The maps alone [1] seems to sum up so much of my experience with prejudice over the years. I grew up in and around and still live near DC which is near/at the bottom of the scale here.
First, it wasn't until I found my way onto the Internet regularly and into online games in particular in the second half of the 90s that I witnessed hate for Jews outside of history lessons. Suddenly, mixing in real-time with a not terribly diverse crowd from all the country the very word 'Jew' was an insult and heard regularly.
Next, in the early 2000s as my career got underway I ended up working with the people who vendors would fly in from cheaper parts of the country.
At the time, the staff in our group was better than half black with middle management comprised of a black man, hispanic man and an orthodox Jew. We had several people come who were particularly about who they were willing to take direction from and at least one who was sent packing mid-project for his very strong opinions on ethnicity.
Finally, as we move through tourist season in DC I've already had my summer dose of tourists talking about how 'wasting money educating negros is killing the country' and Obama's birth certificate.
I guess I should be very glad to have been born into such a melting pot.
> ...I ended up working with the people who vendors would fly in from cheaper parts of the country.
As someone who grew up in a cheaper part of the country, I was tempted to be offended by that comment (and particularly by the subsequent suggestion that people from cheaper parts of the country were more likely to be prejudiced).
I felt like you were pre-judging me based on where I was born - something I had as little control over as the color of my skin or my religious and cultural background.
But then I realized you're probably not always aware of your own prejudices, any more than I am. So no worries, we are all still learning how to get along and respect each other.
>'As someone who grew up in a cheaper part of the country, I was tempted to be offended by that comment (and particularly by the subsequent suggestion that people from cheaper parts of the country were more likely to be prejudiced).'
I appreciate that you've show restraint from that snap judgment and given me the benefit of the doubt then.
>'I felt like you were pre-judging me based on where I was born - something I had as little control over as the color of my skin or my religious and cultural background.'
That's not at all my intent.
Even though I'm noting some after the fact correlation (as opposed to presumption) between requests for cheaper professional services talent and those incidents it would be a pretty silly to pre-judge based on it.
In fact, I think that sort of negative-bias thinking is a common and costly mistake in both anecdotal observations or reported statistics. Even if something is 'more likely' the positive outcome is often even more likely.
The context of these charts is a pretty good example. It would be foolish for someone to focus on the suggested 10-12.5% for some state rather than the 87.5-90%.
It's particularly important in the case of human interactions where a default posture of respect and consideration regardless of the perceived odds costs little if anything at all.
>'But then I realized you're probably not always aware of your own prejudices, any more than I am.'
Sure.
I tend think prejudices and predilections are something we all have, but the key is try and be as aware and objective as possible - to treat people as individuals in spite of those notions.
This map reminds me just how split the state I live in, Washington, is. Living in Seattle it's hard to imagine we come in at the second highest category.
A shame he didn't go deeper. The analysis here is very superficial, basically consisting of him browsing the forum for a while and doing some number crunching on profile data. A bit disappointing for a NYT article, even if it is just on their website.
It would have been much nicer if he did a proper data analysis of forum posts. If we've ruled out social economic class and education, what big factor remains? I suppose it would be friends and family. Perhaps a linguistic analysis could reveal how connected these people are to each other. Perhaps some psychological analysis could reveal something about their personalities other than "a perfectly nice and intelligent young woman".
If we could locate the source of these ideas, perhaps there could be a way of battling it. From my experience, people who post on forums are just the tip of the iceberg of the people who share their opinions and beliefs. For every person who voices an opinion there could be hundreds who share it.
Perhaps you could use the linguistic analysis to track their beliefs to key influencers.
Hey, thanks for comment. I'm a bit skeptical of the whole linguistic analysis thing, for various reasons. But I could be convinced otherwise (Also this would bias the analysis away from people who just register and lurk) ... Another thing I looked at was Facebook profiles. But this part was cut due to space. Here's what I found:
Not surprisingly, most Stormfront users do not want to announce their white nationalism to the world. But about 100 Americans say on Facebook that they like Stormfront and are publicly searchable. This small, selected sample can offer suggestive clues to the membership of such sites. Are, for example, white nationalists unpopular and social pariahs?
Nearly 80 percent of Stormfront fans had more than 100 Facebook friends. Nearly 60 percent had more than 200 friends. By comparison, a 2011 study found only half of Facebook users had more than 100 friends.
Finally, another thing that was interesting was the percent of people who are atheists on the site. But I wasn't sure exactly what to compare that to, so that got cut too.
Thanks a lot for making an account and taking part in the discussing, and my apologies for bashing your article a bit. Obviously the topic is very interesting and I'm very happy you made the article.
I would actually be wary of the lurkers, I suppose there is a significant amount of people who are 'interested' in stormfront without actually sharing the belief who have accounts there.
The Facebook statistic would be very interesting if it had been of the average Stormfront user. There's a chance the sort of person who has extreme opinions on their FB just has more friends, with only 100 out of 200.000 it's hard to tell.
It's funny you are skeptical of the linguistic analysis thing while you opened the article with a quote from a girl who was impressed by the linguistic analysis of that NYT quiz ;) You can make this sort of analysis without any specific knowledge at all, a very generic n-gram analysis could give you anything from common phrases used by stormfront users to linking their identities across mediums (i.e. stormfront to twitter/facebook).
Eh, I don't think the number of Facebook friends is a meaningful comparison here. At least, not without additional controls. If a user takes the time to seek out such niche likes on Facebook, they also probably take the time to seek out friends to add. I know Facebook doesn't have the massive fake user problem that plagues Twitter, but still, I'd wager that fake profiles, inactive accounts, and users from countries with low Facebook usage skew the average significantly.
You can't really tell if they are "social [media] pariahs" unless you compare them to a representative sample. You could control for the average number of likes, and compare that to the average number of friends. Or even better, you could compare them to several groups of users who like other fringe topics (from all parts of the political spectrum) and see if they're significant outliers. In fact, this is going on my idea list. :)
yea, that seems a better way to do it. and regardless you're dealing with such a small percentage of white nationalists and such a selected sample that it can only be suggestive. but i'm really not sure how else you could get any clues, so it seems worthwhile.
-- seth
i meant that i don't know what the answer is. because the obvious answers that sound really good -- diversity, education, economic development -- may not work.
IMO, the Stromfront-type writings consist of about 30% legitimate grievance and perhaps 70% crackpottery, all portrayed in a grossly simplified and vulgar way. Part of the fuel for the crackpottery, is that the media/NYTimes in general ignore or downplay the legitimate grievances. Once you stop believing the NYTimes, well, what do you believe? You can believe anything a random site on the internet says. So one obvious answer, which you left out, is to actually address the legitimate grievances.
The other obvious answer is censorship. Why don't we have a Stormfront TV channel? Because such a channel could never get a cable license, and if it did, it would get sued out of existence. Surely some lawsuit can be conjured up to shut down Stormfront, and make it impossible for other web hosts to host such sites?
So either address the grievances and make peace or crush them underfoot and leave no doubt - those are always the two traditional ways to deal with hateful dissenters.
> Once you stop believing the NYTimes, well, what do you believe? You can believe anything a random site on the internet says. So one obvious answer, which you left out, is to actually address the legitimate grievances.
