
Toward Rethinking Self-Defense in a Racist Culture - anarbadalov
https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/toward-rethinking-self-defense-in-a-racist-culture/
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downerending
Cultures are made of people, and all people are racist everywhere and at all
times throughout history. Nor could this possibly change.

~~~
vagrantJin
True. May I also add that cultures are indeed fluid, and change over time on
account of being made of people. Allow me to give an anecdotal example.

Men used to marry and sleep with very, very young girls this and was seen as
culturally acceptable, normal, correct and even healthy. Fast forward a couple
of centuries and we've agreed as a whole, regardless of race and culture, that
this is a practice we should do away with. Wholesale. As you can see, culture
and people, do in fact change.

With this potential for change in mind, we need to tackle the elephant in the
room. The reasons for which a practice, regarded by most as a beneath the
standards of our global, egalitarian morals, should persist and continue to
exist. Something must drive racism, some benefit that outweighs the cost, from
a psychological standpoint. What is it?

~~~
downerending
It's the fact that racism is ultimately stereotyping, which you could think of
as rapidly gathering information under uncertainty. It's not very different
than training an ML model. There's no way to capture _all_ of the complexity
of the world, but capturing _some_ of it has immense survival value, and would
have been the norm throughout the evolutionary history of animals (at least).

We can be sad about the necessity of this, just as we are sad that most
animals (and most of us) will die horribly. But it's an immutable fact of
reality.

If it were somehow possible to raise or breed a person that lacked any
capability for racism or other forms of bigotry, they would go into the world
like a sheep among a society of wolves. They'd die quite quickly.

Better for us to simply acknowledge the truth, and try to rationally limit the
fallout. Pretending it's not so simply makes things worse.

