I do find it plausible that the binning-by-reflexive-associations would be predictive in some circumstances though; whenever reflexive associations like that make a difference. Maybe in ascribing a frame to an article or CV based on reading gendered names at the top acting as a prime- like studies done on male privilege in hiring and peformance reviews and promotion etc - signifiers of gender changing how the same information is interpreted. I imagine that race has an analogous mechanism.

I had never heard of it. I got "a moderate automatic preference for African Americans over European Americans". Does this mean I'm in the clear? Or do I need to work on eliminating this bias? It could have been because I didn't like the look of one of the white guys. I don't even know the guy but already I don't like him :roll: — jamalrob

I don't really like the implicit bias tests, I don't think they have much ecological validity in estimating the effects of racism; how similar are manifestations of racial prejudice to binning a black face into a "bad/white people" tag?. Nevertheless, I believe something like it makes sense to explain hiring disparities for equal cvs etc... I see no way to explain these two things conjoined without an implicit stereotype construct (1) that people aren't racist in general with their actions and words but (2) there are disparities like the hiring one for equal CVs.

I don't think it's possible to eliminate biases across the board, but the dimensions of bias vary, and I see no reason why "racial" bias can't be pretty much eliminated, while other biases remain common (fat/thin, tall/short, etc), largely because I think racism and its underlying biases are not transhistorical. — jamalrob

I should have been more precise. By saying "impossible to eliminate", I meant within the context of a society that's systemically racist. I don't intend to naturalise personal prejudices and implicit stereotypes; I intended to portray them as hard to circumvent entirely in a systemically racist society. Hard to mitigate partially? I doubt it. Hard to entirely remove the psychic influence of racialisation in a society that is systemically racist? I definitely think so.

EDIT: I am not supporting that your version of white privilege is actually helpful. I am just saying that it's fair use. Not really trying to rebegin a debate but just to say that I think a lot of my criticism of your idea was invalid. — Judaka

As polemical as I am with you, I have a lot of respect for this attitude. :up:

I have taken the Harvard implicit bias test, at least the one on race -- I assume everyone here has -- and got more or less exactly the result I expected: as a white man of my age who grew up where and how I did, I have a slight but noticeable implicit bias in favor of whites and against blacks. I already knew that -- though I'm not really sure how. — Srap Tasmaner

Same! Being a white from the UK predictably had my implicit biases be pretty strong against Muslims and blacks.

So now what? I'm not sure eradicating my bias is on the table, though I believe my children have less bias than I do and their children will have less than they do. I have even heard psychologists argue that "sensitivity training" of the sort businesses and schools and other institutions pay experts to provide is worse than pointless: not only does it not reduce implicit bias, it tends to make people defensive, resistant to self-examination, and thus less likely to modify their behavior. — Srap Tasmaner

I don't think it's possible to eradicate it, I think it's possible to try and mitigate it where it matters. I wish that there was a magical anti-racist technology of self that stopped me from having those blindspots and conditioned associations. But I doubt one could ever exist, outside of living in a society that does not have constant racist propaganda, xenophobic immigration policies and the socio-economic disparities that give the pretence of objectivity to naturalising/essentialising thought+behavioural patterns - ie in a society where race matters less, we will make it matter less.

Monitoring my own behavior is what I've opted for. I have decided -- rightly or wrongly I'm not sure -- that racism is acting upon bias, whether implicit or explicit, explicit bias is a failure of the intellectual conscience, but implicit bias you just have to live with, make the effort not to act upon it, be open to recognizing when you have, and improve. Not so different really from dealing with other cognitive biases really, except that other people may pay a price for your failings. — Srap Tasmaner

I've gone for much the same option. I'm not sure what else there is to do other than study, self examine, talk to people. I think it matters most to put in extra effort into being less prejudicial when the action will have tangible consequences; for me that's been who I answer/ask questions from/to in a seminar, grading something which isn't anonymised, or when designing an experiment trying to incorporate flags/checks for if the phenomenon in question has a demographic aspect to it (admittedly almost impossible with student based "convenience sampling").

Going back to the more general privilege concept the thread is about, I think there's a similar psychic debt when trying to navigate a romantic relationship - though if the privileged are already pretty uncomfortable with dealing with how they embody the mechanisms of systemic discrimination in public, trying to propagate the discussion into the bedroom is going to be even worse!

I do think... with a fair amount of conviction... that once one becomes aware of the facts when blacks are not treated equally under the law, they can no longer be thought of as innocent. However, I would urge that the expectation placed upon each individual regarding what they ought do, would be commensurate with their ability to effect/affect change. A public official is held to a much higher standard than a poor rural white person living in the rust belt.

Both ought do what they can when they can. — creativesoul

:point: :strong:

With regards to what anyone can do, here is something that's been on my mind.

Let's say you're generally a woke person in terms of systemic racism. You've read stuff that clearly establishes that it's a thing, and that it shows up everywhere. Literally everywhere, poverty gaps, pay gaps, hiring gaps, healthcare gaps, job-with-benefits gaps, precarious vs stable employment gaps, police murders, rates of kids drowning in swimming pools.... .

Let's say you're also aware that systems which are systemically racist also promote (and do not effectively punish/render invisible) racial prejudice against the oppressed group. And you know that racial prejudice is a more complicated mental construct than just being a binary between white supremacist terrorist and tolerant liberal; like where does the hiring gap for equally good CVs come from if there's no way for managers to embody a mechanism of systemic racism? Implicit stereotypes have to play a role. And it makes absolutely no sense to say that someone learns that mechanism the instant they're in a hiring role. So you also know that implicit stereotypes are both a relevant vector of oppression; contributing to the hostility of public spaces, differences in how the oppressed group are treated; and they are fucking everywhere. So panvasive that internalised racism is a thing - like Christians the world over praying to the miracle of a milky white ethnically Palestinian Jesus.

