Feelings as Evidence

Social justice claims to be about equality. The idea is that certain groups are systematically oppressed by a majority (white men), who are complicit, and may or may not be knowingly so. Being part of this majority, then, means that you have profited at the expense of people with the misfortune to be born a different gender or skin color than you. You have committed micro-aggressions in the past. You have been insensitive, if not downright degrading, to "people of color".

The biggest problem with this narrative is that it is unsupported by evidence. We have to go down to the level of gut feelings, anecdotes about how a particular personal interaction made someone feel uncomfortable. Feelings can't be measured, tested, or quantified. Perhaps some day in the future, advancements in neuroscience might give us some objective index through which we might judge a person's internal emotional landscape, but for now, these claims are nothing but supposition. Yes, feelings do matter, but they are ephemeral.

To understand why this point is important, you only have to examine how the relative importance of someone's feelings changes when the contexts and people involved change. If a woman receives a death threat, or is even just called an unkind name, her feelings are what people supposedly care about. If those words anger or sadden her, she has been "harassed". If she feels "unsafe", this is the worst tragedy of all, tantamount to a physical assault, to hear some people tell it. Change the context to a male being insulted or receiving death threats, and his concerns are dismissed. We don't feel empathy for him and may even attack him for crying for attention.

Change the context to race and it is much the same. Insults and harassment towards racial minorities is spun up to the level of tragedy and horror. Last month at Vanderbilt University, a campus minority advocacy group was outraged when a bag of dog feces was discovered on the steps of the black cultural center. On Facebook, the group posted the following message:

This morning someone left a bag of feces on the porch of Vanderbilt University's Black Cultural Center. The center has served as the nexus of many aspects of Black life on Vanderbilt's campus since it's [sic] inception 31 years ago. The violation of a place that in many ways is the sole home for Black students is deplorable. As many of us sit in grief, recognize that these types of actions are what we speak of when we note the reality of exclusion and isolation of students of color and specifically Black students on our campus. This act has hurt many and will nto be received lightly. We will not allow for the desecration of the place we call home. As we announced yesterday and reaffirm today, we will not be silent.

Such hurt, most racism, indeed. If these were normal times, one might chalk this up to the hateful actions of some nasty individual and move on, Even better, if you were free of an environment that insists that a significant portion that the people around you hate you for the color of your skin and that trains you to look for and call out any and all perceived slights against  you, you might not immediately jump to the conclusion that this was some cowardly act of racism.

And you would be right. As it turns out, the hateful dog poo was actually the product of a service dog, collected into a bag by the dog's owner, a blind student, who was unable to find a trash can. The fact that her disability led to this incident is an amazing teachable moment for those of us who detest the wrong-headed ideas of identity politics and intersectionalism.

Above all, it underlines my point that how you feel might have little to nothing to do with reality. Those students in that group felt "hurt", "excluded" and "isolated". These were all feelings conjured up by their own expectations. In a way, it was the activists themselves who inflicted the pain they felt by creating the environment I alluded to above.

I don't mean to imply that racism does not exist, but simply wish to point out that if the innocent actions of a person with a disability can be so intensely misread as hatred, how many "micro-aggressions" are likewise the product of differing expectations and expression of individuals? How much harm are we inflicting on the minority youth of this nation by setting them up to expect rejection at every turn, and then feeding them the tools to ensure they internalize and act out their own oppression?

On the flip side, the culture of grievance being created, the now tired concept of "check your privilege" being foisted on those of us who don't belong to the equal but separate minority group, serves only to divide us. In the name of "raising awareness", what is raised is distrust and anger. To address the issues minorities face, failed methodologies must be abandoned, scientific inquiry must not be viewed as hate speech, and truth, not feelings, must be the basis for taking action.

Turnabout Test

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SJW Mathematics: Prejudice + Power = Racism?

Earlier this year, the diversity officer at Goldsmiths University in London, Bahar Mustafa, become the subject of an intense controversy when she tweeted with the hashtags #killallwhitemen and #misandry. She also called one student "white trash" and advised white male students that they shoudl not attend a university event about diversifying the cirriculum. Last month, she was summoned to court to answer to a complaint over those tweets, as she apparently may have broken UK law.

Shortly after the backlash began, Mustafa had this to say:

I, an ethnic minority woman, cannot be racist or sexist towards white men because racism and sexism describe structures of privilege based on race and gender and therefore women of colour and minority genders cannot be racist or sexist, since we do not stand to benefit from such a system.

This defense met with a flurry of criticisms from bloggers and journalists, but Mustafa was merely restating an idea that has been around for some time. Feminist Frequency's Anita Sarkeesian, noted for her allegations and criticisms of sexism in video games, made a similar claim regarding sexism only being possibly by men against women. I traced this as far back as a paper written in 1995 by Caleb Rosado, though I suspect that it has been expressed in some form earlier than that. You can read the paper in full here.

Discrimination is the unequal treatment of individuals or groups on the basis of some, usually categorical, attribute, such as race, ethnicity, gender, religion, sexual orientation, age, or social class membership. Prejudice is an attitude, however. When it results in an action, it becomes discrimination. Both together form the basis for racism. Prejudice is an attitudinal bias, while discrimination is a behavioral bias.

