Because everyday is Blog Against Racism Day

[eumelia]

So International Blog Against Racism Week ended yesterday and my default icon is back to cute Chibi!Mel.

However, that doesn't mean we stop blogging, talking or generally being pissed about racism and racial discrimination.

Due to my somewhat controversial (though it really isn't) entry "What is this symmetry you speak of?", I was told that I don't take into the account the motivation behind the racial discrimination that permeates the culture and society in which I live.

I quote the comment:

Your post started out saying how privileged you are and then you went off to say how racist your country is. The pivot/changeover of your post is where you said that you have never experienced racism. I posit that you have. It just doesn't fit your narrative, nor that of many other Israelies, so you ignore it.

You see Israel as a bully, a regional superpower who, externally, runs roughshod over weaker neighbours (Palestinians) and abuses the "other" internally.

The people who are writing "Arabs out" and suspect every Arab of being a potential terrorist see Israel as surrounded by "a ocean of enemies" who want to "throw the Jews into the sea". Where you see malicious behaviour, I see fearful behaviour

I am not supporting racism, I am not saying that Israel has no racist elements in it, I will never accept "Honour" killing as anything but the heinous, rancorous act that it is.

What I am saying is that in an otherwise enlightened post, you are wearing blinkers which are preventing you from being a fuller part of the solution. If people are scared and that leads them to racism, you cannot just say "Stop, What you do is Wrong" and expect them to change.

You are, of course, part of the solution already, and that is a Good Thing(tm)

:)

Emphasis mine.

There is a problem with citing a motivator for such behaviour. It can be easily construed as excusing the behaviour in some ways at worst or falls into that problematic category of "hate the sin, not the sinner" at best.

Basically, it reduces the accountability and responsibility of the those committing racist behaviour be it in words or in action.
And that is, how you say?
Not cool.
All prejudice, each and every single one can be reduced to its fear factor.
Fear of the Other, whoever they may be does not excuse the behaviour (including mine) of those who perpetrate and perpetuate the racial discrimination I witness in my day to day life and that others experience as a part of their identity.

I don't think humans by their nature are malicious, fear is a far bigger motivator than Evil. And because we as humans are so far removed from anything "natural" it's idiotic to proclaim anything to do with human behaviour natural - no to mention cultural differences in which Nature can have very different meanings.

In any event, the reason why someone says or does something racist matters little to me, this also true when someone says something racist or racially prejudicial and qualifies it by saying "but I didn't mean it that way"..
"Text is everything" said Derrida.
It's also nothing if you're going to ignore the context and the power structure of social interaction.

In short, this is the conversation we all have to have:

Comments

[hemlock-sholes.livejournal.com]

And grownups who hide behind children while they themselves attack teenagers?

And mothers who raise their children to strap on explosives and blow themselves up?

[mao4269.livejournal.com]

(sorry for the double-then-deleted-comment, I belatedly realized that I'd reponded to Mel's original post and not to your comment)

Obviously the mortality rate in IDF combat units is considerably lower than among suicide bombers, but are the mothers and societies encouraging their children to go in those directions really so different? Both are thinking of what their children can contribute to the national cause and prioritizing that over the physical well being of the children themselves.

[hemlock-sholes.livejournal.com]

Excuse me, but why are you talking about their motivation?

What about my first example?

What do you think of these people's actions?
Can you defend their actions without mentioning "Who They Are" as opposed to "What They Do"?

Also, can you defend their actions without comparing them to other people?

[mao4269.livejournal.com]

By no means am I trying to defend their actions. What I'm saying is that it's unreasonable to criticize them for their actions while not criticizing other people doing effectiely the same thing. When you apply a double-standard to people on two sides of a conflict, the legitimacy of your criticism is significantly undermined. I would argue that that problem also applies to your first example, at least on a national level (Israel is subsidizing families to stay in Sderot instead of subsidizing them to move, effectively using children as a buffer zone while, at least pre-strike, regularly doing operations in Gaza to kill militants who are largely young men, including teenagers). To only criticize Palestinian f***ed up behavior and not Israeli is like criticizing the Sioux for their violence in the Battle of Little Bighorn and not criticizing the U.S. military for its attacks.

[mao4269.livejournal.com]

That should be pre-truce, not pre-strike, oops!

[hemlock-sholes.livejournal.com]

I'm sorry, where did I criticize anyone?

So what you're saying is that in order to judge someone, I must analyze their surroundings (their motivations).

People must be judged BOTH by what they DO and who they ARE.

If I understand you correctly, you agree with me and disagree with Eumelia.