This. When people fall out of the bottom of the officially sanctioned narrative space, whether it be true, false or especially (as it probably always is) some really complex combination of the two they need to rely on their own judgement and sometimes that judgement will lead to Nazis or Reptilians or some combination thereof.
Legitimate grievance? How is blaming the world's problems on "the Jews" (as if they all operated as one) anything remotely resembling legitimate grievance?
Poor, rural white Americans are getting a raw deal (thanks, in large part, to right-wing politicians they were misled into electing) but that's because poor, rural people everywhere are getting a bad deal these days. "Whites are an oppressed group" is complete idiocy and an indefensible position.
Yeah, silly michaelochurch. It's black on white crime of course. (Well according to your comment.)
Add to that faulty logic.
Add to that the general degradation of morals and the kids of today, I tell you.
---
Let's completely forget the centuries long history of white on black oppression that has led to the unequal socio-economic conditions between blacks and whites. I'd, you know, cut them some slack.
---
You do realise that every generation has claimed that the "youth of today" are nothing compared to how things were "back in the day". I mean, really?
---
The only thing you said that made sense is tribalism. I would jettison the rest if I were you.
"Let's completely forget the centuries long history of white on black oppression that has led to the unequal socio-economic conditions between blacks and whites. I'd, you know, cut them some slack."
By saying "cut them some slack" you are implying that I am doing the opposite. IE, I you are implying that I am being too hard on black people. How is this case? I pointed out a legitimate problem - black-on-white crime. Is it not a problem that multiple friends and people like my friends (ie white or Asian) were assaulted or killed in nearby neighborhoods? Is it not a problem? Should I just be silent about these problems? What on earth does "cutting them some slack mean"? I'm not endorsing stormfronts views on the matter, I am just saying that the base of their hatred there are some real, legitimate problems.
"You do realise that every generation has claimed that the "youth of today" are nothing compared to how things were "back in the day". I mean, really?"
Yes, I realize that. It also true. Most of the people who ever complained about the decline of the youth, were in fact correct. That is how the rise and fall of civilizations works. Civilizations explode out of a small tribes of ultra-militant, ultra-fertile, ultra-patriarchal, utlra-disciplined people. See for instance, the Puritan settlers of America who had fertility rates of nearly 10 per woman, who conquered New England, begot 16 million descendants and established the American empire. Each generation was slightly more decadent than the previous. But the momentum from the starting culture was so great that there was a lot of expansion before the cultural decay becomes apparent, and the decline phase sets in. Eventually, the society becomes too decadent and corrupt, and a new hard-core tribe comes in and conquers. So the cycle goes. How many years before ISIS rules us all? Hopefully it won't be in my lifetime.
One side note - the decline is not uniform or all one-way. Within the broader trend there are ebbs and flows among subpopulations of being more or less vulgar, more or less decadent, etc. Vulgarity actually probably decreases for a while as the break-out tribe becomes more "civilized", and then starts to rise again as order declines. (I think the 1950's were probably an absolute minimum of vulgarity in the U.S.)
I'm doing more than that. I'm calling you out. That word `legitimate' is very sneaky. I'd say it's close to racist to assert that black on white crime is a "legitimate problem" rather than just a "social problem" or a plain old "problem". There are _fucking_ well documented systemic _reasons_ for why there may be statistically more (per capita or whatever) black on white crime than white on white crime. So it's _not_ a legitimate problem. It would _only_ be legitimate if all other things being equal black on white crime was higher than other types purely because black people are black. If you can't or don't want to or won't see that you're racist. It _is_ a problem, all crime is a problem, it's _not_ a legitimate problem in that it does not legitimate racist attitudes towards blacks because only wilful ignorance could be blind to the socio-economic conditions that give rise to this crime.
> Yes ... "Each generation was slightly more decadent than the previous." ... ISIS ... my lifetime
Hey, you know, horseshit. Or bullshit, or whatever. I'm not even going to debate your there.
> "Is that a threat?"
No. It was advice to you to drop the more idiotic claims you are making so that you stop being an idiot. I am not joking.
Why don't you cool down, henrymercers comments are some of the more intelligent and reasonable comments in this thread. If you would read calmly you would see there is no racism in his words, he is simply not being racist. The word 'legitimate' does not restrict the meaning of the sentence to anything you imply.
Though I agree that his paragraph about decadency through the ages is a bit nutty, everyone has their strange beliefs. Nothing wrong with that.
"That word `legitimate' is very sneaky. I'd say it's close to racist to assert that black on white crime is a "legitimate problem" rather than just a "social problem" or a plain old "problem"."
I have no idea what you are talking about. By legitimate, I simply mean "real" or "not imagined". I mean that the problem actually exists in reality, as a opposed to a problem that exists only in the heads of the stormfronters.
"...because only wilful ignorance could be blind to the socio-economic conditions that give rise to this crime."
I used to believe as you believe. I've read all the books - William Julius Wilson, The New Jim Crow, Tally's Corner, etc. etc. I used to be willfully ignorant of the more "race realist" positions, because, well, I thought they were racist. But then a friend I respected convinced me to study further. I did and the facts and evidence was compelling. It would be better for me personally if I actually took your advice and re-adopted my original views on the issue, which were more like yours. But the evidence has convinced me that socio-economic conditions are not at the root of the urban crime problem, and so I now believe otherwise.
In the 1890's Philadelphia was a far poorer (in terms of any measure of median income), and far more unequal city than it is today. It was the gilded age and extremely wealthy people lived right in the city, rather than the distant suburbs. The city teemed with immigrants of all sorts. Yet the murder rate was 1/10th of what it is today. Why?
Or look at London, England in the 1910's. Massive inequality, massive problems of poverty. Yet the homicide rate was a tiny fraction of what it is in modern Philadelphia.
You can do the exercise at home. Find the homicide rates for a couple dozen U.S. cities, from both present day and from the early 1900's. Correlate the crime rate with income, then try correlating with race.
Look at South Korea in the 1950's. Take the problems that John Kozol writes about in Savage Inequalities, compare to the South Korean schools of that period, and you'll see the South Koreans had it much worse. Yet the crime rate was low, and the dire school situation did not prevent their economic growth.
Or look at 1850's Japan or Germany in 1700's where it was the upper class committing a lot of the crime. Why? Because they could get away with it. If you were a young punk from a Samurai family you could terrorize and steal from a merchant and suffer no punishment. Now in Japan, the murder rate is ridiculously low and you can leave a purse on a public bench and not have it taken. Why? Read up on Japan policing tactics. And murder clearance and conviction rate is over 90%. People do not get away with murder. Compare to Baltimore where the solving rate is closer to 30%.
Socio-economics has little to do with crime rates. Crime is committed by people who do not fear its consequences, for one reason or another.
I went to college in a city with a large underclass black population. Multiple friends were mugged or assaulted. Then I visited China, a country that went through hell and back in the last sixty years, and is still way poorer than my college town. And yet I was safer anywhere I walked, than I was a few blocks away from my own dorm.
Also, this not just a matter of correlations. Read the links. In many of the attacks, the attackers are not out for money, and they are saying stuff like, "get whitey." These are racially motivated, black-on-white crimes.
For the record, I do not think that black people are incapable of low crime rates. Rather, they live in communities where a) the police only show up to bust some heads now and then, but do not provide an ongoing presence to deter crime b) there are no fathers to instill discipline c) teachers don't sufficiently discipline students for fear of being called racist d) there is an entire culture of victimhood and "blame whitey" Schools teach more about slavery and how whitey oppressed them, rather than teaching about science or engineering. Thus teenage thugs looking for some fun feel it morally acceptable to enact violence against whites.
