War Handwavium

Above is a good video called “How to tell people they sound racist” by Jay Smooth. You can see his thread about it here:

http://www.illdoctrine.com/2008/07/how_to_tell_people_they_sound.html

I like it because it makes an important distinction between dealing with what someone said and dealing with their internal motivations. The lesson of the video is that it’s far easier to say “That thing you said about the watermelon was racist” than it is to say “You have the heart and soul of a racist”. Hearts and souls are hard to measure. Words are a little bit easier.

This post is sort of in that same spirit of choosing how to fight for equality by choosing tactics that are easier to win and avoiding tactics that get you bogged down into a quagmire with no exit strategy other than to shut down the thread.

The quagmire comes when you say “It sounds to me like you’re saying” (or some variation) and then insert the most extreme discrimitory thing that you can imagine, something so evil that it would make Darth Vader pause, before he’d remind himself of how his poor mother was a slave and murdered by sand people, and then choke hold someone.

“It sounds to me” is really nothing more than a round about, back door approach, to saying “I think you’re a racist” but trying to soften it and dilute it by saying “it sounds that way to me”. What you’re saying is just an indirect way of saying “It is my opinion that you are a racist”. And as Jay Smooth points out in his video, saying “you’re a racist” is a whole lot more likely to derail than dealing with specificaly what the person actually said.

Focus on what they said, not on what you think they said or what you want to interpret them as having said. And for pete’s sake, don’t invent quotes attributed to the person if they didn’t actually say it. Focus on their actual words.

Part of what is behind “it seems to me that you’re saying (insert horrible evil)” is an assumption of bad faith, that the person’s words or actions must have behind them the worst possible intentions of anyone who ever said those same words or did those same actions.

But, for example, not every cop who arrests a black man is racist. So, you cannot take one phrase/action and assume the worst intent of anyone who has ever said/done that.

I’m not saying you have to assume good faith either. You don’t have to poly-anna their intentions. It’s best to avoid intentions altogether. But definitely don’t take their words or actions and find the worst possible intention behind them and then try to weasel a round about accusation about their intents by couching it in “It seems to me that you’re saying (evil)”, when all you’re really doing is saying “It is my personal opinion that you’re a racist”.

“It seems to me that you’re a racist” is just one level of indirection above what Jay Smooth’s admonition to avoid saying “you’re a racist”.

“Racists do this. You’re doing this. You must be a racist. Wait, Jay Smooth told me not to say that. It sounds to me like you’re saying you want to be a racist. Yeah, yeah, that’s the ticket.”

Uhm. No.

I would suggest not making any assumptions about intent at all. Don’t assume good faith. Don’t assume bad faith. Instead of “It seems to me that you’re saying (evil)”, what you might consider doing is saying something along the lines of this:

“Racists have used this phrase, or done this action, as a way to commit camouflaged racism. They want to continue to be racists, so they find indirect ways of doing and saying racist things. The thing you just said/did is one of those things they do/say as camoflaged racism. When you do/say this thing, whether you intend it to be racist or not, it will end up hurting some people because racists say/do that exact same thing to hurt people.”

This is a bit of a mouthful, but it’s a hell of a lot shorter than a flamewar.

Another way some people try to defend assuming bad faith is by asserting “The meaning of your communication is the response you get.” Or some variation thereof. How it gets applied in a totally derailed flamewar is this: “Your communication hurt me, you must have meant to hurt me.”

But that’s taking things all the way back to intent again. And focusing the conversation on intent is the quagmire that Jay Smooth warns about. “You *are* a racist.” “You *meant* to hurt me.” These are comments about the person’s soul. And they’ll derail it in a heartbeat.

The part that is true about that whole “the meaning of your communication is the response you get” concept is how you felt about the communication.

And for pete’s sake, don’t start saying “It *feels* like you’re saying (evil)”. Speaking truthfully about your feelings would mean saying something like “that hurt” or “that makes me sad” and so on. Talking about feelings doesn’t mean “I felt like you meant to hurt me” is now an acceptable way to indirectly make accusations of intent. No. You know the truth about *your* feelings, you know your soul, you know your heart. Report it. But keep the report to your heart, your soul, your feelings. Don’t say “now that we’re talking about feelings, let me say what I feel your intentions were.”

