Friday, November 18, 2011

Race relations

Still talk on the racist statements made and I still find myself explaining differences. In an attempt to condense everything down here goes.

Responding to a criticism of an ethic minority there can be a difference between "You can't say that because it's racist!" and "You can't say that because it's untrue!" the conditional lies in how a simple question is answered:

If a criticism made about an ethic group is true is it still racist?

If you answered that with "No" then the two responses are equivalent if you answered that with "Yes" then the two responses are different. Who cares, isn't this just hair splitting? Okay a little, but consider what happens when an untrue statement is made and both the Yes and No camps respond with the same "You can't say that because it's racist".  Now consider what happens if another, but this time true statement is made and the Yes camp just respond in the same way.

To them all those who point out that the statement is true are agreeing with or placating  racists; the facts of the matter don't matter.

What if a statement is made that some in the No camp don't know is true or not? If everyone responds with "That's racist!" are they doing so because they're in the No camp and consider it to be untrue or are they in the Yes camp and don't care?

Those in the No camp can be easily identified as soon as they start asking about facts; a little more tricky to place the Yes camp because although it may be the case they don't care about the facts and keep repeating that "it's racist" they might just be No campers who think the truth/untruth is so obvious it doesn't need spelling out.

Why do I think this is important? Well in the No camp the path taken is "This is racist because it's untrue"; in the Yes camp there's a danger that it could turn into "This is untrue because it's racist". If you can't see why that could be a problem mull it over for a while.

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