What is the solution? Restore the same policing practices that made 1900's London, 1890's Philadelphia, or modern Japan safe. Stop teaching racial grievance in the schools. Allow white people to sue the schools for teach racial grievances, or for getting bullied for racial reasons, just as black people can sue schools when they get the same from white people. Make sure teenagers from broken homes are under the supervision of male authority figures one way or another, many via after-school activities, longer school days, or by having convent style living arrangements. You would also need to figure out a way to create a constructive black leadership. A leadership that would focus on opening black-owned businesses and then getting black people to spend money at those businesses rather than on products made by giant outside corporations. In other words, the leadership needs to drop the grievance/hand-out culture and replace it with the same type of culture used by every other ethnic group, ever, to get ahead.
Yes you're right. It's black people that are the problem.
Not centuries of subjugation and mistreatment.
Not racism.
By your own admission you've come to adopt a viewpoint you once regarded as racist.
What's more likely, (a) that you don't view the (still racist) position as racist now that you hold it _or_ (b) the position has somehow become un-racist. I'm going with a.
(c) it depends how you define racist. If you define racism as exhibiting personal animosity or prejudice to people one knows of another race, due to the color of their skin, then I am not a racist. If you define racism as identifying and pattern matching general problems that break down along ethnic and racial lines, then I am a racist. You can choose your own definition, I'll choose mine. How we define the word is not interesting to me. The real question is, are my views morally repugnant? I do not think so. If you think they are, then say exactly why.
Also, I sure as heck do not believe that white people are blameless in this whole crime and urban decay situation. There is a lot of blame to go around. I really do not care about blame or about who is at fault, just in identifying cause and effect and solving the problem. Denying the problem as legitimate, or attributing false reasons to the crime problem is neither useful nor constructive. (Subjugation and mistreatment of blacks by whites is and was a huge problem, but it is not causing the crime problem, and it is not helping anyone to pretend that it is).
Henry. Thanks for taking the time to debate me on this. I appreciate your civility.
> (Subjugation and mistreatment of blacks by whites is and was a huge problem, but it is not causing the crime problem, and it is not helping anyone to pretend that it is).
Centuries of subjugation and mistreatment has led to a socio-economic underclass. This is _fact_. There is plenty of documentation. Even though things are getting better the fact remains that this is the cause of the crime problem.
Rather than attribute the obvious source to the problem you have said:
1) That black on white crime is racially motivated, "get whitey". You can't just say that, you can't just trot out unsubstantiated claims. I just don't believe that's true.
2) That if only blacks got their act together in the way other races have that they'd improve their lot.
3) That there are poor people or underclasses in other societies and they don't carry on the way blacks in the US do.
Or words to that effect.
For me that is not pattern matching, that _is_ prejudicial thinking. And you accuse blacks of racism! You state implicitly and explicitly that it is because of their race that the crime rates are higher and that the urban decay is worse than other places at other times. That is prejudicial thinking and we can leave morality out of it. My concern in analysing the language and the logic that you use is if you are using the same standards for every group of people. I clearly see that you are not. That means you are exhibiting bias, that your thinking is prejudicial. You've learnt this, you need to unlearn it. I know it's not easy to confront that which is within us that is biased and prejudicial but there you go.
Tell you what. You point me towards the stats and the literature (not the anecdotes!) that have led you to these conclusions and we'll explore this topic together.
Tell you what. You point me towards the stats and the literature (not the anecdotes!) that have led you to these conclusions and we'll explore this topic together.
Send me an email at henry.k.mercer at google's email service. I'll reply back this weekend with a reading list.
As soon as you call the problem "Black on white" crime, you're showing your true colours. The problem isn't "Blacks" or "Whites", it's those who discriminate between them.
Except that every example I pulled from Philadelphia, a city where I would like to live, but where I do not think I can raise a family safely, was black-on-white or black-on-asian crime. Read the links I included, this is a racial issue. From an analytical standpoint, the crime is best understood as an ethnic conflict, just as Palestinian-versus-Jewish or Jewish-versus-Palestinian violence or Hutu-versus-Tutsi violence or Whites-lynching-blacks are all best understood as ethnic conflicts. To not describe it and analyze it in these terms, cripples your ability to understand the problem.
Except that I'm sure there is lots of black-on-black crime as well.
In short, there is lots of black crime.
Why?
Because of the shitty socio-economic position they find themselves in due to centuries of subjugation, institutional and social mistreatment. And that happened because of their race. In that way it's a racial issue. White racism. Blacks were for a long time not even classed as human, which is a classic dehumanizing tactic used to view the other as an object to be used rather than respected.
Comparing black crime in the USA to the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory or to the Belgian initiated ethnic violence in Rwanda is wrong-headed and very prejudicial thinking.
The hateful milieu arises from the mixing of four ingredients:
One part legitimate grievance. For instance, black on white crime is a huge problem that is not talked about and not addressed in mainstream discourse. In Philadelphia, a close friend of mine got mugged at gunpoint outside of her apartment. Two blocks away, recently, a twenty-something woman who could have been any of my friends, was mugged, shot, and killed. In another incident, a man fitting my own demographic profile, was mugged, shot and paralyzed, a few blocks away. Elsewhere, a group of yuppies walking home were attacked by a "flash mob" and had the crap beaten out of them ( http://www.phillymag.com/news/2011/06/27/fk-flash-mobs/ ). My friend now fears to go to the grocery store after dark. Young professionals fear sending their kids to public schools because their kids will get beaten up and be made miserable ( see http://thenotebook.org/blog/125398/looking-back-on-racial-vi... or http://www.reddit.com/r/AdviceAnimals/comments/1lfr7l/as_a_n... )
When you have legitimate grievances, and discussion of those grievances is actively suppressed (see http://whitegirlbleedalot.com/ ), then it is easy to get carried away with further conspiracies that are not actually true. That leads us to the next ingredient.
One part pattern-matching that leads to plausible, but false, grievances. For instance, it is undeniably true that "Jews totally run Hollywood" ( see http://articles.latimes.com/2008/dec/19/opinion/oe-stein19 ). It is also arguably true that the output of Hollywood is poisoning our culture and leading to the destruction of our civilization. If you believe those two things, then it is not that much of a leap to believe that Jews are ruining the country. Personally, I believe that Hollywood is poisonous, but I do not blame it on the Jews. I think the Jewish people have a disproportionate number of savvy businessman, they ended up running the studios for historical reasons, and that they are mainly producing the films that people want to see. If Hollywood was run by gentiles, the output would be largely the same. Perhaps the main problem is actually the First Amendment - civilization might not be able to survive the freedom to watch addictive trash on television.
One part tribal instinct. When you feel like you have been lied to, called evil, and excluded, well, you want to find other fellow travelers to bond with. And then the internal dialogue feeds on itself, and it exacerbates the "us-against-them" mentality.
One part general vulgarity due to a break down in character education in our society. My mother has frequently commented on the general rudeness, vulgarity, uncivilness, etc. in recent generations versus when she grew up in the 1950's. I suspect this is not just nostalgia. Especially on the internet, people say awful things.
Put it all together, and Stormfront is what you get.