So why not in me? Why not in you? Are we not people affected by the structures we live in? It's one thing to be aware of these things as an intellectual construct, it's another to view your own actions and thoughts under their auspices. That is something that anyone can attempt, so they should attempt it. It's easy to put all the racism "over there" into abstract societal mechanisms, but if "the personal is political" everyone has to do the difficult work of self transformation - to try and be the kind of individual whose thoughts and actions challenge the psychic manifestations of systemic racism. And no, I don't think it's "enough" - emotional labour of that sort is doubtlessly of less importance than social projects, but because we all can, we all should. I think that goes double for the privileged groups like we whites - if we want to live in a world absent systemic discrimination, we should try not to be its racist grandparents.

In relationship to the topic, I think that's what "white privilege" taps into, why it gets so offensive. It doesn't just highlight that whites are beneficiaries of systemic racism, it highlights that the psychic (and other individual embodied) manifestations of systemic racism are there too. It's difficult to stop an ego-defense mechanism when you don't realise that's what it is, and trying to stop it is supposed to be painful. Part of system justification is emotional homeostasis. But how painful struggle is has never touched its moral status; if you can, you should. Are we really to believe that whites are so fragile that our reluctance to do this work is because it is impossible? I doubt it.

So one can be white, be conscious of systemic racism, and be in opposition to it? If that is true, whither "white privilege?" If I denounce any claim to it and actively work against it, how is it properly applied to me? — Pro Hominem

@Banno gave a worked example using "stairs" for able-bodied privilege at the start of the thread, then linked an essay later in this () post. gave a long explanation. If this question is rooted in a failure of understanding, one of the essays Banno linked has a checklist of ways white privilege works on a day to day individual level (as a manifestation of systemic racism).

(sorry if an American bias is present there - I acknowledge it and it doesn't change my point). — Pro Hominem

No worries.

Straw manning again. I did not say that vocabulary was sufficient to end racism. I said it was a factor. — Pro Hominem

Obviously addressing the conditions that support the racist fiction is a bigger factor. I would never say otherwise, and have in fact said that I don't think the "white privilege" framing is somehow fatal to progress in race issues - I just think it's unproductive. — Pro Hominem

What would you replace "white privilege" with? I'm genuinely curious, not asking in a "gotcha" way. Or if you don't agree that the role that concept plays in discourse still needs to be played, why not?

So racism is inevitable? I could not more vehemently disagree. — Pro Hominem

Oh no. That's not what I meant at all. I simply meant that how we talk about race isn't the primary means by which systemic racism re/produces itself - in my view the primary means are economic and legal (function of the enforcement of law rather than letter of the law). Say when Glasgow Council decided to tackle the systemic risk of knife crime, they didn't intervene on how people spoke about each other, they treated it as a public health and education issue; effectively increasing the social capital of the target communities to address the conditions that lead to knife crime being more commonplace in those areas. They did not and could not stop anyone referring to community members as neds or schemies, but they could address the disadvantages that increased the risk of knife crime for the targets of the words.

"Defund the Police" from the BLM protests wants a similar shift in strategic focus; public health over punishment, prevention through addressing the economic issues that lead to higher crime rates over the punitive treatment of the symptoms of those issues. The focus on socio-economy over discourse is instructive.

Why not start on that now? — Pro Hominem

In a time where "Black Lives Matter" is an effective rallying slogan, and "white privilege" as a concept is forcing us to discuss systemic racism like this, it is still completely necessary. Why start jettisoning the vocabulary that will be needed to address the issues while they're still a huge thing? And why does this difficult deconstructive labour of race concepts have to be done in the same breath as the problem naming slogan of "white privilege"? Different problems, different strategies.

As long as we continue to employ the language and symbolism of the race-based view of the world, we will never live in a "post-racist" world. This is my concern with most anything that uses the "black" or "white" labels. If every one of us just stopped believing those terms correlated to something real in the world, racism would immediately disappear. That is what the end of racism looks like. — Pro Hominem

Oh absolutely; there will be no need to use race categories to call a spade a spade here after systemic racism has been abolished. Until then, insofar as a system is systemically racist, it requires a vocabulary to describe the mechanisms of its systemic racism in order to address them. It's a cart and horse thing; systemic racism is doing all the pulling, not how we speak about race. What would abolish the need to use race as a concept is the end of systemic racism - the only reason it seems plausible that abolishing the vocabulary of race would end systemic racism are that how people think and socio-economic conditions relate to each other. No one's going to get more free by everyone agreeing to use words differently in isolation, and so long as systemic racism exists it will engender racial stereotyping and other prejudices.

I see this as a much different discussion than on what race is - an interlinking collection of categories that is re/produced by a process of racialization. It's not just words. If someone's going to believe that a person is gonna be lazy because they're black, that's nowhere near using race categories to describe systemic discrimination that's rooted in how those categories propagate+sustain themselves over time and people!

Magically abolish racial categorisation in language alone, there would still be systemic racism, and it won't be long after that until racial stereotypes crop up.

Both require direct, knowledgeable involvement in a previously determined illegal act. — Pro Hominem

If complicity and collaboration in an injustice both require that that injustice is illegal, it becomes impossible to be complicit with or collaborate in the execution of an unjust law; since by definition it is legal.

Edit, example: So something like Operation Legacy, in which administrative agents of the British Empire destroyed their meticulous internal documentation of Britain's human rights violations in order to avoid something like the Nuremburg Trials happening to Britain... Perfectly legal. So impossible to be complicit in; despite all those turning a blind eye, and all those failing to sequester documents; and impossible to collaborate with; despite people burning down archive buildings. If someone who literally burned incriminating documents to stop the British Empire being held to account legally for its crimes in an international tribunal is not a collaborator in the crimes of Empire, I don't know what remains of the meaning of the term.

Supporting X is not equivalent to not challenging X. — creativesoul

Aside from complicity, how would you describe the following thing MLK highlights:

I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and that when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress. I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that the present tension in the South is a necessary phase of the transition from an obnoxious negative peace, in which the Negro passively accepted his unjust plight, to a substantive and positive peace, in which all men will respect the dignity and worth of human personality. Actually, we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.

?

