What can we actually do to stop racism?
This post is an attempt to potentially explain some things and hopefully make it clear enough that we can do something about them. The focus of this post is on what is known as racism. It will also touch upon equality, equity, equality of opportunity, equality of outcome, discrimination, and the concept known as privilege. To begin it is important to understand what is being discussed. If people have completely different understandings of a word than any discussion involving those words will result in very different mental interpretations. That can further muddle up things.
What is racism?:
Racism is treating someone special based upon what is perceived as a racial trait. A common racial trait is skin color. However, in regions where everyone shares the same or similar skin colors it has been known to break down into the shape of a persons nose, or some other characteristic. This post will primarily be focusing on things from the lense of skin color as that is the most common. Any other trait could be substituted and what is being written about here would still apply.
What is being treated special?:
In this post the concept of treating someone special applies to treating people with positive privileges, rights, or compensations and it also applies to treating people with negative impositions, restrictions, and involuntary demands. The word special could be replaced with the word different but in the case of this concept different can again be one of the justifications people use to treat people special. Your skin color is different, your nose is different, your hair color is different, etc. For this reason the word special is used instead referring instead to the action that occurs relative to a perceived difference.
What is equality of outcome?:
This is a situation where it is expected that people in life should be able to expect the same outcome as anyone else. There should be no discrimination that results in the outcome being different. This concept also holds in practice the idea that we can adjust the world around us to try to make outcomes the same. We can make it so everyone achieves the same results.
What is equality of opportunity?:
This is the situation where everyone is provided equal access to opportunities. The chance to try to do whatever a person wishes is there. The doors are before the people and they must choose which ones they wish to go through.
What is equity?:
This generally is just another way of saying equality of outcome.
What is discrimination?:
Discrimination in reference to race is the act of deciding to group people based upon racial traits. Example: "How do you discriminate between these people?" One answer: "We could do it by skin color." The act of breaking them into groups based upon traits is discrimination. The act itself is something all life forms do. It becomes racism when you confer special treatment based upon the results of the discrimination. In society when this word is used it generally is speaking of negative special treatment and not referring to the act of grouping things. This is also sometimes referred to as generalization or stereotyping.
What is privilege with respect to race?:
Privilege is simply a special treatment in the positive sense. It's opposite in a racial setting is usually called discrimination. In reality both directions are special treatment.
Now what?
The definitions are out of the way. Now it is time to attempt to tackle the concept of racism and by then end ultimately what we can realistically do about it.
At this time a imaginary scene will be presented to you. Please attempt to imagine it as best you can.
There is a big scale sitting in reality. Around the base of that scale are a lot of people of differing colors. For the sake of this document we will call them white and non-white since that seems to be a common grouping at the time this post is written. That scale could be used for anything.
Let the games begin.
A person who happens to be white does something against someone who is non-white. We stick a white person on one side of the scale. We have decided the scale will represent crime or injustice at the particular time. The scale sinks down. To make the scale balance we pick up the non-white token that we perceive as the victim and we place them on the other side. The scale balances. One side is the perpetrator, and the other side is the victim.
In a setting where racism is a crime and we assume all people of one trait are guilty of racism we might as well grab all the tokens of that color and place them on this scale. It is now out of balance. This is because we have generalized and discriminated based upon a skin color. We have done so when the majority of those people are likely not perpetrators of any crimes. There are no victims to cancel out their act on the other side.
A quick thinking person might come forward and say that one white person perpetrated the crime of racism against multiple non-white people. Due to this they can put all of that person's victims on the other side. Now the scale appears to balance, or maybe it ends up heavy on the victim side. On the side with the white people recall there are people there that committed no crime, as they did not discriminate, or act in a state of racism.
These scales of justice exist in our minds and in our societies as we attempt to restore unto the victims what they have lost and hold the perpetrators accountable.
If the people that committed no crime are on the same side of the scale as the perpetrator they often are determined as needing to provide that restitution to the victims. This occurs whether they are perpetrators or not simply by the fact of their skin color.
This is racism. The crime of racism is being countered with racism. If we were to truly measure racism we'd need to take ALL tokens regardless of their traits and put them on one side and label that side racism.
You soon realize you cannot actually fix racism with more racism in the opposite direction.
If you think about it there is only one way to defeat racism. Don't make decisions based upon race. Don't assume things about a person based upon race. Don't treat people special based upon race.
Is it truly that simple?
At it's heart a lot of this seems to be based around the concept of equality; two types outcome, and opportunity were defined at the beginning of this document. We collectively can strive to get closer to equality of opportunity. We can find ways to present the doors of possibility to everyone and let them decide which ones they wish to walk through. What we cannot guarantee is outcome. That is anti-reality. Reality itself shows us how fake the striving for equality of outcome is.