Your "legitimate grievance" adds nothing to explain the main hatred of the site, which according to the article, is anti-semitism. It's hard to believe that "Jews run Hollywood" is enough to explain that. I guess you need to add the old myth that Jews run the economy or some such. But then, that doesn't work well with the article's claim that the hatred is not driven by economic hardship.
"Your "legitimate grievance" adds nothing to explain the main hatred of the site, which according to the article, is anti-semitism."
Um, well you can believe what Seth (the article's author) says, or, um, you can make a very quick trip to the Stormfront home page. Seems to me that maybe ~20% of the thread subjects relate to Jews. The other big two topics are black-on-white violence and immigration. It is in those two topics where I think there is a considerable amount of legitimate grievance.
"It's hard to believe that "Jews run Hollywood" is enough to explain that."
No it's not enough, that was just one of many examples of pattern matching.
I said that the group most-mentioned in Stormfront member profiles is Jews and that things often come back to Jews. But this is not to say there are not many threads about black-on-white crime and immigration, which I mention right off the bat. Most of those threads tend to mention Jews, as well ... not saying that's the primary motivation of everyone or that it even matters which group is talked about the most. But I think everything I said will be clear to anybody who goes through the site.
The parts all tie together. The increase in vulgarity drives the grievances and pattern matching. The Hayes code was a social gentleman's agreement not to pollute the culture too badly, thus you had Jewish studios pumping out a good number of socially beneficial messages. The black middle class used to do a lot more to keep black society as a whole well behaved, but now they apparently have washed their hands of the urban underclass.
> If we could locate the source of these ideas, perhaps there could be a way of battling it.
That is interesting. It would be nice if there was a source for these ideas (well besides human nature) and if it was curable. We want to think these people a basically good but sick. Something happened to them and they became like this. If we could only prevent or even undo that.
Could it be for example that by default people are racist and will automatically dislike others from different groups (social, religious, national, intellectual, professional).
Hate of "others" is used for group cohesiveness.
Maybe it isn't them that are "abnormal" but us, who maintain that we don't have these beliefs, biases and stereotypes (at least rationally). Wouldn't that be scary...
Historically and geographically maybe instead of a sea of tolerance with island of hatred, it is the other way around. A sea of hatred and division with islands of tolerance.
It is also interesting that we often attribute craziness to these people. I do it all the time. They are mentally sick, they are hallucinating etc etc. But if you read manifestos of killers and how these people behave towards each other, how they function in real life, you might find they are are disturbingly "normal". That that is really disturbing to me at least.
I'm not sure if it is accurate, but I think of someone who is hateful as someone who was hurt. This is also why I think it's so hard to fight hate, as even if you mend a wound, the memory of hurt lasts and fosters hate. How do you make someone forgive and forget?
You teach forgiveness, and hope others do the same.
As someone who has been seriously hurt by someone else (they're in gaol for life) I know how hard it is to forgive. I still haven't succeeded, and I probably never will.
But, I have succeeded in gaining the knowledge that revenge would just continue the cycle of violence, so it's in my power to stop it.
Revenge solves nothing, and only causes more pain.
I don't think there's any innate racism, but people do tend to be hostile towards those who they see as "not of their own tribe". This view of the problem would suggest that racism is the result of people having a very narrow world-view, where they don't recognise many other people as being "like them".
This would seem to be a solvable problem. We can break down communication barriers. The internet is already transforming the world in this way, and we've already come so far in the past few decades. Surely we can keep going, until nobody lives in a small corner of the world that's isolated from the rest of us.
The internet does help break down communication barriers, but I'm not sure how much it really helps when it comes to racism.
It's so easy to talk with someone on the internet without knowing anything about their ethnic background. In fact I have no idea whether you're black, white, Jewish, Indian, whatever. So if I were a chauvinistic white supremacist, I could just pretend that everyone who writes thoughtful comments on HN is a white dude. This contrasts sharply with the real world, where you can't help noticing a person's gender and skin color before you ever exchange a word with him or her.
The internet also helps people erect strong barriers that might otherwise have been too weak to sustain. Stormfront.org helps turn potential neo-Nazis into actual neo-Nazis, helps them unite despite their geographical dispersion, empowers them to publicly boast their bigotry, and worst of all, gives them a comfortable environment where they never have to confront any other opinion. The fragmentation of online communities keeps prejudices alive in the gaps.
Very interesting idea, and I think there are large grains of truth in what you said.
I don't think humans are racist by default, but rather that the way in which most societies have evolved so far are conducive to racism. Most communities around the world are either ethnically homogeneous, or if they're not, they have active conflict among ethnic groups in adjacent regions/towns/villages/neighborhoods. It's easy to be an armchair racist when there's no Jew within a hundred miles of you. It's also easy to be a practicing racist when other ethnic groups are threatening to kill you.
Historically, it has been very unusual for people of different ethicities to live together in the same block (let alone the same building) unless one ethnicity was regarded as superior politically and/or economically. Only in the modern world do Africans, Caucasians, Chinese, Indians, and Native Americans even have a chance to live as equals in close proximity. It is a rare phenomenon indeed.
But people do get used to it. At first there's conflict, but then a new generation is born who have never experienced ethnic homogeneity. The kids grow up playing with all the other neighborhood kids, unless bigoted adults tell them not to. This is the generation that can finally overcome racism. Not because they're better people, nor because they're better educated, but simply because their best buddy is red, their girlfriend is yellow, and their favorite football star is black. When these kids become leaders, and their racist parents die off, that's what a non-racist community looks like. History is made, one funeral at a time.
So the source of racist ideas is not some crazy dude with a funny moustache, but the very existence of homogeneous or segregated comunities. It is no coincidence that the places with the highest Stormfront membership rates are also the places with the lowest ethnic diversity. The geography and demographics of Montana breeds racists. Hawaii, on the other hand, is a rather unsuitable place for a person to grow up to become a racist. Even in other parts of the world, relatively homogenenous countries like Japan and Korea tend to be incredibly racist.
The only way to combat racism is to make people live together.
> The only way to combat racism is to make people live together.
This is how I see it too. It has to start earlier, in kindergarten. By the time kids hit highshcool they already carry prejudices that might be hard to undo.
The best antidote is to personally know someone from the other "group".
The cliche defense for "I am not racist" is "I have a <race> friend, I swear". But there is truth in there. Having a friend, a coworker or acquaintance, is a good way to reduce racism probably.
I'm reading your post in the voice of a New World Order comic book villain.
"My fellow world-saviours... let us prepare the masses for their new way of life. First, we'll force the subjects from kindergarten age to undergo mental conditioning to, shall we say, "soften" those prejudices so those little brats don't ever DARE to trust their natural instincts. They'll believe what we'll tell them to believe! crowd cheers And then when they reach the mandated Employment Age, we'll transport them all to designated Urban Zones in order that they may live together in perfect raceless harmony under our watchful and benevolent eye! All hail the Progress Commission!"
"Yes. I like Argentina also because they're mostly white, and they sheltered the heroes of our race after the Zionist take-over of Europe. But I was for Germany all the way. I loved how they utterly crushed Brazil in their own house. I don't like that they have to have an African on their team and it's obvious he is there because of affirmative action.. I also don't like how the German team had to hug Merkel and her Zionist lackeys but regardless, I'm happy for the German victory especially right in the house of one of the biggest mongrel countries in the world aka Brazil. It is left unsaid, but it almost feels like a big white hand slapping the face of every white-hating zionist and mongrel out there."