For me there's a distinction between complicity - what I think MLK diagnoses as the system justifying behaviour of the "white moderate" in a different vocabulary - and collaboration, like the FBI's actions against black civil rights movements in COINTELPRO + within Garvey's movement. Complicity's "The wrong life cannot be lived rightly" vs collaboration's being an agent that works to promote or sustain the unjust conditions of life.

What? — Judaka

I decided to use an exaggerated form of you insinuating that I was racist (more likely to be racist!) to satirise your insinuation that I was (more likely to be) racist. I took a few signifiers I have that are associated with white supremacist terrorists (skinhead blackshirts with steel-toed boots) and highlighted them, along with allying myself with the use of "white privilege" as a concept. I could explain the joke more.

I couldn't possibly substantiate my claim, it's anecdotal and a weak claim but I certainly believe it is more likely that a person who uses the term white privilege to be more prone to making assumptions based on race. — Judaka

Making assumptions based on race; depends a lot of how it's done, no? Is it in intellectual act of critique which highlights socio-economic-legal disparities ("privileges")? In this context assumptions based on race are neutral on the metaphysics of race ; it doesn't have to matter what race is for the purposes of showing what it does. You don't hold any opinions of any individual, you hold opinions of a population based on disparities that the population has been shown to face.

That is much different, I hope is clear, from holding a negative opinion or treating someone badly in a manner rooted in their race.

Apparently defining racism is a controversial topic in this thread, what is your definition of racism? Isaac claims that it requires oppression, while I would say any race-based discrimination is racism, that's the definition I'm working on. — Judaka

In my head I distinguish between racial prejudices and systemic racism. Though the two interlink systemically.

A discriminatory prejudice is a negative judgement of a person that results in holding an unsubstantiated negative opinion of their character, capacities, and possible behaviours causally derived from an agent's recognition of (or assignment to!) their membership in a group, and then possibly treating them differently based upon that opinion. A racial prejudice is a discriminatory prejudice where the group assignment mechanism is race. This is a reduction of person to how they are racialized at the same time as an act of racialization.

By systemic discrimination I understand a socio-economic mechanism that increases the chances of negative outcomes for members of a group based upon their membership of that group. In other words, when belonging to the group is strongly determinative of the increased chances of negative outcomes relative to non-group members. IE, when the disparity in relative risk is not dependent upon what you do, but is strongly dependent on what group you are assigned to. Systemic racism is systemic discrimination that is strongly determined by race.

In a system that is discriminatory against a group, discriminatory prejudices against that group become more likely. If risks (eg, economic, criminal) are associated with group membership societally, the belief that explains those risks on an individual level in terms of group membership becomes more likely. Eg: "disabled people are scroungers", the black "welfare queen" stereotype. An agent's negative judgement by embodying the group assignment mechanism is different from explaining the group membership by the assignment mechanism; eg, highlighting racialisation vs racialising someone, talking about racial profiling vs racial profiling someone.

Inversely, if a person in a system acts in a manner that engenders a negative outcome upon someone based on their group assignment (eg, a hate crime, a prejudicial hiring decision, calling refugees dying in Mediterranian "cockroaches"), it engenders a systemic discrimination in that system to the extent they have determinative power over it (the extent to which an individual's actions are systemically causal). If you found a country weaponising racial prejudice, the prejudice of the founders shows up in systemic racism against their target groups of prejudice. This is a good reason to demand higher standards from politicians and lawmakers than ordinary people; their prejudices and lack of attention show up as prejudices and lack of attention in policy, law and individual outcomes so affected.

There are many reasons I think people who like the term white privilege are more likely to be racist but the main one is simply that the term is very race-orientated. It calls out being white in the US as a privilege and what I see people doing is using the idea of white privilege to presume the privilege of somebody who is white. Which gives you a lot to work with, a lot of assumptions that you can make about someone simply for being white. — Judaka

I think this is the equivocation I wrote about above; talking about the group assignment mechanism and its associated effects (highlighting racialisation and systemic racism) vs embodying the group assignment mechanism (racialising someone and having a racist prejudice).

Is there any way it would be enough for me to simply say you are completely incorrect? Could you then engage my perfectly rational arguments without having to resort to ad hominem projections? Or are you going to demand my bona fides and waste a lot of time before we get back to the actual point of the conversation, which is the general poverty of the term white privilege as a tool to help end racism? — Pro Hominem

Eh, you asked me:

do you have the impression that I am made personally uncomfortable by the term

And I answered yes and gave you a reason why.

You had previously stated you would not engage with me on the substantive content because:

Apologies if I'm shortchanging you by not responding fully, but it feels like I would just be retreading what I've already said. — Pro Hominem

it would be retreading ground you felt you had already covered.

I wrote a lot of polemical stuff at you, in my mind it's only fair to explain what motivated me to do it!

fdrake is just doing exactly what makes the criticism of the framing correct, by showing that those who see the world through it, are in fact most prone to race-based discrimination. How can something producing such an effect possibly counter racism? — Judaka

Oh, you got me. I was pretty lazy in my responses to @Pro Hominem - writing them as I did while being a bald white wearing a black t-shirt. If I put a bit more effort in and wore the steel-toed black boots as well that would've deffo upped my White Power creds.

The provocative remark that I'm "more prone to race-based discrimination" based on my support for the term "white privilege" is mostly unsubstantiated - do you really expect people who use the term to be more racist than people who do not use the term?

The only way I see that this makes sense is the series of equivocations:

Racist = uses racial categories in arguments = can think about people in terms of races.

I put it to you that there is no way to talk about racism and not be racist under that series of equivocations. That's pretty pernicious, as if indeed there are unique societal dynamics that involve race causally, race is a useful analytic category. For instance; a study on racially motivated hate crimes becomes racist for making race a factor in the analysis, irrelevant of the fact race places a causal role in the crime.

On a systemic level, the causality concept changes from billiard balls (if A then B is guaranteed) to comparisons based on what's analysed (here race) holding all else as equal as possible in the background. Billiard ball causality is uniquely determinative, systemic causality is strongly determinative. If there is a disparity in that sense based on race, it's reasonable to infer that race plays a strongly determinative role in that situation.