[mao4269.livejournal.com]

I'm saying that to judge behavior with legitimacy, you must apply a uniform standard. Knowingly murdering an unarmed person is wrong, it doesn't matter who you are. But if there are two groups and both regularly do so, to attribute the behavior of one group to terrorism and the behavior of the other group to freedom fighting for their nation is not only, as Eumelia said, an unimportant distinction, but a harmful one. I'm not saying that you have to analyze their surroundings, I'm saying that if you apply an unequal standard to their behavior because you've labeled their motivations, the situation will never improve.

[hemlock-sholes.livejournal.com]

And how can you tell if your standard is uniform or not without analyzing the surroundings?

Obviously you must label after the analysis. But I haven't labeled anyone during this entire conversation. Only the two of you have been putting labels on people.

[mao4269.livejournal.com]

You criticized the original post for saying that motivation, specifically "being a racist" as motivation, doesn't matter, and as evidence of the necessity of doing so asked how to distinguish between two labels. By using the inability to distinguish those labels as a criticism of the argument, you revealed your assumption that one or the other of the labels should be applied. You didn't apply them to anyone yourself during this conversation, but your comments were based on the idea that they should be applied, so I've been trying to show why it's problematic to apply them.

As for how to tell whether the standard is uniform without analyzing the surroundings, what surrounding do you need to analyze to uniformly apply the standard that an armed person attacking an unarmed person is wrong? I know that the issue of what constitutes being armed and unarmed (should a rock be considered the same level of weapon as a bullet?), but that's a matter of defining the standard not analyzing the surroundings.

[hemlock-sholes.livejournal.com]

So you're saying that people should not be labeled?

If so, then what is this post all about? I understood it to be about the mechanism of labeling.

So by your standard, an armed policeman should not interfere with an unarmed robbery/assault just because he's holding a gun and the robber isn't?

Should he call for backup or should he drop his gun?

The situation is not everything, but it is a lot.

[mao4269.livejournal.com]

I'm saying that people should be judged based on what they've done not based on a label, yes. My comments have been intended to demonstrate why labeling is often problematic, I won't try to speak for anyone else's comments or the original post.

I should have clarified that an armed person should not attack an unarmed one with hir weapon. And based on your question, I'd like to add the addendum that if the unarmed person is committing physical violence against an innocent person, use of the weapon is justified. But here the standard incorporates certain aspects of the situation. It's the difference between a teacher giving a lower grade based on the student's failure to comply with the rubric versus doing so based on having decided ze's a bad student. The latter might be based on evidence, but the important thing to evaluate is what is the student's actual behavior. A police officer can shoot someone and be justified or not, but the important thing is that there's a standard that differentiates between acceptable and unacceptable behavior and that it's applied uniformly. And of course people behave in relation to others behavior, so you need to look at the behavior of others when figuring out if the standard is applied, but that's different than looking at who the police officer "is" and judging based on that.

Similarly, in the case of the "battered woman", what she did includes what behaviors to which she was responding. The criterion is still what she did (either she attacked an innocent man or she attacked someone who consistently beat her), not who she is (a sociopath or not)

[hemlock-sholes.livejournal.com]

Let's take your Teacher example.

If you have one smart pupil who stops doing his homework/studies/etc near the end of the year (his average drops from 100 to 85) and a poorer pupil who has worked hard to raise his average from 60 to 85.

By your thinking, during a parent-teacher meeting, the two pupils should be treated the same because, objectively, they got the same mark - and should be judged by the same standard.

I think they need to be judged by different standards, depending on who they ARE and what they DID. Not just what they did.

[eumelia.livejournal.com]

Objectively, the students would be judged on their progress, on not just on their final mark. The fact that one has slipped and one has improved is neither here nor there.
The progress or regress is judged by the same standard.

[hemlock-sholes.livejournal.com]

So you admit that judgment depends not only on specific actions which are done in a single moment in time but on the whole complex of past actions.

i.e - who the person is...

[mao4269.livejournal.com]

Judicial systems are the marks, not the parent-teacher meetings. Quantitative or binary measures (a mark, a guilty/not guilty verdict) are intended to gauge what someone has done, whether they've complied with a certain standard. Parent-teacher conferences are concerned with who the kids are, and that's important (for a lot of reasons, but for the purposes of this example) so that parents know how to help their kids improve on quantitative measures in the future. But the university admissions offices are looking at the marks because what the student did is what's important to them.

[hemlock-sholes.livejournal.com]

Really?
Then why to judges present lengthy explanations of their judgments and not just a binary Guilty/Nt Guitly.