And in looking through the discussion around this article (see link in parent) they seem to view separation of ethnicities (into homogenous countries) as the solution to their problems.
Interesting. That was precisely Stalin's solution to minimizing threats to his order throughout the Soviet empire and like it or not he was nothing if not rational. (Except, of course, for his assessment of Hitler's ambitions.)
That's not even just hate, that reads like someone desperate for acceptance. They touched on every hate-able aspect of the match they could. Pitiful.
Reminds me once of an article about how socially difficult it is to break out of hate groups; such that at some skinhead convention, and anti-hate group distributed white-nationalist T-shirts, which, upon washing, revealed a message offering help breaking away from the WN scene... and it actually saw results.
Hate isn't an event. Its a process these people undergo over years. If you browse their history and activities over the internet, like say on twitter. You will generally see they go in search of new stories to justify their theories almost every day.
Over years they build a case around what they believe and why that's true.
If anything their belief in what ever they want to, just grows stronger by the day.
I find it really interesting that at a micro level on forums like this there is the same goodness and kindness to one another. People doing each other favors, people encouraging one another, etc. I mean, I guess it makes sense. People are essentially the same no matter what weird, dark beliefs they hold, but it just always boggles my mind that, out of some fundamental goodness and bond with their fellow human, someone will go out of their way to help someone else find some article or another on why all Jews should be shot or why Anders Breivik was a hero or whathaveyou.
That's very true. They don't even hate non-White people. They just don't know enough of them.
I'm non-White and was in Montana for a while. At first interaction it was obvious some people didn't even like talking to me but when I was breaking the ice and forcing some conversation they were very good people. Even interested in learning about my background.
> They don't even hate non-White people. They just don't know enough of them.
From the article:
> The percentage of Stormfront’s target audience [whites] that joins is actually higher in areas with more minorities. This is particularly true when you look at Stormfront’s members who are 18 and younger and therefore do not themselves choose where they live.
The more nonwhites they know, the more likely they are to go to stormfront. They say ignorance is bliss.
There's a difference between seeing lots of minorities around your town, and having minority friends. One of these things makes you more likely to post on Stormfront, the other makes it less likely.
As it turns out, human beings are generally amazing and wonderful creatures, even when they're members of an unfavored group. (Even when they've selected that group themselves, and the group is unfavored for a damn good reason. Notwithstanding that they're celebrating some very terrible things.)
For tens of thousands of years we lived as tribes of hunter and gatherers. We are biologically programmed to form groups and hate other groups that are perceived as an enemy to our group. Evolutionary psychology is complicated and speculative, but it's quite clear we have evolved an ability to form strong feelings of hate towards other groups.
I like this quote from HPMOR:
>Because the way people are built,... the way people are built to feel inside -...is that they hurt when they see their friends hurting. Someone inside their circle of concern, a member of their own tribe. That feeling has an off-switch, an off-switch labeled 'enemy' or 'foreigner' or sometimes just 'stranger'. That's how people are, if they don't learn otherwise...
>You grew up in a post-World-War-Two society where 'I vas only followink orders' is something everyone knows the bad guys said. In the fifteenth century they would've called it honourable fealty... Do you think you're, you're just genetically better than everyone who lived back then? Like if you'd been transported back to fifteenth-century London as a baby, you'd realize all on your own that burning cats was wrong, witch-burning was wrong, slavery was wrong, that every sentient being ought to be in your circle of concern?
I think this is just about in-groups and out-groups. If you're reasonably liberal-minded, you probably count the human race as a large in-group. They are favoured over animals, and then even more so over plants. A lot of people probably have groups that go family > friends > group/organisation > race > human race > pets > animals > plants.
I put 'race' in here. It's a hard to define concept, and I don't necessarily agree that it exists, but don't have time for that level of discussion right now. However, it's a useful generalization. A lot of people do have a tendency to group together according to race. For most people that's probably a lot to do with familiarity and commonality though than any strong racist feelings.
The only difference with the intentionally racist groups, is where on this spectrum they consider their out-group to lie. Put in these terms, I think it's easier to conceptualize. Personally, and I don't want to get political about this, but as a vegetarian, I feel my boundary includes animals. I don't want this to sound like a holier-than-thou argument, it's hopefully an objective judgement.
I find it difficult to conceptualize including pets in the in-group, but excluding animals we use as food. It makes no sense to me, and just feels like a hard-wired level of compassion that I have. I cannot on an emotional level process the concept of desiring killing animals. But on a logical level, I can see people that do think like that, and I respect people's choices. Now in my ideal world, people would naturally want to think like me, but I have no desire to waste my time trying to convince people otherwise.
Now, if you take a view that just humans are separate from animals and that we don't have a spectrum of care towards living things around us, then it's very difficult to conceptualize racist attitudes as rational or at all fair in any way.
I'm not entirely convinced of his argument that there are not necessarily economic factors in this. I can afford to be a vegetarian, (financially, socially, etc) and I'm not in a position of desperate need, or war or any situation where I need to reconsider my position. I do know for sure though that in times of crisis, this in-group is bound to shrink.
I think the general tendency of liberal thinking to be about sharing with society as a whole, vs more right-wing tendencies to look after your own is also just about where you fall on this spectrum of care to those around you.
If you're anxious or under stress or impoverished, or in any other situation that would make you feel under attack or that you have to protect your own, then I think you are pretty likely to tighten your in-group to a smaller circle.
Even though they take their views to ridiculous extremes, sites like Stormfront do have a valid critique of the hypocrisy of liberal American Jews.
Exactly the same people and groups who claim that White people desiring to live among other White people is stupid and immoral, also believe that Israel being a Jewish nation is non-negotiable. Only the far-left (e.g. Norman Finkelstein and Chomsky in some moments) are consistent in criticizing Jewish identity and White identity in the same terms.
The mainstream claim that these two concepts are completely distinct and incomparable, and yet there is no obvious difference. The only way that this discrepancy can be seen as something other than hypocrisy, is if either (1) Jewish identity is entirely defensive, i.e. a reaction to prejudice from the society in which Jews happen to live, or (2) Jewishness is an entirely separate category, incomparable to race or ethnicity (I don't include religion because I don't think that the concept of Jewish identity solely as a religious identity stands up to scrutiny).
In response to (1), I don't see this as the full picture as Jewishness is allowed to be celebrated in its own right. The idea that Israel should be Jewish merely for the physical protection of Jews, rather than the protection of Jewish identity, is not consistent with how Israelis or their liberal supporters describe Israel.
In response to (2), the only way that Jewishness can be rendered incomparable to Whiteness, is to accept that the most extreme views against Whites are true. Namely that (unlike every other cultural or ethnic identity), Whiteness is an identity of racial supremacism and oppresion. Some people (again, on the far left) truly believe this. But I find it a ridiculous assertion, and most people simply are too brow-beaten to dig this deep in to anti-racist discourse.
"White identity" is a historically incoherent concept advanced almost exclusively by neo-Nazis. "Whites" are descended from an entire continent of rival nations, all of whom historically hate each other.
A better analogy would be, I dunno, Croats? No one begrudges the Croats their national identity.
First, people certainly will begrudge Croats their national identity, when they get around to it. I'm sure you're familiar with the battle against English identity or Swedish identity (at least when they are defined in the same way as Jewish identity is).