I'm sure you know that race plays a causal role in the following circumstances:
(1) Police violence - even if you control for economic+demographic variables, PoCs are at way more risk. @StreetlightX posted a paper a while back that established this (tagging for citation); summarised, whites are at comparable risks to PoCs for police violence in poor communities, PoCs are at higher risk everywhere else. It's not just a class thing.
(2) Sentencing rates and sentence severity for criminal activity strongly track race (I could find a citation for this if you demand one); if you're a PoC, you're both more likely to be sentenced and more likely to receive a harsher sentence if sentenced.

There's also the historical angle of white supremacist terrorism; Tulsa and Rosewood weren't attacked for being poor, they were attacked for being dangerous to the interests of the white race in America - simply by being prosperous communities of colour.

Those are things that are implausible to reduce to the class distinction. Race plays a causal role.

It might be a stupid conception of race that facilitates it, but regardless of how stupid an idea is, it still plays a role when people and systems act under its influence. So long as there are social+economic dynamics that are strongly determined by race, race will remain a useful analytic category. It's a shitty thing to have to make sense of some things on those terms, but those are the breaks.

Edit: so in that context of talking about race still being necessary, how does white privilege as a concept fit in? The disadvantages and history split along white/PoC lines, whites accruing relative advantages and avoiding risks, PoCs accruing relative disadvantages and being more exposed to risks. That it's whites that accrue the benefits is signified by "white" and that it's talking about relative advantages/relative risk reduction over a broad range of things is signified by "privilege", it contains the direction of advantage and gestures towards the character of those advantages. I can't think of a better two word summary of the effect, can you?

(7) White privilege being used to discriminate against the "white" experience and characterising white success in light of their advantages
(8) The privilege framing having an effect on causing things such as "white guilt", shame and so on. — Judaka

It's a sign of courage that complicity is uncomfortable. Not that being uncomfortable because of complicity, by itself, does much at all.

Anyway the meaning of the word become quite clear if you look at its etymology, privi lege... private law. A law is generally applicable to everybody with exception. Privi leges then are private laws or rights that specifically only apply to certain individuals or small groups. The majority of whites don't have privileges in that sense... so it's just not accurate to say they do. — ChatteringMonkey

I think you know that's not how it's used. It's not just about the law, though there absolutely is a component of privilege associated with the law; apartheid, Jim Crow, the Windrush scandal... Another aspect - unwarranted police violence splits along racial lines, and it's almost impossible to prosecute them successfully for it - by design.

Just out of curiosity, do you have the impression that I am made personally uncomfortable by the term? Or are you speaking to the larger suggestion that it causes discomfort in some people? — Pro Hominem

I get the impression that you get offended by the term. Perhaps it was a misreading, but I found your prose in this thread had a wounded narrative voice. Albeit a wound dressed with abstractions. Analysis written with the urgency of a deep felt wound, defending yourself from the (alleged) accusations inherent in the idea. I imagine that you feel scared because you believe if it's true that makes you racist and complicit in oppression and there's not much you can do to change it.

Reminded me of this:

Apologies if I'm shortchanging you by not responding fully, but it feels like I would just be retreading what I've already said. — Pro Hominem

No worries. I'm under no illusions that I can convince you to change your mind about the term! At some point over the years all the discussions about it became essentially the same discussion to me. The usual reasons of "it's a bad slogan because it's divisive/pejorative", "it's a simple emotional appeal, where's the logic?", "it draws attention away from more important issues" have been around for a long time, I used to even staunchly believe the last one! So forgive me for not responding to your articulation of the points, for me at this point it's effectively an abstract structure. People super uncomfortable with the claim get more uncomfortable when the discomfort is pointed out, and super duper uncomfortable if it's psychologised. I've never had success with reason, I've sometimes got people to think using reason laced with emotional appeals. The same happened to me; what cajoled me out of the bunker I'd built with critical thought was getting fucking owned by an off the cuff comment made by a talented feminist.

I actually really like how uncomfortable it can make people; discomfort invites study and refutation from a certain kind of mind, and intellectually+emotionally engaging with the mechanisms of privilege for that curious and empathetic kind of mind is an opportunity for self discovery. Finding out where and how you fit into history and the current moment. Sand, oysters, pearls, etc.

I just hope that the dawning awareness of our own complicity that such an engagement produces also produces allies and collaborators - that righteous anger agitating towards greater freedom is all too often condemned as mere irrational sentiment. Being "possessed by an idea" as @Judaka put it; I like that, a haunting by reason and compassion. Let us hope it is a poltergeist.

So the concept of privilege isn't contrary to any of your experiences. You simply feel it is patronising.

Can't you see that this is the same mechanism that religions use to indoctrinate people... because they are stupid and can't be trusted to make up their own minds? — ChatteringMonkey

So focus on the facts: do you find anything factually wrong with what material conditions accounts using the concept seeks to highlight? Privileges of able body and mind, race+ethnicity, income, gender...

but because it assumes that i'm in need of moral instruction in the first place — ChatteringMonkey

I'm sorry that the idea that other people may be able to teach you things that have a shot of making the world, and you, better offends you so much. Are we so different that you only believe what you believe based on reason and no sentiment is involved? I doubt it, we are talking about your personal feelings of offence, not about the realities associated with privilege.

Does that seem like a fair complaint to you? — ChatteringMonkey

The point is that words are being used in a way that is not typical so as to elicit the correct moral response. I'd rather have an accurate description and let people make up their own minds, that is all. — ChatteringMonkey

To add to that, it's also offending to constantly be told what it is you are offended about, even after explicitly stating that that is not the case.... as if your self-reported experience doesn't matter because you have to be some self-deluding idiot that can only be saying these things to justify his abject moral character. — ChatteringMonkey

Moral instruction can be distasteful when the values+perspectives to be imputed go against something in you, yeah. Which of your experiences does the concept of "privilege" go against?

Yet I need to distinguish between that which is asserted to be in accordance with reality (and could be correct) and that which is asserted to be in accordance with reality (and couldn't be correct). — Judaka

What kind of idea is incapable of being accurate or inaccurate? Can you give some examples?