Then why, in life, are there interviews and psychological exams and "samples of work" and recommendations and so on and so on...

Except on the very lowest level, no-one relies solely on simple quantitative marks. If you want to get into the lowest level of university (simple BA/BSc) then marks are enough. If you want to get a scholarship or get into an advanced program, you'd better believe they want to know who you ARE, not just what you DID.

Unless you're going to tell me that, for example, various ethnic groups getting higher or lower results in IQ exams really means that they are superior/inferior...

[mao4269.livejournal.com]

In many court cases, the challenge is to determine which of two competing standards is not being met. In your robbery example, it's between protection of private property and protection of human life. So judges legal decisions tend to try to clarify how their understanding of what was done so that it's clear how each standard was or wasn't violated.

IQ tests asses people's ability to do well on IQ tests. The system used to quantify something doesn't necessarily quantify something meaningful and therefore isn't neccessarily a helpful standard. To bring it back to the judicial system, the drug laws in the U.S., which penalize the more costly form of cocaine less heavily than the less costly form, IMHO don't quantify the harm to society (of people debilitating themselves) posed by each. | agree with the point of the original post that what someone does is more important than what hir intentions were, but I would add that when it comes to defining criminal behavior what's done is only important in terms of its effects on others.

You're right that universities are concerned with more than what someone's done (though I don't know that
citing "samples of work" as evidence of something other than what someone's done helps your argument). But I don't think any of that contradicts the point of the original post, judging based on actions rather than motivations. Interviews and teacher recommendations (the U.S. doesn't use psychological exams in university admissions or scholarship applications, so I don't have sufficient knoweldge of how they're used to speak about them; I hope you'll accept the substitution as a reasonable one) aren't geared towards understanding students' motivations for their behavior during high school, they're geared towards gauging students' abilities based on the recognition that some measures (i.e. grades and scores on entrance exams) are flawed. The judicial system does this through having multiple levels of law (the Basic Laws and regular ones in Israel's case) with the high level designed to prevent the implementation of standards established by the lower level that gauge something other than harm done to society.

Anyway, I need to get some work done today, so this will be my last comment for a while (hope you don't mind the unilateral decision about a timetable).

[hemlock-sholes.livejournal.com]

Really?
Then why to judges present lengthy explanations of their judgments and not just a binary Guilty/Nt Guitly.

Then why, in life, are there interviews and psychological exams and "samples of work" and recommendations and so on and so on...

Except on the very lowest level, no-one relies solely on simple quantitative marks. If you want to get into the lowest level of university (simple BA/BSc) then marks are enough. If you want to get a scholarship or get into an advanced program, you'd better believe they want to know who you ARE, not just what you DID.

Unless you're going to tell me that, for example, various ethnic groups getting higher or lower results in IQ exams really means that they are superior/inferior...

[eumelia.livejournal.com]

You didn't just go there!

My mind boggles at your reply.
Are you saying mothers who raise their children to enlist into the IDF are different? Go! Train yourself for the cause!

I really expected much better from you.
This is the stock reply I expect from people who are not actually informed of what goes here - We're Ethical and They're Not, that's what you argument is reduced to and that really doesn't cut it.

[hemlock-sholes.livejournal.com]

I'm not saying ANYTHING.
I'm asking questions.

You are the one assuming I'm comparing Israelis and Palestinians. I'm not comparing anyone to anything.

I'm simply asking how you can support (or not support) people's actions without going into their motivations.

[eumelia.livejournal.com]

You are asking questions that within them lie certain implications, but regardless.

I'm obviously not getting what it is you're asking or saying (not saying), so how about you break it down to basics for me.

[hemlock-sholes.livejournal.com]

Let's put it another way.

Suppose a woman brutally attacked a man while he was sleeping and horribly disfigured him. That is what she DID.

Are you telling me that you're going to judge her and ignore the fact that she is/was a battered wife? That is who she IS.

My point is that the guy in film speaks well, but his argument (What people DO, not who they ARE) is wrong.

[eumelia.livejournal.com]

The woman brutally attacking the man in this instance can be compared much more easily to the person saying "Hey, that thing you said is racist", she's not attacking him because deep down she may or may not be a violent sociopath, but because he's beating her up on what I can only assume is a regular basis.
Seeing as she would be reacting to an act of violence... in your example.

[hemlock-sholes.livejournal.com]

But how do you know?

Perhaps she IS a sociopath? Perhaps she's not a battered wife, but only pretending to be one, after the fact?

She may be attacking him because she's a battered wife or she may be attacking him because she's a sociopath.

In both cases WHO she is is just as important (if not more so) than what she DID.