Furthermore, I think that you are simply defining anyone who talks or thinks about White identity as a "neo-Nazi". Jews are given space where they can think about and consider their identity. Whites are only permitted to feel shame about theirs.
The onus is on you to explain why people with common appearance, ethnic background, language and culture, do not form a well defined group simply because they are more numerous than Jewish people are as a group. Or why, the European disapora, having intermingled in the US for 500 years, must completely give up their identity and accept anyone from the world as like them, simply because they don't originate from a single country.
"Certainly"? I don't think that's the case. Can you expand on what you think I'm missing? There are countries outside of Europe--entire continents, really-- that speak a European languages. Do you really think Chileans have less in common with Spaniards than Lithuanians? I'd even guess that African-Americans and white Americans are more similar than white Americans and Danes in terms of language and culture.
What you are missing is that you are focusing entirely on edge cases. No sociological category is so airtight that you cannot "deconstruct" it. E.g. it is also true that Jewish Americans have more in common with non-Jewish Americans in terms of language and culture than Jewish Israelis. Does that mean that, like Whiteness, Jewishness is simply a category that has been invented to serve some political purpose?
> What you are missing is that you are focusing entirely on edge cases.
Am I? I could name half a dozen other cases, but you're the one who stated your point without actually providing any argument for it so I feel like it's your turn rather than just throwing around words like "certainly" as if they're a proof of anything.
Here's the basis of my counterargument: no one, other than a fringe group of crypto-neo-Nazis, takes "white", to be defined as "European", seriously as an ethnic identity. This is certainly not the case with "Jewish". Jews have identified with other Jews for centuries. You can't even go back a single century before your pan-European notion of "white" identity breaks down. English-descended people refused to consider Spanish and Italian-descended people as "white". Even German Nazis didn't consider themselves the same race as Slavic people. The entire notion of ethnic identity is based on a shared history, and there's no shared history between Bosniaks and Basques that would meaningfully exclude any non-whites.
So I ask, why do people try and advance this ahistoric "white" identity out of nothing? My contention is that it's motivated by antipathy if not outright hatred towards races considered as "non-white".
Both of you are correct. "White" as a political signifier does find plenty of usage in pre-20C writings and discourse (stuff like Thomas Carlyle's "Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question" for example), but it was hardly a point of primary ethnic identity -- Europeans were far more likely to identify as "Anglo-Saxon", "Spaniard", "Swede", etc. And there was certainly a good deal of ethnic strife between various White groups, both in Europe and in the European diaspora in the USA and elsewhere.
However, "White people" do have a legal definition, one that has been used in Western legal language and exacerbated by post-1960s ethnic grievance politics. "White" is simply the contraposition to "person of colour" or "minority". I don't think it matters that "white" identity is not historical - Whites today are an actual group with loose ethnic relatedness and what should be strong shared political interests.
See for example Canada's definition of a "Visible minority": "persons, other than Aboriginal people, who are non-Caucasian in race or non-white in colour." That's pretty clear.
> You can't even go back a single century before your pan-European notion of "white" identity breaks down. English-descended people refused to consider Spanish and Italian-descended people as "white".
> sites like Stormfront do have a valid critique of the hypocrisy of liberal American Jews.
No, they don't. Don't legitimize their nonsense.
Also, Israel is not meant to be solely Jewish. It's just majority Jewish, just like other nations are majority Christian/white. That's a security measure, not an expression that Jews are inherently superior to other races—most Jews I know (including Israelis) support the inclusion of other people in their communities.
I share this critique, and I outlined it in my post, so I'm not legitimizing them, but rather outlining what things I think they are correct about.
I simply do not believe that Israel as a Jewish state is a "security measure". Almost no one thinks of it in these terms, neither Israeli Jews or American Jews (Einstein did, but he was in a minority). Israeli's (and American Jews) typcially describe Israel is existing for the protection of Israel identity, religion and culture, not the physical protection of individual Jews.
You say that most Jews support the inclusion of other people in their communities, and yet the Prime Minister of Israel said "If we don't stop their [African asylum seekers] entry, the problem that currently stands at 60,000 could grow to 600,000, and that threatens our existence as a Jewish and democratic state ... This phenomenon is very grave and threatens the social fabric of society, our national security and our national identity."
>Please don't bring Stormfront to HN.
I will bring my own beliefs to HN, feel free to deal with it however you like.
> Almost no one thinks of it in these terms, neither Israeli Jews or American Jews (Einstein did, but he was in a minority). Israeli's (and American Jews) typcially describe Israel is existing for the protection of Israel identity, religion and culture, not the physical protection of individual Jews.
I'm an American Jew who does. It's also not all that rare of a belief that having a country with a majority Jewish population is essential to the protection of the Jewish people. While people certainly talk about this argument less these days, it was one of the key justifications for the creation of Israel in the wake of the Holocaust (what you get as a small minority in every nation on Earth).
I'm familiar with holocaust as a reason for Israel's existence, I just don't accept it as the primary reason. There are simply to many occasions where American Jews and Israelis celebrate Jewish culture and identity for its own sake, and not merely as a reaction to being singled out by other Whites.
Even the narrative of the holocaust suggests that Jewish identity and culture is valued for its own sake. The concept of genocide implies that wiping an entire group of people is worse than simply killing the same number of randomly selected people. If this is true, then it follows that there was some inherent value in that group's identity, beyond their worth, and right to exist, as individuals.
> There are simply to many occasions where American Jews and Israelis celebrate Jewish culture and identity for its own sake, and not merely as a reaction to being singled out by other Whites.
What is wrong with that? Do the Jewish people somehow not deserve existence? Why should we not celebrate our culture and religion the same way Christians, Croats, and Italians do? (for example.)
Also, celebrating our culture is not mutually exclusive with celebrating diversity of cultures.
> The concept of genocide implies that wiping an entire group of people is worse than simply killing the same number of randomly selected people.
Do you dispute that? Generally racism is frowned upon.
Hating because you don't like their personality is acceptable. Hating them for their race isn't.
Killing someone is unacceptable. Killing someone for their race is even less acceptable.
That I have to explain this to you makes me think I might be dealing with anti-semitism.
>What is wrong with that? Do the Jewish people somehow not deserve existence? Why should we not celebrate our culture and religion the same way Christians, Croats, and Italians do? (for example.)
If Jewish people deserve existence (as a group, not individuals), then White people deserve existence as a group.
You say that White people are allowed to celebrate their culture and religion, and yet these are precisely the actions that are demonized as racism or at best ignorant provincialism, by the same liberals Jews I am describing.
You simply cannot have it both ways. My first post described how supporting Israel's existence as a Jewish nation was contradictory to liberal Jew's attitude towards White identity. You now concede that Jewish identity is in fact very similar to White identity. But now you are trying to change the argument, as if I was the one saying that Jewish identity was unacceptable. I'm not. I'm saying it is no more or less acceptable that White identity.
>Killing someone is unacceptable. Killing someone for their race is even less acceptable.
I disagree, but that isn't the point here. The argument against genocide I'm referring to is that it is more wrong because it wipes out a particular race or ethnicity, not because of the mindset of the perpetrator.
>So now you're getting very Stormfronty.
>That I have to explain this to you makes me think I might be dealing with anti-semitism.