Edit: I guess what I'd really like is:

(1) A bunch of ("brute") facts
(2) An "arrangement" of them.

And labels for which bits of the account can be accurate and which can't be.

Or doesn't it break down like that? Can there be "arrangementless" facts?

A worked example would be really good.

and even generated an increased use of individualist language regardless of race (ie, talk of privilege merely ressurects ideas of assessing achievement by comparison with origin rather than as a indicator of it). — Isaac

That's interesting. I guess one reading of it is causal, like "I am privileged /because/ I'm white" - so someone who did not feel privileged might go a bit nuts over that- one of the guys on the Partially Examined Life was pretty vexed by it since he grew up poor. My initial reaction to the term (about a decade ago now?) was a surprising amount of hostility to it, at the intersection of the stereotypical reasons from Working Class White Brit + Leftist - "it's the working class that matters most" + "white supremacy is a subprocess of the class antagonism" + "this is individualist liberal identity politics" .

While I can agree with all three of those things still (though in a different way now), I do remember feeling very accused by the idea of white privilege, and my mind was definitely doing some ego defence mechanism bullshit with those three ideas. I was not happy with my complicity in it, which influenced the strength I rejected the idea with. Warding off guilt using anger. If you asked me at the time I would not have been able to admit that the idea made me extremely uncomfortable, I would've justified my emotions using those leftist tropes.

Wish I would've heard of Akala back then:

Behind my painted smile is the most painful grimace
This mental prison I live in cause I am so conditioned
By my privilege, what a strange contradiction
To grow up brown in Britain and know that your living
Was paid for by a carcass that resembles yours
Born in the heart of the empire
You're worth more than others just like you
But less then the native ones, raised by my mum but in this world I am a father's son

Yeah, its basically saying that you can't be trusted to make up your own mind. — ChatteringMonkey

Perhaps, but belief it or not, some people are actually concerned with precision in the words they use. Like, don't try to convince me by manipulating the meaning of words, just give me accurate facts and let me decide. — ChatteringMonkey

In context, what have you decided?

PS - you said "duckspeaking" and your name is drake. That's hilarious. Well done. — Pro Hominem

That quacked me up.

Correct me if I'm wrong, it seems to me the main thing you dislike about white privilege is that you believe the phrase has essentialist connotations. As in, stating that there is a character entailed by a person's colour. A kind of prejudice by oversimplification. Moreover, you find white privilege unhelpful as a term insofar as it may suggest a universal character of oppression based on not being white - which, problematically, isn't sensitive to ethnicity or local context.

Both of these are instances of the term "white privilege" being judged by its possible interpretations. I agree that they are possible connotations. Just like some people felt excluded by "Black Lives Matter" the name for not being verbatim "All Lives Matter".

That fits into the context of considering the term "white privilege" as somewhere between an organising concept of discourse + activism + solidarity and as an anti-racist propaganda tool. I think if you understand, which you seem to, the realities associated with white privilege (the legacy of European settler colonialism and its justifying ideologies + the economic and cultural means of reproduction of its effects), the utility of the term for you is spent. The concept no longer functions for you in a Kangaroo court of reason, the question remains of evaluating its status as a brick through a window.

I agree it is unspecific and very broad, I agree that someone seeing "white privilege" by itself as an adequate description of the mechanisms that perpetuate white privilege is intellectually lazy. But it's a framing device, it opens a space for a kind of discussion that is still very necessary, and it suggests essentially the right collection of ideas: ( a ) the legacy of settler colonialism and its racism advantages whites relative to PoCs ( b ) it's a "privilege", not a guarantee - systemic+statistical/population based rather than an iron law, it's not "white success guarantee", ( c ) it's agent neutral, it doesn't say who or what does it or how - broad enough to be applicable to apartheid and other legalised racisms, systemic+institutional effects like in hiring and health outcomes... And finally ( d ) it emotionally resonates enough to provoke discussion.

I don't think you could ask for a better two word propaganda tool. The costs associated with the analytic imprecision actually show up as gains in transmissibility and scope. It's even very very accurate for a slogan.

The information you've provided demonstrates that the form of that message is perhaps even more important that its substance, in terms of being accepted and perhaps acted upon by the audience. Have I missed something? — Pro Hominem

How can you tell if someone who extremely dislikes the concept of white privilege is doing so for system justification/self palliative reasons or not? I'm not saying don't be critical of it, I'm saying that the very idea inspires so much vitriol in some people and pages and pages of text. Often, after the pages and pages the person who says they hate the concept of white privilege actually agrees with all of the substantive content it criticises, but feels either personally attacked by it or that (generic white person) will be turned off by it. Projecting personal discomfort onto the absent other, maybe. Regardless, they dislike the present because of the package. Complicity should never feel comfortable, and self flagellating doesn't make any difference.

I've got a personal wager that people who get super animated about it being a hard sell to some white people to begin with more often than not are duckspeaking system justification in an academic dialect. But that's neither here not there I suppose.

What do you think about this? — Judaka

I don't think brute facts exist. I think the idea of a brute fact is one which does not depend in any way on the capacities of an agent in perceiving/representing/interpreting/explaining/articulating it. I don't believe it's possible for an agent to relate to any type of fact without compromising its brute-ness; as a brute fact is necessarily an unperceived, unrepresented, uninterpreted, unexplained and unarticulated one.

Insofar as the means of apprehension of a fact are theory-ladened, the resultant fact from that means of apprehension are not brute.

I think you have a three stage process in mind.

(A) There are brute facts.
(B) Brute facts are arranged discursively (with narrativisation, emphasis...).
(C) The discursive arrangement is evaluated normatively (morally, cost/benefit etc.).

The status of some facts as brute is what the process rests on.

