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Dear fellow white people. You seem to struggle with the meaning of the word “racist”. You think it means “hatred for other races”. This is incorrect. Allow me to explain.
When someone makes a post like this, white people immediately say things like, “look, it isn’t racist! It just looks for contract. See how, if I manipulate the photos, I can make it select for black people”! https://twitter.com/artordillos/status/1335773425701330944?s=21
This is because y’all don’t know what the hell “racist” means.
When someone calls an algorithm racist, they don’t mean that a computer code hates black people, or that it was deliberately designed to exclude Black ppl. That’s not what racism is about.
When someone calls an algorithm racist, they don’t mean that a computer code hates black people, or that it was deliberately designed to exclude Black ppl. That’s not what racism is about.
I mean, if someone hates black people that’s absolutely racist, sure. But that’s like saying that CSI is a tv show, so therefore Schitt’s creek isn’t a tv show because it isn’t a crime drama. Racism includes, but is not exclusive to, hatred.
Racism is about the million little ways life is made different for people of colour because society is run based on a white model - it is run mostly by white people, mostly for white people, with other folk being an afterthought.
It’s the same for ableism and all those other isms by the way. Very few people actively HATE disabled people. But assumptions based on an abled society still leave disabled folk in the cold and that is ableism.
This is also why hatred of white peoples is not racism. Because unless we live in a society which is run by and for non white people and ends up screwing over while people in a million little ways (which we don’t) then hating white people is not racism. It’s hatred.
Here’s an example of racism. Until I was 13 I though racism was history. Like, I lived in the Caribbean, attended a heavily multicultural school (I was in the minority as a white person), and learned all about colonization, slavery, Harriet Tubman, the Arawaks etc.
My teachers were white Americans but they were the kind of white Americans who travel to the Caribbean and teach at an international school. They were leftist progressive types who taught pro-gay, pro-diversity, anti-colonization anti-racism stuff to the multi-ethnic kids.
But to me I experienced it all as a history lesson. One I internalized and took seriously, but didn’t register as being a modern THING that was still a problem.
After all I watched my white teachers suspend a white kid for a week and call a school-wide emergency assembly complete over calling a Hispanic kid “dirty”. It was made very clear that racial bigotry was considered HORRIFIC and was intolerable.
So when I returned to Canada, I was walking down the hall with my new friend, a Canadian child of East Indian parents, when I saw a “stop racism” poster and laughed. “What is that, leftover from the sixties?”
And my white privilege was hit over the head with a reality stick as my brown friend informed me that racism exists and affected her daily life.
That privilege, that ability to be oblivious to racism despite a thorough education in it, was an example of racism.
That privilege, that ability to be oblivious to racism despite a thorough education in it, was an example of racism.
Did I hate brown people? Of course not. I zeroed in on the one non-white person in my class because, for one thing, I could recognize them (all white people look alike to me, even now). But my ignorance about racism was proof of racism at work.
There are lots of ways that BLM, pro-diversity white people like me can participate in and contribute to racism. Calling something racist doesn’t mean necessarily that any hatred is involved. All it takes is ignorance, or apathy.
If an algorithm wasn’t designed to exclude black people, but does so anyway more often than it excludes white people due to differences in contrast etc is that racism at work? Absolutely. That doesn’t mean it had to be intentional.
Most news hosts sit in front of a dark background. Why? Because while people’s faces stand out better with a dark backdrop. It isn’t done to intentionally highlight white people. It’s simply done with white people in mind.
So when you have two news hosts, one of whom is black, sitting in front of that white-person-friendly backdrop, and you have an algorithm that looks for these contrasts, you’re going to get crops that centre the white person more often.
White peoples think that racism means hating non-white people. It doesn’t. It means centring white people. Thinking of white as being the norm, making assumptions based on whiteness. This is a result of a white-majority society. And it is racism at work.
It is the banality of racism that white people have trouble with. We were taught about slavery and Jim Crow and all of that clearly evil stuff, and most of us agree that was really bad. So how can we be racist? Well, lots of ways.