> If Jewish people deserve existence (as a group, not individuals), then White people deserve existence as a group.
This makes no sense. Jewish people as a group have a very long shared cultural and religious history. However, the concept of "white people" is a fairly recent cultural and political construct and has changed dramatically over the years--for example, at one point in the United States Irish and Italians were not considered to be white. You can't compare them in the way you (and the Stormfront crowd) are attempting to.
That said, I have to be skeptical about this assertion:
> The states with the most members per capita are Montana, Alaska and Idaho. These states tend to be overwhelmingly white. Does this mean that growing up with little diversity fosters hate?...Probably not. Since those states have a higher proportion of non-Jewish white people, they have more potential members for a group that attacks Jews and nonwhites.
>
> The percentage of Stormfront’s target audience that joins is actually higher in areas with more minorities. This is particularly true when you look at Stormfront’s members who are 18 and younger and therefore do not themselves choose where they live....Among this age group, California, a state with one of the largest minority populations, has a membership rate 25 percent higher than the national average.
California is a HUGE state. Just because it's diverse overall doesn't mean that there aren't certain pockets that are very non-diverse...and being close to "The Others", while not mingling with them, may even exacerbate the tendency towards bigotry.
I don't think people in New York are naturally more tolerant in some genetic sense...if you're someone with a preoccupying hatred of a certain race or group, your biological stress levels will go haywire, as on any given subway ride, you can pretty much expect to be sitting or standing next to someone of that group. Chances are, you just get over it, especially if your workplace and neighborhood are equally diverse. And if you don't get over it, chances are the city life won't be for you.
It's often not so much a conscious choice to be tolerant versus intolerant...if something "scares" you at first, but you see it every day, and most days, your interactions are benign or even net positive, your body/mind is going to logically reason, "Meh, these people aren't bad at all".
And if you have a certain fear implanted in you, and never get a chance to confront it on an every day basis? What kind of logical process, absent first-hand, everyday experience, would reverse that fear?
Your thoughts match up with Anders Breivik living in a part of Oslo, a city with a large portion of early-generation immigrants from non-western areas, which was predominantly white.
I think the eventual solution to racism will be love.
OK, maybe not love, but at least lust. We tend to take a very narrow time view of a few hundred years. However I can't but imagine in the US in two or three hundred years it will become increasingly harder to tell races apart.
Look at countries like Brazil. Look at the amount of interracial marriage going on right now in the US as opposed to 50 years ago. That I suspect is the future and I don't know how racism survives it.
That's more or less what I already believe -- that is I already agree with the statement "race is primarily a social construct". Of course some sub-populations have different genetic factors which may have some handwavey amount of effects, but I'd argue that 1) having multiple distinct "races" is primarily caused by group dynamics among humans rather than genetic variation, and 2) these constructs are generally harmful and we'd be better off not having them.
I don't have a preference. Just stating what will almost certainly happen.
It's happened all throughout history before. In fact, I'm guessing most members of stormfront might be a bit surprised if they had a DNA test done.
We are all product of generations of rape and pillage and countless secret affairs behind tents. But now we can move about faster and communicate better.
Hate speech can be a good thing. When someone verbalizes hatred, he or she gives us a chance to push back and question underlying prejudices. This is always better than a heckler's veto of racist or sexist ideas. Drowning out the hurtful speech doesn't address the root causes of ignorance, fear and anger.
Although I think you're right, that is definitely not what's happening on Stormfront. There's nobody "pushing back", just racist people talking together.
> There's nobody "pushing back", just racist people talking together.
Not quite, "... Two weeks ago, the boneheads thought they’d got their man. For a decade, the pseudonym “Andy Fleming” has been troubling Australia’s far right and neo-Nazis – “boneheads” to their opponents –
by writing about them. His blog Slack Bastard carries the work of a man who has acquired enormous amounts of intelligence, so much so that it rivals police knowledge. ..." [0]
Yeah, I agree with this. On the internet it's so easy to get sucked into an echo chamber and completely cloister oneself in some belief system or another. Then every other perspective is the foolish mainstream media who are only there to feed the sheeple or some agenda of the enemy. I think these echo chambers breed/cater to a sort of messianic paranoia.
Don't forget that organizations like Stormfront give people purpose, something people often struggle to find in places like Montana.
We all want to be part of something bigger. Some turn to open source, contribute to the community. Others build wild conspiracy theories and focus their energies in that.
Suburban or rural communities more specifically where finding people to collaborate on projects can be harder, especially for things that are more of a niche interest.
In a place like New York City where literally everything is going on, you can throw a rock and hit something interesting. In rural Montana your options are severely limited, and if you're not happy with the local offering, or what you can sponge off the internet, you're going to be pretty lonely.
The kind of people who hang out on the Stormfront website are the kind of people who cram all kinds of point-of-view pushing into articles on Wikipedia, "the encyclopedia anyone can edit." Basically, you would be wise to assume that any article on Wikipedia that pertains to any topic related to "race" (broadly construed) or immigration or the history of Fascist or neo-Nazi movements is skewed at present toward the Stormfront point of view,[1] although of course there are Wikipedians who are trying to clean up that mess.[2] People who gain their "knowledge" of the world from websites like Stormfront seem to end up like the unfortunate victims of early lobotomies performed by inserting icepicks into their skulls: permanently brain-damaged and no longer able to perceive or understand facts contrary to their ideological position. I can only hope that such a toxic website will diminish in influence as people who know better about those issues take care to promote understanding those issues better early and often among all the young people coming up in the next generation.
AFTER EDIT: I guess I would learn something if I asked why this was downvoted, not seeing any comment in reply here. I'll note for the record that some of the arguments given in this very thread for why it is a "valid critique" or "human nature to discriminate" as part of thinking about the issues Stormfront brings up get into our HN community from developers and other smart people who haven't studied history or social science much getting their knowledge of these topics from Wikipedia articles that have been subtly corrupted by Stormfront-supporting Wikipedians.
permanently brain-damaged and no longer able to perceive or understand facts contrary to their ideological position
This is the normal state of affairs. Most intellectually curious people never break out of the first paradigm they are exposed to. Most people never get that far because they're not intellectually curious. At some point you have to trust somebody or something because it fits with what you know of the world, and makes sense. It's a pity some people stop with stormfront but they'll never have any political influence so I'm not too worried.
I have to say that coming from you I find this amusing. Anytime you and yummyfajitas have a discussion you not so subtly accuse him of being a racist and pretend you've addressed his points by dumping a list of references on the thread.
By the way saying it's "human nature to discriminate" is completely defensible. You may disagree with the connotations, but any introductory social psychology textbook will do. You must know that too, because you're part of that journal reading group at your local university, right?
I don't like how the word "hate" has been co-opted to mean "racist." I hate caraway seeds and bullies and I believe my feelings are justified. (Seriously, why put rock-hard seeds that taste like turpentine into food?) Somebody could be racist without feeling hatred at all. In fact, it is these cold-hearted sociopaths that disturb me the most. Hatred can be a proper, constructive reaction to cruelty and corruption. Don't let racists take that away from us and don't let them hide their true agenda with a normal human emotion.
I'm glad an "Internet Developer [in] Jew York City" is one example that the author picked to profile. I personally believe that the current "sensitivity training" and "diversity-based" US K-12/college education based on African American literature, history classes on MLK and slavery is misdirected.
