And all this happens without a scintilla of bigotry or prejudice (or what some call R(1) racism). The individual is irrelevant, except to the degree that they receive unwarranted privilege from the systems that have been created. And so, the dilemma of whether one is racist from an R(2) perspective comes down to notions of privilege. In this country, there is only white privilege. In other countries, other groups have privilege based on the systems there. And while one may have white privilege, they don’t necessarily have wealth or male privilege. And a rich black man in the U.S. can have a great deal of wealth privilege, but not have white privilege.
Are you sure about that? Because looking at the numbers, both Asians and Jews have higher socioeconomic outcomes than white people do right here in the USA. They also show up higher on IQ tests, which the social justice crowd (who are R2 adherents) seem to think is a racist test that only reflects privilege and not intelligence.
If we put the intersectionalist theory to the test, we see pretty clearly that Asians have higher privilege than whites, and Jews have the most privilege of all.
And therefore power.
And therefore, within the Bivol-Pavda racism framework, it’s okay to be prejudiced towards Asians and Jews as well. Perhaps even ok-er than being prejudiced against whites.
Now an individualist (like me) who treats everyone equally regardless of their race, will simply congratulate the Asians and Jews for doing so well. But a collectivist (like the social justice crowd) can’t do that. Inequities in society are evidence of a hierarchy and hierarchies must be fought by any means including weaponized prejudice. So in the end, they’ll fall right down into the same anti-semitic bucket that the alt-right has.
You can even see it going on right now on the ground, with the New York women’s march being split up into a BLM one and a Jewish one, over the contentious issue of where Jews fall on the intersectionality “matrix of oppression.” They appear to have been given an honorary spot on the “marginalized” side of the dividing line for now, because Hitler, but that won’t last forever. Especially with Social Justice protesters waving Soviet Union flags and such, and Netanyahu not doing the Jews here any favors with his Palestine policy, which the Social Justice crowd are very tuned into.
So I guess I would ask you: What terms would you prefer for discussion the race-based R(2) oppression? What about the sex-based R(2) oppression? The wealth-based R(2) oppression?
I’m fine with simply R(1) and R(2). I don’t care which words we use as long as we’re using clear words and talking about the same things. Too often I’ve seen folks from the social justice sphere doing a kind of Motte and Bailey dance, jumping into and out of the different definitions when it suits them.
I think the central meat of your response falls into that trap a bit. You said you simply default to “bigotry” and such for any individualist (R1) definition up above, and reserve “racism” for systemic things based on privilege hierarchies. Well okay. By that rationale, nobody is racist. Do you teach your students that nobody is racist?
I’ll reach out and agree that redlining was racist, but I disagree that it was not a product of individual R(1) racism. It definitely was. It was systemic racism but the system was drawn up, at least in part, by individual racists. They were not race blind when they drew that red line on the map.
I do see that there can be some systems emerging that are systemically racist without the hand of individual racists crafting them, but they’re mostly related to deep learning, and AI, and decision automation. So for instance, the thing Ben Carson is going after Facebook over, where Facebook targeted real estate ads went to white people instead of black people because some AI figured out that folks who watch Beyonce videos are less likely to buy houses. Or the Amazon AI that was developed to sort through resumes based on prior hires, and threw the black resumes out because of word choice. Those are racist systems that emerged without any racist hand of a racist person, purely from machine pattern recognition. They definitely qualify as “systemic racism” in my eyes.
