of value, commodity form, class warfare, markets, etc. -- some of which were unique to Marx and some of which pre-dated him by centuries. Marxism refers to, you know, Marx's system of thought.

I submit that whatever alternative definition you're proposing is silly and confusing.

> Anyone who throws individual rights under the bus in favor of the interests of the group

It's all fine and well that you're a traditional liberal, but calling everything that's "not you" a Marxist is pretty lazy.

Re: On Being Midwestern: The Burden of Normality

#265

Post by free_everybody »

irrational wrote: post #148
evanlivingston wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're missing a familiarity with a good chunk of the history of systematic racism in the U.S. There are reasons homogeneous communities form in the U.S. A few of those reasons have to do with city planning and legislation. City planning can be racist in nature and promote exclusionary communities. Redlining, while not typically state legislation, is a good example of practices that contributed to the formati…

>Why can't we treat people from outside our community as the same as people inside? Because millions of years of evolutionary biology tells us that people outside our community are dangerous. There are rituals an outsider must undergo in order to join the community and become safe. This kind of evolutionary baggage can't be undone by just waving a magic wand and wishing it away. I think we are trying to direct our ev…

Great point, but I don't think "directing our evolution towards not having communities" is a desirable goal. This would make people heavily reliant on the largest corporations and that power dynamic would probably turn out terribly for the common person.

Re: On Being Midwestern: The Burden of Normality

#266

Post by humanrebar »

extra88 wrote: post #138
[deleted] wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[deleted]

I don't buy into this big-R, little-r racism but "well if they'd just work harder, or get a better job," and "they" refers to black people, that's racism. > 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 pe…

> Unconscious bias, which by definition does not include intent, can still be a form of racism.

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".

Re: On Being Midwestern: The Burden of Normality

#267

Post by rhcom2 »

[deleted] wrote: post #253
rhcom2 wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't you continue that line of thinking to include, "I have no problem with black people but slavery is my family's means of economic security, I'm not being racist, just selfish"? 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 o…

[deleted]

I didn't create the mother example but it's the same with the slaver holder. Even with a non-racist intent, supporting and participating in a racist system is still racist - no matter the justification or motivations.

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.

Re: On Being Midwestern: The Burden of Normality

#268

Post by jandrewrogers »

evanlivingston wrote: post #197
colechristensen wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you're missing is that growing up there simply _weren't_ people outside my community/culture. It was much less about systematic racism and much more about who chose to immigrate to specific regions in the late 19th century. What you're talking about are things that happened in larger cities, but that's not the whole world and that doesn't match the history of much of the midwest. The parent was right, if there i…

My point is that there is a reason there weren't people outside of your community/culture. Looks at maps used for redlining https://dsl.richmond.edu/panorama/redlining/#loc=5/37.510/-9... and tell me you don't see a concentration of them in the midwest. These policies were effective during a timeline that would strongly influence and limit the diversity you saw growing up. Cultural conditions created an environment t…

You are not comprehending the facts behind what the poster is saying. There are large parts of the midwest that were settled almost exclusively by communities of central and eastern European settlers in the late 19th century. These communities are culturally homogeneous because it was virgin agricultural country before these groups of immigrants settled there. No one else has ever tried to move into these areas, largely because it isn't that attractive to anyone but members of these communities. Most people that live there today are direct descendants of the original immigrants. There was no redlining, racism, etc -- that would kind of require that someone other than these people ever lived in these communities.

I've lived in the midwest in a small farming town where virtually everyone, mostly only excluding my family, was directly descended from people that moved there from the same small part of what is now the Czech Republic at around the same time. It was incredibly homogeneous culturally.

Re: On Being Midwestern: The Burden of Normality

#269

Post by twblalock »

humanrebar wrote: post #260
twblalock wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are lot of systematic "isms" -- capitalism, socialism, fascism, etc.

Those words aren't used the same way as "racism". To wit: Are communist Americans also capitalist because they part of systemic structural capitalism?

Yes, you might call them anti-capitalist capitalists.

Re: On Being Midwestern: The Burden of Normality

#270

Post by extra88 »

creaghpatr wrote: post #203
extra88 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I think their definition of "hate group" is sometimes too expansive (e.g. religious groups that are mostly about something else but disagree with gay marriage), SPLC is still credible.

That's the point here. The parent comment is leveraging the credibility of the SPLC to smear a community/region based on the organization's subjective definition of 'hate groups'. An interactive 'hate map' seems to encourage this form of stereotyping. It's all about the branding. It works because there's always a kernel of truth in stereotypes (I'm sure there are true hate groups in Indiana), but that raises larger q…

I don't think they're smearing. There is a cluster of white nationalist groups in southern Indiana but I don't think that means people are generally more racist there than say, Ohio.

The two things I take away from looking at the map are 1) it's not just a southern thing (which I think is a misconception they're explicitly trying to correct) and 2) the hate group density correlates with population centers pretty well (which is often the case for maps of people).

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