Then with "social facts" for instance, we can see that although evidence alone is not sufficient for verification, to call it a matter of taste is simply unreasonable. Because someone born into an environment where this social fact exists is going to have a really tough time doing anything except accepting it although exceptions may apply. I suppose that other categories help to signify the nature of the claim and how it is NOT merely a matter of taste. It is just a very helpful framing which really embodies what I see as the correct way to see things. — Judaka

If this is social fact in the Durkheimian sense, I don't think it relates to bruteness at all. Bruteness is an epistemic/semantic issue regarding facts, social facts are facts about social structures (societies, cultures, institutions...). The only way I see of relating one to another is through this (largely unarticulated) intuition of agent dependence; if social facts are dependent upon the (possibly interpretive) practices of agents for their occurrence and apprehension, they are not independent of agents and therefore cannot be brute. But be careful with that - as it would be possible to erroneously infer that aspects of social structure are matters of taste ( if not brute = agent dependent = dependent upon an agent's interpretation = like "I like coffee")! Or indeed that whether arbitrary social events happen depends upon how they are interpreted.

It's hard to parse left polemical arguments unless you're used to them, I think. It's not just a you thing!

Find a common vulnerability - exploit it. This is not a new thing, it's a venerable tradition; people do not like being told that love means taking up your cross and getting crucified, they want to hear that it's being very nice and popular, and having friends and admirers. They want to hear that if they pretend to enjoy being exploited, they will stop being exploited. Peterson is selling soft soap cunningly disguised as hard rock (for real men). But look out, them commies want to steal your freedom! — unenlightened

:up:

I don't really disagree that the terms objective and subjective have issues. Thinking of alternative conceptualisations has been on my mind lately but I've yet to settle on anything. Mostly what I am interested in is looking at the effects of a viewpoint on an individual and challenging the individual to ask not what is true but what effect their ideas and beliefs are having on their lives. Analysing characterisations or narratives - looking at the consequences and evaluating what outcomes are good and why and how can we try for those outcomes. — Judaka

Something rough and ready in that regard:

Subjective/objective in their usual use are better parsed as matters of taste (subjective) and not matters of taste (objective). I think of a matter of taste as a condition whereby having the opinion/taste is sufficient and necessary for its truth. EG: I like coffee. Roughly whenever thinking something makes it so.

Issues which are not matters of taste break down into either failing the sufficiency or the necessity clause or both. If the connection between having a belief and its truth fails to be sufficient; then the fact that you have an opinion need not say anything other than that you have it (matters of fact). If they fail to be necessary, perhaps you are committed to things that you do not know (matters of ideology/behaviour).

Things of note fail both; we can be wrong in ways we don't understand, we can be wrong about something and not know we think it (but nevertheless we are committed to it). If having a belief but being unaware of it is something incomprehensible, spending some time in therapy will both convince you otherwise and probably make you feel better.

My interest in OP is based on such thoughts, as far as the best method for determining what is or isn't true, honestly, I had given much less thought to how this might bear on that. I was really thinking more about challenging the unwarranted truth status given in a variety of contexts which I was unhappy about. — Judaka

I think the motivating context for the subjective/objective framing is usually matter of taste vs not matter of taste. Like seeing politics as a choice between really important ice cream flavours (and nevertheless choosing vanilla with chocolate chip for unexamined psychosexual reasons latent in the colonial unconscious :P)

I think @JerseyFlight's post is a pretty straightforward argument written in a polemical way.

(1) Accepting an ideology can have a palliative function for people.(see here)

From linked paper:

Since that time, many researchers have replicated the results of this work in samples across the globe, demonstrating that conservatives (or right-wingers) are happier than liberals (or left-wingers), and this relationship is mediated by system-justifying beliefs that legitimize existing inequality

Intuition pumps:

Contrast "everything is going to work out in the end" with "The end might well happen within 50 years (citation citation citation citation)"...

Contrast: "If you work hard, you'll go far" with "How you end up depends a lot on where you start, and you can't control where you start (citation citation citation citation)"

(3) People instinctively understand the palliative function and don't want to lose it. Like I felt anxious without my nursing blanket when trying to sleep as a wee kid.

(4) (3) splits along left+liberal/conservative lines (see linked paper). Systemic critique is generally a leftward thing. It is explicitly opposed to system justification narratives - critiquing+agitating against systemic injustice vs not seeing it as a relevant political category/explicitly justifying it as fair or as unavoidable.

(5) Adopting viewpoints that result from systemic critique tends to put you more left along the split in (4), which correlates with losing the palliative function in (3) since you invest less in it.

But that is trivial. People like easy answers and comfortable answers better than true answers and no answers. They like to be empowered even if it is a fantasy of power. They like cheap. They like to get Brexit done and make America great again. — unenlightened

I've never known you to use "they" like that when talking about an elephant in the room regarding people. I say this despite being critical of Peterson; why him and now? What issues is he palliating in his target demographic? Who are they? I think he addresses a bunch of needs for them; and I don't want to throw the considerations of need out along with the ideas he addresses them with.

Peterson has no model of anything. It'll change as the wind blows. Total pseudo-intellectualism and charlatanism. Has many strident followers, I'm sure. So does Trump. If you take it seriously, that's your business. — Xtrix

I don't take what he's selling seriously. I take why people buy it seriously.

Depends on what we're supposedly reacting against. If it's climate denial, for example, simply present the evidence -- that's a positive direction forward. If its pseudo-intellectualism, then counter it with actual intellectualism (re: Peterson), etc. Not complicated. — Xtrix

Oh. I misread you then. I thought you had a competing life model/model life to Peterson's.

Yes, as long as we don't make that the full time job. If we chase every crazy claim, "debating" and "refuting," etc., we go nowhere. It's best to have a positive direction, a plan, a better way of life, a better way of thinking, etc., and let people join in with that -- questioning ourselves and correcting mistakes along the way, but not getting sidetracked by "debunking" things (unless there's a real chance that it helps). The same is true of "debate" -- a ridiculous concept, really. — Xtrix

What positive direction do you believe in?

I'm shaken by how 'mercans make an individual's race so pivotal. — Banno

Don't you live in Oz?

