On 11/14/2016 12:50 PM, Prof David West wrote:
all humans, probably all animals, are innately xenophobic, we are all afraid of the
"other." This is nature. But, fear of the black man, or the woman, or whatever, comes
about only when our context, the collective / the culture gives definition to the xenophobic
"other."
absent the collective, no individual would be racist or misogynist, but they
would be afraid.
That's a good way to think about it. But it skirts a fundamental wolf that
Steve is feeding. The right tends to assume people are basically bad (perhaps
not evil, but at least selfish). The left tends to assume people are good and
circumstance leads to bad actions. The reality is that the collective(s)
constitute the individuals just as much as individuals constitute the
collective(s).
Yes, there are individual racists. That assumption is a critical part of my
argument. If there was no individual racism, I couldn't distinguish between
individual and collective racism. And, no I'm not entirely separating the two.
Is/can individual racism persist (invariantly) under composition? Yes, of
course. Individual racism is foundational to the US, unfortunately.
But that's not the problem I'm pointing out in the _Williams_ article. The problem with
her article is that she implies that "elites" are accusing policemen of
individual racism. And asserts that those shootings were not racist acts, motivated by
individual racism. I agree with her assertion. The shootings are (mostly) a result of
fear- and aggression-based training. Even _if_ the individual cops (like Darren Wilson)
are racist, being a policeman is a _professional_ position. To the largest extent
possible, cops are encouraged to keep their personal opinions out of their work. So,
even when an individual racist commits a collectively racist act, it does not imply that
the collective racism necessarily _derives_ from individual racism.
Systemic biases exist. And the current focus on the shooting of black men by
police is on systemic bias, not (necessarily) individual bias. That Williams
avoids that distinction damages the entire article.
On Mon, Nov 14, 2016, at 01:20 PM, Steven A Smith wrote:
It sounds as if you are entirely dissociating individual racist (or misogynist
or... ) bigotry from the collective?
I know you to have some fairly eclectic ideas about individual and collective
human behaviour/motivation/self-awareness, so I'm trying to wrap my head
around what you are trying to say here rather than deny or discount or disagree
with it.
Perhaps one could postulate that many if not all human "sins" are emergent properties of
collectives and that individuals, raised out of the context of an already corrupted group would not
have those properties. Adam and Eve before expulsion from the garden of Eden? It is as if you
are suggesting that many (or all?) individuals remain in some kind of state of Grace, marred only
by their myopic (and other types of) ignorance, magnified quantitatively or transformed
qualitatively into the kind "sinful" behaviour we see in group activities? I can buy
SOME of that, but have a hard time not believing that there *are* truly bad actors, individuals who
have, through whatever process of arriving (nature or nurture, genetic/disease/trauma-induced
insanity), exhibit truly, deeply madly abhorrent if not actually evil (how do you measure that?)
behaviour?
Again, not to belabor it, I know you to have some very *useful* (to me)
alternative perspectives on things, I'm hoping my questions here provoke you to
illuminate me more.
--
☣ glen
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