[mammothfail] Racism Can't Come from Her Because She's Not Racist! Fallacy

[cimorene]

isilya and I were using our mothers' limited ability to grasp racism as we understand the concept as a tool to try and grasp the thought processes going on in MammothFail (the witty new name I've been seeing for what I previously called Racefail:Colonialism).

isilya: If they don't admit that well intentioned people do racist things, then the people are just well intentioned full stop!
cimorene: Right, and racism that seems to come from well-intentioned people is either an oxymoron, or a cruel and strange artefact of particular unfortunate circumstances - such as the entirety of natural history and logic, the existence of N.A. natives, and the discrediting of the hunted-to-extinction theory, in the case of Wrede. (Those were beyond her control, and just happen to systematically make it more likely that many people's feelings will be hurt on racial lines as a result of her book; that's a sad fact, but not her fault!).
isilya: You should blog that.

These are the logical contortions you must go through to grapple with the situation if you reject the "racism as an institution" concept.

Comments

[robin_arede]

Excellent (though I'm not convinced it's generational--which I am not at all sure you are implying, as opposed to talking about someone whose attitudes you know, but just in case).

A whole lot of the FAIl in both the recent rounds come from nice white people who don't want to acknowledge the systematic nature of racism, who want to reduce it to individual actions and feelings (intent, hah), especially the Mean Things a Black Person Did To Me Once, and who are nowadays working themselves around to saying that "all anti racists are racists! OMG because they notice RACE which we are too nice and white and well bred to do so).

A lot of people want to belive racism only exists in the KKK or other white supermacist groups.

[cimorene]

Well, I do think there's been a shift over time (which could be characterized as generational therefore) down in the dominance of that perspective, which is another way of saying it's a slightly outdated way of looking at prejudice. I don't think you could say generation caused it, or that such attitudes were remotely homogenous within a "generaton", though, of course.