By "high quality" I mean, for example, that you might have read the first post in the thread and responded to it in some manner. Instead, you've gone off on a rant which has nothing at all to do with my proposal. Same for Hanover's post, just pile of non-responsive unrelated gibberish. — Hippyhead

I did read it. There's no definition of quality in the OP, only an implicit equation of mod posts with quality standards. You can read the list I wrote to you as an list of reasons why I think having academic quality standards goes against the open access nature of the forum.

The kind of standards which could be enforced more strictly mostly regard tone; we could enforce people to be more polite. I believe that that incentivizes passive aggression more than civility. As it stands, posters get kicked if their engagements are predominantly excessively rude and excessively inarticulate. The bar's far below formal debate or academic argument intentionally.

Regardless, those are good ideals to try and emulate. It's definitely exemplary content if you approach something like that (@Srap Tasmaner, @Nagase come to mind here) - but it can also be good content if it's a provocative, insightful and brief treatment of an issue (@Banno is particularly gifted at this). Those are great, but not necessary.

Are you actually just being provocative on purpose here? I mean, it's really a double bind. If a mod disagrees with the idea, a reader can plausibly infer that staff acknowledge that we are naughty. If a mod agrees with the idea, a reader can plausibly infer that staff are elitist.

This is exactly it, and tragically these young people don't have the resources to place him in context as an intellectual. There is nothing there. Even in the domain of psychology this guy is a joke. The amount of revolutionary research and progress in psychology, in the last 20 years alone, is breathtaking. Peterson exemplifies and embodies none of it. He is still trying to preach the moth-eaten narrative that will power is the agent of human psychological salvation. We know this is nonsense, many other factors are at work. Like I accurately said, he's a conformist and a reactionary. — JerseyFlight

Eh, I'm somewhat sympathetic to him. The social issues he's speaking about are pretty real. Even if he presents some of them in an inverted reactionary form. If you grew up in the 80's or 90's and you're a white dude in the political north, the societal norms and expectations you grew up with involved stable careers ending in a pension+retirement, social mobility tied to educational attainment, and widespread belief that formal legal equality had been attained for all "identity politics" issues. The culture screams it at you, get a job, get a skill - "pick your sacrifice" as Peterson terms it.

But now the peers are educated, the gig economy is a thing, industrial jobs got outsourced or automated out of existence, white worker political institutions like unions (which your parents + grandparents relied on and benefitted from) have less and less influence (how could they keep it?) and worse still we might mostly be dead by then from the climate change pressure cooker. There's widespread distrust in "mainstream media", and we form these little online spaces based on largely consumer interest. Occupy happened and was ignored. We're living through the death rattle of (something), there's widespread awareness that it's a death-rattle... so... What?

The left's vague slogans about community and solidarity don't tell you what to do, and in all this ambiguity and weirdness, it makes sense to invest in nostalgia - clinging onto anything that makes it all seem like it's gonna be okay, and reassure you that doing the things that people've always done (IE, our parents expected to be...) will restore order and make sense of life again. No coincidence that Peterson's a Christianity inspired therapist! "Pick a frame" as Peterson puts it in the same breath as "you get to pick your sacrifice". I have the same nostalgia but channel it into unions and protest. Hell, a good conversation in person with a stranger would be fandabbydosy (no, 4chan mayoboys recognising a kindred spirit from my sandals and odd socks in a bar don't count).

Peterson has all the right creds to sell confidence; he's a therapist (and we're all pretty fucked up right about now), he can cite scientific studies (very badly, lobster anthropology and not in that cute Deleuzian way, thinking the alpha wolf study had ecological validity). He's a damn prof for god's sake, but he speaks critically of the social conditions generating all this malaise.

And as much as I hate to admit it, it's not like left critique is going to sell his target demographic anything but horrific superego flagellation (a phrase I learned from @csalisbury). So what? Leave them to it?

Yeah probably. A missed opportunity. The right has Jopo, the left has BreadTube. Pick your gateway drug and tune out reassured for the evening.

His popular stuff is all self help and DESTROYing the left. It's one thing to talk about his arguments, it's another to consider why he's appealing and to what demographics. (Some) People find him helpful, he's reassuring and inspiring. Thinking about Peterson as a narrative event is kinda different from thinking about him as a scholar.

I think you're missing his point entirely on the topic of "thinking". If you listen to him in a broader context, what he seems to be referring to is the kind of 'intellectualism' which attempts to deconstruct the status quo and to replace it with a vacuum or with violence. This seems to be what he's spent his life studying. — whollyrolling

I'm not gonna criticize his views here, I'm gonna look at what they do as a narrative intervention (which seems to be in the spirit of the thread). What conversations and values does he promote/enable? What conversations and values does he silence/disenable? How does he fit into discourse?

Essentially, he's a Youtube star. A few years ago there was that memetic clip of him arguing about leftist opposition to Free Speech and Stalinism in a Canadian court that was discussing hate crime legislation against transgenders and nonbinary people at the time. He did so eloquently, and he leveraged a few tropes (as I remember) that link really well into American influenced discourse.

The Free Speech and Stalinism thing fits right in; people saying that leftist counterprotest and deplatforming is against free speech is at least as old as Oswald Mosley and Carl Schmitt. Anyone who frequented news sites and blogs that had a similar ideological climate to Breitbart will have seen the Free Speech thing in that context at the time. The Left is against Free Speech is a handy trope that also follows from anti-Soviet propaganda efforts - a closed loop of leftism=authoritarianism=free speech restrictions. He was fire on top of kindling.

After that video of him criticising trans hate crime legislation in Canada went viral, people discovered that he had a large Youtube repository of lectures that flesh out why he thinks what he thinks. He's dealing with themes of modern social isolation, the powerlessness of modern life, pent up and barely held in anger, and changing cultural concepts of masculinity/femininity. He does so using psychology and psychoanalytic references as well as textual analysis of old stories and moves like the Lion King. It's accessible, , he speaks well, he's quick on his feet when improvising. This is his political/cultural posture, these are the issues his ideas weigh in on.

He's styled as a prof who speaks hard truths accessibly and has a frame of interpreting them; a hodge podge of the Protestant work ethic, Jungian terms, and psychotheraputic interventions. He manages to tie the three together in a consistent science-flavour aesthetic that speaks to cultural issues. The personal transformation and anti( anti - X ) politics side well with center right values and individualist emphasis.