If you’re in a conversation and someone says/does something that lands as racists or sexists or whatever, it’s going to hurt. And if you want to hold the person accountable for what they said or did, then let them know the effects of their words and actions. Their intent becomes irrelevant.

“That hurt. Racists use those words/actions to hurt people. Regardless of what your intentions were, when you use those words/actions, you will end up hurting people who have had to deal with racism.”

Give it a try.

Racism exists in America today. Racial profiling by police has been documented numerous times and numerous cities. Looking at who the police in a stop in an area, the percentages of who was stopped, when broken down by race, should roughly follow the racial makeup of that area. If you’re in an area that is 80% white and 20% black, but the police records show their stops break down into 70% black and 30% white, you can assert that racial profiling is taking place.

But just because you’ve proven that racial profiling is occurring in a department or a city or a state or even a country, that does not mean you can pull out a specific incident of a police stop, and assert it was racially motivated without looking at the individual merits of that specific case.

To take one incident and demand that it follow your chosen general principle is a logical fallacy called “A Dicto Simpliciter”.

To commit the dicto simpliciter fallacy with racism is to argue that a particular incident must be racially motivated because racism exists in this country.

This recently happened with a case involving Sgt. James Crowley (white) responding to a 911 call about a breakin at the Cambridge, Mass. home of Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. (black)

Gates had come home from a trip overseas to find his door jammed shut. He asked his cab driver (also a black man) to help him force open the door. A neighbor saw two black men forcing the front door open and called 911 to report a possible breakin. Crowley was first on the scene and found Gates in the home. Crowley asked to see Gates’s identification. What exactly happened after that depends on whose version of the story you read. Crowley says Gates would not show an ID. Gates says he did show his id but then Crowley refused to identify himself or give his badge number. What exactly happened, no one may ever know. But it ended with Gates being arrested for disorderly conduct. The charges were dropped several days later.

When the story first hit the news, some folks immediately reported it as obvious and blatant racism by a white cop arresting a black man for no reason. Even though they had little or no information about what actually happened or the character of the two people involved.

These people committed a dicto simpliciter, demanding that this particular white cop arrested Gates out of racism, because racism exists in the US.

It appears now that more information has come out about Crowley that this particular incident was likely not motivated by racism. Crowley was hand picked by former Cambridge Police Commissioner Ronny Watson (black) to teach sensitivity training to keep cops from racial profiling. A Boston cop, Lawrence Hickman, (also black) who teaches at the same academy and has worked alongside Crowley for years has nothing but the highest respect for Crowley.

What must be separated in the discussion of racism is the general principle versus a specific incident which may or may not be racially motivated.

Some people demand that this particular (or any particular) incident be labeled as “racism!” out of a conflated idea that since there is racism in general, this must be racism. And they may be motivated out of fear of the converse: If this particular (any particular) incident is NOT racism, then there is NO RACISM IN GENERAL in the country.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Racism in America exists today even if this particular case involving Gates and Crowley was proven beyond a shadow of a doubt to have nothing to do with racism.

But jumping to the conclusion about a particular incident being racially motivated only to have it turn out to not be the case can only result in losing support from people against the very real fight against very real racism in America. The story goes that the little boy cried “Wolf!” three times when there was no wolf. The forth time, there was a wolf, but no one would listen to him.

So don’t commit the dicto simpliciter fallacy. Just because there is racism in America in general, doesn’t mean that a particular incident must be racist.

As for why Crowley charged Gates with disorderly conduct, it seems more a clash of egos than racism. How much ego Gates brought to the incident is not yet exactly known, though he has admitted to bringing some ego by getting angry at Crowley. We know for a fact that Crowley brought enough ego to arrest Gates for trivial reasons. (The fact that the charges were dropped so quickly would seem to indicate they lacked merit.)