noahtheduke

take data in change it push it out

cis - straight - white - 30 or 40 years old
clojure programmer
living in the shadow of grief


nothing remains forever empty


Profile pic commissioned from @ICELEVEL


noahtheduke
@noahtheduke

I’ve been sitting on the seed of a blog post for a minute that goes something like “modern civil rights activists/sjws hurt their messaging by trying to redefine the word “racism” to mean systemic racism instead of the colloquial definition of interpersonal race-based prejudice.” Because I’m not a writer i don’t have a lot else to say about it yet lol but it’s been bouncing around in my brain for like 3 years.

i’m mostly writing this now to incentivize writing more later. tired of merely thinking this


noahtheduke
@noahtheduke

in the comment of the above, @fracture wrote:

Are they redefining it, though? That's always been the idea behind the word, and both of those examples fit. It's a word to describe an ideology based around building racial hierarchies and structuring society around them, it's an -ism like capitalism or communism. You can have capitalists and you can have people who think it's all a scam but still believe in shit like reaganomics or w/e

i didn't know the history of "racism" but having just read the wiki page about it, looks like the word has been in usage for ~120 years and has had the connotations of "belief in the superiority of one race over another" for ~80 years. hard to say how much of that time has been "systemic racism" vs "interpersonal racism" or when such a change might have occurred.

given that, words follow usage and trying to get people to use a definition that is no longer in wide use is imo futile. like how in the 90s and 00s it was a common joke topic to be mad about "whom vs who" whereas now no one uses "whom" or talks about it because the language-as-used-by-everyone has moved on.

in my personal experience having grown up in the 90s and 00s, popular culture was very focused on "color blindness" and then later "celebrate our differences", with stories and schooling and DEI interventions being focused on interpersonal racism as the major problem that can be handled by education and kindness.

at some point, we're losing discursive ground to shitlords because when we say something like "you can't be racist to white people", we're using versions of "racist" and "white people" that have a massive academic-based context. it's trivially easy to both imagine and give real-world examples of "interpersonal racism against people with light skin" and when "racism" is popularly understood as "interpersonal racism", we look like idiots who are either racist ourselves or lying.


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in reply to @noahtheduke's post:

I believe that specifically with the word "racism" you have the problem of meaning drift in the wider world (where it has come to mean personal racial animus) versus meaning preservation within academic communities (sociology, American studies, etc.) where they've been using the word "racism" to describe a system of organizing society along racial lines since before the word ever appeared in the NYT.

It reminds me a little bit about the word "hacker" in the 1990s: there the wider world just won (mostly) and everyone with the in-group meaning now understands that you have to translate for people in the out-group. However, there you didn't have a century of academic literature that's still relevant and useful reading that embedded the "exists now mostly in an academic setting" meaning.

Also, I remember the "stop trying to use racism to mean what it means in an academic context out in the non-academic world" being a thing in the 90s when I was in college (I am old), so I question the initial post's usage of "modern". Maybe it's something that has to be re-litigated every N years as a new crop of young activists encounters the academic work on systemic racism.

"hacker" is a great example of this kind of semantic shift, and how even the "hacker communities" have mostly moved away from the word given the tendency among non-tech folks to only use it negatively.

Maybe it's something that has to be re-litigated every N years as a new crop of young activists encounters the academic work on systemic racism.

I suspect that's true. i am 30 or 40 years old and grew up in the 90s, and while i remember a bit of the "PC discourse" of the 90s (my mom loved rush limbaugh) i certainly wasn't in the adult conversations to hear the meat of it. i spent the 00s on the internet nowhere near feminism and thus missed any discussions of this, and then was a "militant internet feminist" on reddit and tumblr in the 10s, and was steeped in academic circles so the academic usage felt right and righteous. it's only been in recent years (and especially with the rise of g*mer g*te 2) that i've been thinking, "maybe this is going about it wrong."

there's the argument (as i'm writing this) that might say "don't give the power of your words definitions to your enemies, they'll just turn all of your words against you" which is like true to an extent, but this one feels particularly widespread and can be handled with a single additional word ("systemic") without missing a beat.