Some of us are born with bad eyesight, some of us hearing problems, we are bigger, smaller, faster, slower, smarter, dumber, charismatic, not charismatic, and the environment we are born into is not under our control. We all know that humans come in many forms. We have character flaws. The fact we are a parent doesn't mean that those character flaws suddenly cease to exist. By extension children are going to be subject to the flaws of their parents as part of their environment. We cannot control this and it is not equal. It just is. We also cannot control the economic situation despite what communist/Marxist/socialist controls people may imagine. Such controls again do not control the character of the people that are subject to them. Some may work hard, some may not. People also have very different interests. These are all environmental factors that will influence things.
A simple mind experiment can reveal the impossibility of equality of outcome.
If you have a football/soccer field somewhere and people are randomly distributed on it in any fashion you want then an object that they desire is randomly dropped somewhere on the field some of them will be closer, some of them will be farther. There is no equality of outcome in this experience. Assuming they all move at the same speed then the closest person will get to the object first. This is reality.
Furthermore, pay attention to nature itself. So many of the things we decry as evil and wrong and thus try to mold society into our imagined image go against what nature itself does. Watch other life forms on the planet. Don't selectively watch just for things you want to be true. Instead watch it all. Pay attention to how life interacts. Without humans even in the picture there is no equality of outcome. Survival of the fittest is a factor, but there is also a huge amount of random chance. A very evolved and fit specimen can still end up dead if the randomness of life puts it into the wrong situation. Fittest in this case simply means that in aggregate they are more likely to survive than others and given a large enough population their progeny will be the ones to go into the future.
So let's pretend we could get equality of outcome. How would we do it? Well we would either need to lift everyone up to being very fit, very smart, and having the same interests, or we would need to go for the lowest common denominator and reduce abilities. You can't have equality of outcome unless people are the same and have the same interests.
One person may like football, another may not. Yet equality of outcome presumes that the lives of both people should have similar outcomes regardless of their interests and what they seek to do. This is not realistic. It actually isn't even desireable if you spend much time thinking about it.
So why do people push it then? It sounds nice and has emotional appeal. That is what most people react to. They don't want to spend time thinking it through. It also becomes a convenient excuse to use in the pursuit of justifying racism or other forms of bigotry in the pursuit of being anti-racist.
If you recall that scale of justice example presented earlier there is no anti-racist. It is just different types of racism put onto opposite sides of the scale but in truth if you have 10 racist people on one side of the scale and 10 anti-racist people on the other side of the scale to balance it out what you really have is 20 racist people.
So how do you fight racism?
Again you can't fight it using racism.
Treat people equal.
We will get more into that.
Equality of outcome is off the table. It is fake, and is ignoring reality itself. It also becomes very dystopian and authoritarian in its pursuit.
What about opportunity though?
Is that something we can pursue?
Equality of opportunity is to try to make it so a person can attempt to pursue any opportunity that someone else can. We cannot control how realistic that pursuit will be but we can strive to make it so the paths to attempting that are available. We should have no desire in forcing people to go through doors and pursue opportunities at the demands of others. We should let them pursue their interests. We can strive to make as many opportunities available as possible. Examples of this working in society are glasses, contact lenses, hearing aids, wheelchairs, wheelchair ramps, leagues of games to allow people to compete and participate with others similarly challenged as they are.
We cannot guarantee people will have the same work ethic, or be born into a family with the same work ethic. We can strive to put the pathways there for those that put forth the effort to succeed. We cannot guarantee success, but we can present the opportunity. We also can teach people responsibility so they begin to realize that the consequences of their choices are theirs. They should learn to not blame others when things don't go the way they want. That blame game leads to problems, not solutions. We need to teach them to learn from experiences and strive to persevere. If the journey does not end where you initially planned that does not make the journey worthless. Often in a long journey the place you end up going at the end may be a choice and somewhere you chose to go to rather than the destination you had in mind when you began the journey.
As a society we can strive to increase equality of opportunity but we can never perfect it. It is a goal post we can forever be moving towards. This is a worthy goal.
It also shouldn't have anything to do with race.
So how do we treat people equal?
Treating people equal simply means that when you interact with people try to treat them the same as you would anyone else. This only applies to the initial encounter with them. As you interact with people their character will reveal itself and you will begin to have information about that person. It is important in reality for us to pay attention and react to information as we encounter it. Given time you will treat everyone slightly different that you know because you will be operating off of information you have gathered about that person through experience. This should not be information that is being told to you by someone else as that can taint the treating equal bit. To treat people equal you treat them the same until you personally learn more about them that indicates you should treat them different.
