![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
On my last post about race, made just a bit before Christmas, I had more than one person lining up to tell me that racism cannot exist where there is no racist intent.
The topic of the post was the now internet-infamous HP webcam that tracks light faces better than dark ones, which obviously means that it would tend to work best out of the box for someone our society identifies as "white". The YouTube video in the post gives a pretty stark demonstration of the extent of this.
In one of my comment replies, I said this to one of the commenters who insisted we only judge intentions when discussing racism:
I used "every third person" as the example to emphasize that the standard it's using is both arbitrary and predictable... it's not a machine that we can easily pretend sometimes punches some random people in the throat, we can clearly see what it's what doing: it's punching every third person in the throat.
There might be some corner cases where two people are walking abreast or a whole crowd of people runs past it and throws off the count a bit, but anybody who points to these scenarios and says "So you can see that, in fairness, this proves that there is no problem with every third person getting punched in the throat in our country today." could be safely written off as missing the bigger picture, right?
In fact, we would probably wonder at such a person's willingness to excuse and defend systematic throat-punching. Do they benefit from it somehow? Do they believe that there are whole classes of people who deserve to be punched in the throat while others don't? Maybe it's as simple as they walked past the machine without getting punched so whenever somebody starts talking about how much it hurt to get punched in the throat or how they don't want to see anybody else get punched, they feel like they're being accused of something or blamed for something.
They didn't build the machine, after all. They didn't set the People Counter to 3. It sucks that some people get punched in the throat but it has nothing to do with them!
The fact is, we have built and do continue to build and maintain (sometimes passively, sometimes actively) many systems that metaphorically punch people in the throat for arbitrary reasons, giving some people head starts and holding others back. We all live within these systems. Our ways of life are supported by them. Our ways of thinking are supported by them.
And as long as these systems exist, we don't need racist intent to participate in racist actions and to generate racially-biased outcomes. The fact that the status quo is the status quo means that no one person has to exert a tremendous amount of effort to reinforce it.
Tomorrow I'll post a follow-up I've written with some specific examples of "throat-punching machines" we deal with. I was going to make this all one post, but given the reception I usually get when I write about race I think it's best to deal with a smaller number of points at a time than a larger one.
And in The Continuing Adventures of Conversations That Aren't Happening Here: "helpful" discussions about what sort of tone people who are sick of racism should strike or what terminology is least likely to result in the shedding of white plutocrat tears. I'm not deleting anything but I've frozen the current discussions on those topics... anyone who thinks they have something that really really needs to be said on such a subject is more than welcome to take it up in their own space.
The topic of the post was the now internet-infamous HP webcam that tracks light faces better than dark ones, which obviously means that it would tend to work best out of the box for someone our society identifies as "white". The YouTube video in the post gives a pretty stark demonstration of the extent of this.
In one of my comment replies, I said this to one of the commenters who insisted we only judge intentions when discussing racism:
If we build a system that punches every third person in the throat, that system is a problem whether it's an example of poor design or sinister design, isn't it? And ideally we should be able to talk about that problem and why it's a problem without someone jumping into the conversation to issue us a criteria based on unprovable speculations of intention that we must fulfill before we're allowed to discuss it.
I used "every third person" as the example to emphasize that the standard it's using is both arbitrary and predictable... it's not a machine that we can easily pretend sometimes punches some random people in the throat, we can clearly see what it's what doing: it's punching every third person in the throat.
There might be some corner cases where two people are walking abreast or a whole crowd of people runs past it and throws off the count a bit, but anybody who points to these scenarios and says "So you can see that, in fairness, this proves that there is no problem with every third person getting punched in the throat in our country today." could be safely written off as missing the bigger picture, right?
In fact, we would probably wonder at such a person's willingness to excuse and defend systematic throat-punching. Do they benefit from it somehow? Do they believe that there are whole classes of people who deserve to be punched in the throat while others don't? Maybe it's as simple as they walked past the machine without getting punched so whenever somebody starts talking about how much it hurt to get punched in the throat or how they don't want to see anybody else get punched, they feel like they're being accused of something or blamed for something.
They didn't build the machine, after all. They didn't set the People Counter to 3. It sucks that some people get punched in the throat but it has nothing to do with them!
The fact is, we have built and do continue to build and maintain (sometimes passively, sometimes actively) many systems that metaphorically punch people in the throat for arbitrary reasons, giving some people head starts and holding others back. We all live within these systems. Our ways of life are supported by them. Our ways of thinking are supported by them.
And as long as these systems exist, we don't need racist intent to participate in racist actions and to generate racially-biased outcomes. The fact that the status quo is the status quo means that no one person has to exert a tremendous amount of effort to reinforce it.
Tomorrow I'll post a follow-up I've written with some specific examples of "throat-punching machines" we deal with. I was going to make this all one post, but given the reception I usually get when I write about race I think it's best to deal with a smaller number of points at a time than a larger one.
And in The Continuing Adventures of Conversations That Aren't Happening Here: "helpful" discussions about what sort of tone people who are sick of racism should strike or what terminology is least likely to result in the shedding of white plutocrat tears. I'm not deleting anything but I've frozen the current discussions on those topics... anyone who thinks they have something that really really needs to be said on such a subject is more than welcome to take it up in their own space.