Put the politics that he's negating together with the cultural posture he's cultivated; his messages' target demographic are those who feel uneasy with those political developments he negates and their contexts (anti-sexism, anti-racism, anti-transphobia stuff...) - allegedly apolitical socially alienated white blokes. He sells a journey of personal transformation and self discovery as against the political positions his target demographic was uneasy with anyway. That's a convenient scapegoat - the suppressed shadow of left liberal politics being authoritarian imposition - sold to the suppressed rage of his target demographic. Now it's not about them. it's about (blah). And that frees them. They can work on themselves now that they're disburdened of feeling like maybe they're the problem (spoilers: complicity requires emotional work to deal with and even then that's not enough!). He's basically managed to sell milquetoast conservatism to millennial white gamer dudes through an aesthetic of personal transformation. An intellectual voice for the old Youtube atheism demographic.

My advice: don't waste any time on Jordan Peterson, whether as criticism or not. Better off digging a ditch and filling it back up. — Xtrix

Think there's some value in him. Well. About him. What concerns does he speak to that made him so popular? What is it about his language and work that was appealing?

(1) Self help that
(2) has a veneer of academic respectability targeted at
(3) millenial white dudes with little sense of personal identity that
(4) are all too happy to palliate their terrible social adjustment using
(5) pseudoscience dreck pretending it's Enlightenment Modernism which
(6) synergizes with far right nostalgia that permeates dude culture on the internet by
(7) promising that individual enlightenment will neuter the unacknowledged social ills that
(8) produce all of the above as a symptom.

Deepak Choprah for woke rationalist buckos.

Whether something is objective or subjective tells me how I should approach trying to understand it. When it comes to objective truth, it is experienced involuntarily, it is what it is irrespective of how or what I think about it. Therefore, if you say "B" is true then my options are to either accept that it is true or argue that it is false. I'm restricted to a particular type of conversation - finding out the truth of the matter. — Judaka

I think about OP in talking about cultural or religious norms, morality, political framings, causal arguments, justifying one's behaviour, defending characterisations, justifying interpretations, many things. Just any situation where someone characterises a choice they've made as a truth which you either accept or are ignorant of. — Judaka

So much comes down to the distinction between subjective and objective! I don't support the distinction. It looks like two words (with a lot of baggage) masking a difference in degree that's hard to precisely define. When a claim's objective, I take it you agree that it is a statement about how the claim is justified/checked/evinced/verified and related to standards for those things. Same for subjective.

"The moon orbits the Earth" is objective (verifiable even!) and true.
"The Earth orbits the moon" is objective (verifiable even!) and false.

Right/wrong is separate from objective/subjective, right? It's also independent of topic:

"fdrake likes spicy food" is objective (verifiable even!) and true.
"fdrake does not like spicy food" is objective (verifiable even!) and false.

It doesn't matter that it's about me, what matters are things like: I've enjoyed a burger with blended reaper chilis on top of it. There is a prescient distinction between subjective and involving or being derived from an agent.

So what is subjective? Maybe a candidate is "Abortion is wrong", for reasons of people disagree about it. It's controversial. But I doubt being controversial suffices for being subjective. Objective statements bear on it too. A fertilised egg planting itself to the womb's wall cannot feel pain; it cannot suffer. Someone who believes "Abortion is wrong" because "murder is wrong" and believes "A fertilised egg planting itself to the womb's wall" is murder because it kills a human is wrong... It doesn't kill a human, it can't be murder, so it can't be wrong on that basis.

At the very least, there are intimate relationships between subjective and objective claims. Subjective and objective as epistemic properties do not seem to be preserved through inference - at what point in the above chain of reasons does "Abortion is wrong" (the purely subjective value statement) transform into "fertilised eggs cannot suffer" (an objective statement regarding the capacity to feel pain and have one's agency effected)? Anyone familiar with how those arguments goes can follow the points. It seems reason can act on what is subjective to produce objective statements through intermediary justifications.

And act on what is objective to produce subjective statements.

(1) Bagpipes exist.
(2) Fuck bagpipes. (1, restatement)

Anything can be wrong insofar as it involves interpretation. If someone believes that abortion is wrong, their reasons do not only concern their moral values, their reasons concern the properties of foetuses and tradeoffs with women's agency. I would like to say that believing abortion is wrong is a relationship to the facts of abortion - any interpretation can have a moral valence as a component. The reasons for believing it need not terminate in the individual, even though they concern a moral value. Having a disposition/attachment is never a good reason for having it.

Just any situation where someone characterises a choice they've made as a truth which you either accept or are ignorant of. — Judaka

It doesn't matter that they've made the claim, it matters what the claim is and how it relates to others. To my mind, subjective and objective are actually retrojected types based on intiutions regarding (agent derived)=(subjective) and (agent independent)=(objective). The distinction sits uneasy with the fact that all claims are agent derived (with some motives and history and blah blah); everything becomes subjective. Not because it speaks to its evidentiary status, but because the linking between a claim's subjectivity and the fact that an agent made it is being emphasized too much. The distinction between subjective and objective claims is hot air when you press on it.

People can like things for the wrong reasons.
People can like the wrong things (I just love crushing kitties).

@Kornelius@Srap Tasmaner

Thanks you two!

I said the arrangement itself has been personalised by your choices and you weren't "correct" to emphasise one bit of information or "incorrect" to leave out a key piece of information" because the arrangement has no truth value. You are only "incorrect" in accordance with agreed-upon rules of justification, logic, fairness, reasonableness or whatever else. — Judaka

If we disagree so vehemently, there is usually something of substance to the disagreement. I have a few questions regarding this:

When you say an something is subjective, what do you suggest apart from the fact that it was articulated by someone? Or what does the fact that it was articulated by someone entail about it? To me this sense of subjective seems an uninformative truism, but I sense that it means something more to you.

And can you give examples of what your critique in the OP applies to? When do you believe it is especially relevant to bring up? When someone writes or speaks, what reminds you of it?