So, fair play, because it’s true? Or out of bounds, because it is racist/sexist?
Racism in Politics
A hundred years ago, politics in the South were explicitly racist. At some point that stopped; one might argue about when, but for a long time explicitly racial appeals have been off the menu. Almost everyone regards that as an advance, including myself.
Here’s an ad that showed up in the mail. It doesn’t mention the word ’race’ nor the name of any race; it depends for its effect on you knowing that things like quotas and hiring are targeted that way. I’ve been turned down for Federal jobs because I don’t have the right demographic background; they didn’t even ask about my qualifications before telling me I was disqualified.
It seems black and white to me: racism and sexism are always and everywhere out of bounds.
ReplyDeleteThe fact that one advertiser/party/whom-whatever pulls racist or sexist spew in no way legitimizes anyone else doing the same.
Claiming something is all right because others did that thing or are doing it is to fail to understand that the ethics, the morality, of a behavior is intrinsic in the behavior, it is to misapprehend that ethics, morality, is a matter of personal convenience.
Eric Hines
I have to disagree somewhat with your assessment that this ad is racist or sexist. It certainly addresses issues that affect white working-class males but none of them are exclusive to that group. The most famous anti-AA college admission case was brought by Asian Americans, and I would also question how relevant college admissions are to most working-class individuals. "Rigging corporate American" could refer to hiring practices but it could as easily be thought of as corporate support for all sorts of woke/left ideas such as abortion and transgenderism which don't translate directly by either sex or race. The last point of "their economy left us behind" is pretty clearly a working-class complaint that is again not specific to white males. I certainly see that one could read it as a specifically racist or sexist appeal but you almost have to start with that idea in mind.
ReplyDeleteI'm reminded of something I first read a long time ago on Instapundit, if you treat an ethnic group as a voting bloc long enough eventually they will start to think of themselves that way.
Is an explicitly racial appeal necessarily racist?
ReplyDeleteLet's go back 100 years to the segregated South. Would an ad that appealed to black voters pointing out the racist laws and policies of the government and then arguing for voting for some candidate who would work to change those laws and policies be racist?
So that reminds me of a piece I wrote way back in 2008, Tom.
ReplyDeletehttps://grimbeorn.blogspot.com/2008_05_18_archive.html#7742864642734102511
Sex and race are different in that sex is obviously a real biological category with very substantial effects, so much so that knowing a person's sex is perhaps the single most valuable thing you can know about them if you are trying to render medical aid. It's definitely right up there with age and existing medical conditions. There is definitely going to be occasional need to discuss sex and to make rules or considerations about it, even if we are guided by a general principle of trying to minimize them wherever possible. Race is different in that it is mostly a social fiction, one that has been pernicious by and large.
I don't like the idea of asserting that speaking the truth is ever immoral: that's one of the things we should do. It is true that they have built a world in which these fictions are treated as real and allowed to create additional effects, including the pernicious effect of disqualifying some of us from employment under some circumstances, or having us be discriminated against in things like college admissions. We should be able to talk about those things.
On the other hand, one of the things I have been enjoying about the current moment is that some of the racial barriers have been breaking down. It's nice to see that black American men see that they too would benefit from good American jobs, a world in which their children are not propagandized with sexualities (or in general subject to censorship), where housing costs are not driven up and wages driven down by a lawless refusal by the government to even pretend to enforce immigration legislation, and so forth and so on.
I like seeing categories like 'black' and 'white' become less important to how we vote, which isn't to say that I don't think people should take pride in their heritage. I don't know that I want to see us focusing on the grievance when we have this opportunity to embrace our commonalities instead. It's been a long road getting here, and that's the truth.
Mr. Hines, I generally have concerns about attempts to universalize in ethics. "It is always wrong to X" or "it is always necessary to Y" don't seem likely to work out in practice, even if we try to come up with very careful brackets. "It is always wrong to kill innocent people," for example, seems like it would work; but then you run into things like the Trolley Problem where it turns out that a lot of humanity has an intuition that it might be right to redirect a trolley to kill one person instead of five. (Others disagree, and think that letting the five die is an accident but choosing to kill the one makes you a murderer.)
ReplyDeleteI tend to think that Aristotle and the virtue ethicists are on the right track, and that rather than rules we need virtues that will help us find the best thing to do in real world circumstances. Here, too, I have several general principles that seem to be working against one another: in favor of speaking the truth, for example; in favor of not censoring even offensive speech, especially if it is true; yet against appeals to race that might divide Americans from one another; against standing on such grievances even if they are true, especially in politics.
Grim, the problem you're describing is a failure of us humans to execute, which is not an argument against the universality of ethics.
ReplyDeleteSometimes there are no right answers accessible to us humans, but that's solely our failing. The trolley problem, for instance, has no right answer for us, only a least bad answer--and the fact that there is disagreement about what is the least bad only illustrates our own flaws, nothing else.
All we can do is do our best at reaching for perfection, and cut some slack for those who truly try and fall short.
Eric Hines
Grim, I read your 2008 post and mightn't "complementarity" be a good word for what you were looking for? I, too, like chivalry, but it does seem to leave off the feminine side of things.
ReplyDeleteI completely agree that it's good that skin color is becoming less important to many. Instead of using 'we' and 'us,' with an implicit association of 'white people,' an argument made in universal terms might be better, I think, something along the lines of saying there is clearly official racism against whites now and, whatever your skin color, racism is bad.
Complementarity requires too much furniture. If you want to talk to people who don’t necessarily agree with the assumptions — that God created humanity, that the sex division was intentional and planned, that there are therefore particular roles that are most properly played by men and others by women — you can’t use it.
ReplyDeleteI wanted to say something smaller, like, “Men and women are not the same, and it’s ok to talk about the differences and make allowances for them as long as the intent is to find better ways to work/live/be together.”
Whoa there, Grim. Grab a bottle and a chair and let the spell pass. Too much of that discarding of terms because of their furniture and seeking words to speak with normal people and the Philosopher's Guild will yank your card. We'll just keep this episode between ourselves.
ReplyDeleteStill, I think a reasonable form of the complementarity argument can work from evolutionary biology without assuming Creation. Even so, maybe the word you're looking for doesn't exist because there's never been a need for one until now.
It's an interesting question. Clearly, as Thomas Doubting pointed out, the racism involved in the argument at hand was created by the Dems and is being reacted to here. Also, it would be right to push back against that and for that matter to use it as a cudgel against them. Here the issue seems to be with tone and how people might perceive this. It seems like it may have been conceived by an all too clever political advisor looking to squeeze every alst vote out of wherever they could get it, and this framing was a way to reach people who were both not racist, and perhaps as well those who might be. To that extent, it's wrong to do so if knowingly done. Now, it might also be that the person writing this is young, and has grown up in a system that has framed *everything* in racial terms their entire life. At some point, the fish no longer are conscious of the water they swim in. Then it's yet another evil side effect of the Dems racial grievance politics. Hard to say which is the truth.
ReplyDeleteSide note- as a father to a young woman most people would perceive as "ambiguously brown" to "Asian", and a son who almost everyone would perceive as "White boy" (blue eyes and all), I know that the racist threat I'm far more concerned by is the anti-white (and especially the anti-white male) trend.