One of the ways I was introduced to modern racism, even if I didn’t know it by that name at the time, was through the babysitter’s club books. There was a black character named Jesse.
In the beginning of almost every Jesse book (each book is narrated by the title character), she tells us that she is black. And she usually comments on the fact that she wouldn’t have to tell us if she were white. We assume white unless told otherwise.
That’s racism. That underlying assumption that the ballet-dancing, middle class babysitter kid is white unless she tells us she is black, is racism at work. But that isn’t hatred, is it? I loved the Jesse books. And the Claudia books (Japanese American).
Maybe stuff like that doesn’t seem “racist” to us. Maybe it just seems like the natural product of a white-majority society. But that’s exactly the point, isn’t it? It doesn’t take hatred to discriminate. It doesn’t take hatred to make assumptions regarding race.
If you had a black doctor who spoke to you in AAVE, wouldn’t you have to fight the assumption that this doctor isn’t very smart/educated/professional? Even if you know that isn’t the case, you have to fight it. That’s fighting our internalized racism.
Whereas if a white doctor spoke to us in slangy southern we’d probably find them folksy, down-to-earth and warm.
Or maybe we wouldn’t, because racism isn’t the only isn out there. Classism is a thing and we can definitely be classist when it comes to the way a person speaks English.
We can’t escape the isms. Unless we have some kind of magically balanced society that is run by and for people of all classes, abilities, race, etc etc etc and somehow accommodates everyone (the left wing goal) there are going to be isms.
Our jobs is to learn to recognize those isms and if we can’t, to listen to marginalized people when they actively point them out and figure a way to fight them, whether it’s by reminding ourselves that speech doesn’t denote intelligence or class, or that disability isn’t a curse.
We can’t underestimate the harm done by banal isms. In Black Beauty, John says,
“ONLY ignorance? Don’t you know ignorance is the worst thing in the world next to wickedness, and which does more mischief heaven only knows.”
“ONLY ignorance? Don’t you know ignorance is the worst thing in the world next to wickedness, and which does more mischief heaven only knows.”
The fact is that we are ignorant of what it is like to be different from ourselves and it’s easy not to see the many little ways someone who doesn’t fit into the base-standard can be inconvenienced. Take left handedness.
I’m left handed. And I noticed it, growing up. Scissors didn’t work right for me. Schools didn’t usually have lefty scissors so I had to bring my own. And those desks with one arm? Almost always on the wrong side for me.
My left handedness was enough of an inconvenience that it partially disguised my autism. Poor fine motor skills, delayed coordination? Awkward left hander! Thinks differently? Right brained!
I have a book with a picture in it. It’s a picture that supposedly left handlers can see and right handlers can’t. I have entertained classmates and coworkers with this book, bringing it in and showing it to ppl. Most lefties saw it. Most righties didn’t.
Any lefthander knows about those things you have to think about which righties don’t. Like where to sit at a dinner table, for example. When to get to class so you can snag an aisle desk.
Heck most righties don’t even realize that things like scissors or can openers have a HANDEDNESS to them. They take it for granted. But they do. Lefties have a shorter life expectancy because we are more likely to die in workplace accidents. The world doesn’t fit us well.
Not to mention the lefties who got converted to righties by well meaning school teachers only to end up dyslexic.
This kind of “ism” seems small and meaningless unless you have experienced it yourself. Do I feel victimized by righties? No. But my difference did affect me. So imagine something as big and weighted as RACE.
When we point out the ways in which people are not accommodated, whether it’s based on skin tone or disability or country of origin or even handedness, we aren’t calling the perpetrator evil. Most often its “only” ignorance.
So if someone calls something “racist” or “ableist” or “classist” or “sexist”, instead of jumping forward to defend yourself or people like you, maybe accept it and consider it. Ask what could be done differently. Put yourself in their shoes. Don’t act ignorant.