Is it that simple? Partially. It is that simple to say. Making yourself do it and breaking out of the cultural and societal molds we have been indoctrinated with is not so easy. It is far easier to hate, and blame. It is also very appealing to most people to think they are owed things and be happy and supportive of things that are going to give them something easily. That isn't equal treatment though. That is special or preferential treatment. That is the seed of racism, and other forms of bigotry.
If you pay attention you will see that racism at the moment is more prominant than it has been for some time. It is also systemic in many cases. Yes, there were claims of systemic racism when it wasn't actually the case. Yet now it is.
How can this be?
Initially when systemic racism was being pushed as a thing and why the scales of justice were being engaged it actually was not a thing. There were no laws on the books demanding special treatment based upon race. In fact there were laws indicating doing so was illegal.
However, with the introduction of things like Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), as well as quotas for X percentage of hirees must be this or that systems were introduced. When people could lose their business, be fined, or sent to jail for not adhering to such quotas that was SYSTEMIC. The system was enforcing race, gender, etc. quotas.
Discrimination was illegal and technically supposedly still is.
Then they began crying about systemic racism. Suddenly DEI or similar concepts is presented and that is 100% based around discrimination.
You can't fight racism with racism. Yet this tends to be what people try to do.
Hypocrisy is common in such racism related environments as well. All that changes is which side of the scale where both sides are racist is considered the hero at the time and which is the villain. Which side claims they can't be racist at the time.
It is a lot like a teeter totter.
In the past it could have been slave owners claiming that black people were subhuman and thus they couldn't be considered racist for enslaving them. This of course was complete nonsense. The Barbary slave owners likely said similar things when they were enslaving white people.
Today you'll have people claiming that black people cannot be racist. They somehow think because in the past some black people were slaves now gives them an impossible for me to be racist card. It doesn't work like that. This is however, a common thing.
Treat people equal. That is the solution.
So consider the following:
- Black Lives Matter = Discriminating based upon skin color. It is racist.
- White Lives Matter = Discriminating based upon skin color. It is racist.
- Brown Lives Matter = Discriminating based upon skin color. It is racist.
- All Lives Matter = Not discriminating based upon race. Not racist.
Yet that last one will be attacked as attempting to deflect from the message. This is actually not the case. It is simply someone trying to stop the scales of justice being loaded up on both sides with racists. It is trying to get people to "Treat people equal". Treat each person as an individual. Don't treat them like a white person, black person, polka dotted person, etc. Treat them as individual. People upset about All Lives Matter are basically engaging a defensive action. It is cognitive dissonance. It is uncomfortable to consider yourself as doing something racist. Thus, it is easier to say you are not racist and attack the messenger who says things you don't like hearing.
Scholarships for White People = Discriminating. It is racist.
Scholarships for Black People = Discriminating. It is racist.
Scholarships for Non-White People = Discriminating. It is racist.
Scholarships based upon circumstance and not racial identity = not racist.
Having different scores for admission based upon skin color = Discriminating. It is racist.
You will hear today people claiming this or that is white supremacy. Some of the claims are pretty ridiculous.
- Math is white supremacy.
- Hard work is white supremacy.
So does that mean they are saying white people are better at math and hard work? That sounds like they are claiming they think white people are superior. That sounds quite racist.
Their answer right out of the Equality of Outcome (aka Equity) play book is that the scores non-white people should have to get to get the same results should be lowered.
A hypothetical answer might be something like a grading scale where white people have to get 95% or higher to get an A on a paper and a non-white might get 85% or higher to get a A. The idea is now the amount of white people and non-white people getting an A would be similar. They call this equality of outcome or equity. Though it is fake. It does not reflect reality.
It tries to put an illusion in front of reality and pass it off as real.
Now just for clarity. This is common for some college acceptances but you may or may not be surprised to know that often Asians have to get higher scores than whites. Why? A lot more Asians were getting higher scores. Was it because they are superior? Individually they could have been advanced, but a lot of it was likely tied to culture and how they were raised.
Were you raised that you should get a hand out, and be given things because of your identity or were you raised that you had to work really hard and strive to persevere?
Of those two methods one way will surely present higher scores than the other.
Culture is ideas.
We are not stuck with it. We can learn from them, appreciate them, discard them, and improve them. The culture you are born into is a starting point. It does not have to define you. You can transcend culture. You can build your own culture. Culture is not a racial thing. Though some cultures are more common within certain racial segments. This is a correlation and is not causal due to race.
This is a situation we have over complicated in order to justify behaving in certain ways.
It is actually simple.
- Treat people equal.
- Strive to increase equality of opportunity.
- Cultures are not races.
- Cultures are ideas and can be appreciated but not appropriated.
Agreement is not required. What was meant to be stated at the moment has been. Hopefully there is some value in this for you.