Instead I propose a curriculum where we teach our children the dark side of humanity and allow both white, blacks and asians express our racial and other prejudices openly and honestly. Then to encourage and train everyone to come up with a plan of their own to overcome whatever perceived prejudices in athletics, academics or artistic outlets offered in schools.
Instead of suppressing the human nature to discriminate and giving people a sense of their own agency to either confront their bullies, or to subvert the majority power or to overcome in a round-bout way the limitations imposed on them, we allow people to feel entitled to an abstract idea of "fairness" and "justice" which never existed in American society. And we end up with one hand, "diversity HR Managers," "social justice campaigners" who resort to the ideals of civil rights to rally people, but are actually oppressing people by feeding them a false sense of moral superiority. On the other hand, the "banally evil" professionals who pay lip service to "go along with it" but actually just operates business as usual.
Instead of acting "shocked" and "indignant" every time about racism, we should openly acknowledge it in ourselves and concede that it'll never go away. I believe ironically, the benefit of not suppressing that speech and shaming sites such as Stormfront will help the discriminated people to find power in themselves to overcome than the other way around ("white lady" going into the hood for Teach for America to rescue all the poor inner city kids).
I've flagged this article because it's not really apropos to HN, but we'll never have a truly sympathetic or constructive discussion with others when we openly editorialize their beliefs as "bigotry" or "hatred". Even if they are wrong, framing the discussion in these terms just ensures that no constructive or beneficial dialogue can occur between the parties. Any time you see words like this used, especially in the abundance used in this article, you should understand that there are likely rhetorical and political forces at work intent on discounting the other side (i.e., this is the language of propaganda, not true journalism).
I do have a question in that vein, if anyone is still reading these comments. At what point does a group cross the rubicon such that it's an acceptable implementation of journalistic ethics to slap these kinds of labels on their fundamental beliefs and statements? Isn't journalism supposed to convey events and groups in a neutral context, without favoring one side or the other? I understand almost no organizations like that exist anymore, but hypothetically speaking, I guess. Where is the line of demarcation between a group that still deserves a fair airing of beliefs and the respect of journalistic ethics and a group that doesn't?
Newspapers obviously do not have an obligation to publish rants by any and every madman who comes along, but once they start to gather a significantly-sized following, isn't there a duty to archive and catalog the events in a neutral manner, for the accuracy of the historical record if nothing else? Isn't that what journalism is supposed to be about? I'm just curious how this works and is considered within the industry. I'll be honest, from a distance, it seems that the new journalistic ethics are "If it supports your boss's beliefs, run with it and make it positive; if it tears down your boss's opponents, run with it and make it as damning as possible".
Doesn't everyone know by now that putting your name on a list of white supremacists might not be a good move?
I guess white supremacy and intelligence may be negatively correlated? Or maybe they just don't care.
I sometimes picture a secret room at the FBI with poor clerks running around trying to avoid being buried under ever growing lists of suspicious people being spit out of printers with the advent of the internet.
With all the druggies, the communist sympathizers, the insurance fraud researching, the radical environmentalists, the anarchists, the bomb curious, the pedo interested, the racial supremacists.... heck, they probably barely have time to watch all the Muslims any more. It was probably a whole lot easier when they only had a few people to keep an eye on.
The article itself says white supremacist beliefs and education level are positively correlated. It's a mistake to think that someone who is intelligent is naturally capable of making good or even ethical decisions.
Deriving good decisions from our surroundings is much too complex for our rational thought to be working on constantly. This is why we derive most of our decisions not from careful consideration but from experience, upbringing, instinct and our peers.
A paper showing supremacists in the 1920's were more likely to be educated (not intelligent, educated, which makes sense... the KKK was a prominent social organization in some parts of the country at that time and the locally wealthy and movers and shakers who could afford education belonged.) This doesn't tell us much about the intelligence of supremacists today. I am still guessing supremacists today are less intelligent than average.... because, supremacy is a stupid philosophy. That's my gut feeling.
Edit: Response to the below... I guess I should clarify... There are probably a good number of intelligent people who hold racist views.
The specific people I'm talking about though are people who would join a supremacist organization or register on stormfront. I believe most of these are probably not particularly intelligent.
What you say about feeling that people disagree with you are stupid makes sense. But I maintain most people who overtly hold a supremacist philosophy enough to join a supremacist organization, in this day and age have not carefully considered the issue nor the reality of their situation and are thus probably more emotional, reactionary, and...... less intelligent. I've known people like this and I bet you have too.
You know, I think there is an instinct to think of people in these sorts of groups not simply as members of a hate-group, but wholly monstrous, and stupid, and things like that. It seems to be comforting to think of them like that, or (as the article also posits) to think of them as inhabiting a different world from that of you and your friends. But it's far more likely that the world is more complicated.
Besides which, it's generally problematic (and situationally ironic) to ascribe below-average intelligence to a group you disagree with, no matter how wrong or irrational they may be. :P
Well, I don't know that it's merely all ascribing negative traits to a group with whom people disagree.
With racism/other prejudice, in particular, it is somewhat intuitive to see a link with below-average intelligence. Much prejudice is based on ignorance, fear, and unquestioned learned behavior, all of which less-intelligent people would seem to be more susceptible. In other words, more intelligent people would seem more likely to question dogma and better able to reason through answers.
Beyond intuition, there has been at least one study which shows a correlation between low-intelligence and racism:
EDIT: None of this is to say that there are no intelligent racists; simply that there may well be a correlation and acknowledging that possible correlation might be viewed as somewhat intuitive vs. simply a knee-jerk reaction to ascribe negative traits to those one finds disagreeable.
> Doesn't everyone know by now that putting your name on a list of white supremacists might not be a good move?
You're being downvoted unfairly. I think this is actually a very legitimate point.
In fact, someone in this thread shared links to Stormfront and I refused to visit them out of fear that I'll end up on a list of white supremacists at the FBI.
Such lists would be meaningless if they contained anyone who wandered onto the site. I assume they'd have to be more discerning than that (for instance, logging people with an account, or even better, logging people that have an account and post supportive content).
> Such lists would be meaningless if they contained anyone who wandered onto the site.
Unfortunately I have no faith in the ability of the government to be discerning in the people it targets as subversive or dangerous. See the terrorist watchlist with over a million names on it.
You "guess that white supremacy and intelligence may be negatively correlated" but the article explores how that's probably not exactly the case. "[...] Economists Roland G. Fryer Jr. and Steven D. Levitt found that Ku Klux Klan members were actually better educated than the typical American."
First, it wasn't until I found my way onto the Internet regularly and into online games in particular in the second half of the 90s that I witnessed hate for Jews outside of history lessons. Suddenly, mixing in real-time with a not terribly diverse crowd from all the country the very word 'Jew' was an insult and heard regularly.
Next, in the early 2000s as my career got underway I ended up working with the people who vendors would fly in from cheaper parts of the country.
At the time, the staff in our group was better than half black with middle management comprised of a black man, hispanic man and an orthodox Jew. We had several people come who were particularly about who they were willing to take direction from and at least one who was sent packing mid-project for his very strong opinions on ethnicity.
Finally, as we move through tourist season in DC I've already had my summer dose of tourists talking about how 'wasting money educating negros is killing the country' and Obama's birth certificate.
I guess I should be very glad to have been born into such a melting pot.
1: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/07/13/sunday-review/...