That seems like a very reasonable and cogent description of the difference between prejudice and discrimination. To hold a personal dislike of Jews as a group is prejudice. To try to convince others that Jews are evil or they should act against the interests of Jews is anti-Semitism. The paper goes on:

Racism is a socially constructed reality at the heart of society¹s structures. Racism is the deliberate structuring of privilege by means of an objective, differential and unequal treatment of people, for the purpose of social advantage over scarce resources, resulting in an ideology of supremacy which justifies power of position by placing a negative meaning on perceived or actual biological/cultural differences.

At first, I thought that Mr. Rosado was defining racism as being what I and many others would call "institutional racism". This is school segregation, Jim Crow laws, the minimum wage, and South African apartheid. However, later on, he explicitly states that there is more than one kind of racism and defines them:

Individual racism is a belief in the superiority of one's own race over another, and the behavioral enactments that maintain these superior and inferior positions.... Institutional racism is the conscious manipulation of the structures of society's institutions so as to systematically discriminate against people of color by their prestructured practices, policies and power arrangements.... Cultural racism is the individual and institutional expressions of the superiority of one race's cultural heritage over that of another race.

This is where I start to scratch my head. It seems to me like he is mixing up terms and definitions. The author defined prejudice as thought and discrimination as action, then further defined racism as discrimination that is institutional, a "deliberate structuring of privilege". Shouldn't "individual racism" be limited to "individual discrimination", according to his own definitions and careful framing of scope?

Minor quibble aside, I'll assume that the author's intention was that individuals who live in a society with institutional racism can choose to utilize those institutions to perpetrate acts of racism. For example, the "Scottsboro Boys" trial is widely considered by scholars to be a miscarriage of justice, and was possible because of institutional racism in the 1930s. The white teenagers who accused the black teens of rape knew that their word would carry greater weight with authorities and the public at large.

So, if you accept and apply the narrow definition of racism outlined in Rosado's paper, that institutional racism is the one and only determinant of whether a given act is racist, then Mustafa is correct. However, I have two points to make out of this.

Firstly, categorizing her actions as racist or not is beside the point. Rosado describes discrimination as action motivated by prejudice. Mustafa put her prejudice on display and turned it into discrimination against white males. I don't see how her actions could somehow become virtuous just because they are not backed up by institutional bias. Her acts were hateful and, in the end, served only to incite a widespread distrust of diversity programs and feminism in general.

Secondly, her implicit claim of institutional bias against her is suspect. A white male in Mustafa's position who chose to exclude women or Muslims and tweeted #killallwomen would likely have faced swifter and greater censure than she did. At least in the context where she took these actions, I think that it is ridiculous to argue that institutional bias would favor a white male. This leads to the equally ludicrous conclusion that #killallwomen is not sexist because it is no less well-tolerated (I argue that it is far less tolerated) than #killallwhitemen.

If you want to make institutional bias a necessary prerequisite to calling something racist or sexist, fine, but in so doing, you have increased the level of proof required to make the claim that a given act is racist, because now you not only point to the action, but you must show how institutions explicitly favor one group over another. Personally, I think that this is a mistake, because it ignores the fact that hate, whether practiced by a group that benefits from bias, or not, is still hate. It still damages relationships and reputations and creates divisions in the minds of observers where none existed before.

In actual practice, I think that it is rare that someone actually takes the time to perform this analysis to find institutional bias. Instead, racism and sexism are assumed to be features of the system that apply everywhere and always. We have a situation where the motte and bailey doctrine is employed, and rather than look for the institutional bias, accusers of racism and sexism merely point to the sex or skin color of a person and choose to condemn or ignore acts of discrimination on that basis alone. These careless accusations are not defensible, but when pressed, those calling for the death of white males retreat back to much more widely accepted claims.

This is where social justice warriors do the most damage to their supposed cause while exposing their true nature through their actions. There is no nuance in their analysis of what constitutes an offense and heavy doses of rationalization to excuse their own hypocrisy. Skin color and sex themselves become the only justification needed for condemning others, and the only way to escape is to join the group's mentality or to remain anonymous. The damage that is done to their own cause is ignored or blamed on institutional bias. They do not understand that there really are bad tactics, and that the choice to use those tactics betrays a greater interest in attacking and hurting their targets than in building empathy and understanding.

A Weasel Word for Social Justice Warriors

In the early 90's, the phrase "politically correct" or "political correctness" or simply "PC" came into the national consciousness. It was commonly used as a pejorative to describe the editing of speech to remove words, phrases or actions that might be deemed offensive, but it was also picked up by the other side as well, and I can clearly remember criticisms leveled at politicians and celebrities, calling them out for racist or sexist speech. Even in the thick of it, though, it never seemed like there was any meat to this thing, that it was anything like a movement. By the end of the 90's, the impression that I had was that most people had simply stopped caring and moved on.

It's difficult to say if the social justice warrior (SJW) movement is a direct descendant of political correctness or just a distant relative. Certainly, there are some similarities. Racist and sexist are routinely hurled against supposed transgressors by SJW proponents, joined now by a litany of new descriptors, words like misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, and transmisogyny. We also have ideological terms like privilege, intersectionalism, and rape culture that existed before but have gained a much wider audience outside of academia. My own opinion is that this current of ideological thought never really went away, but continued to stew, primarily on university campuses, until the time was ripe to emerge again.

"Problematic" is another word that has emerged from a relatively obscure existence in academia and has pushed quietly into the mainstream. It is an odd choice of word for the meaning that it has taken on. Originally, it was meant to convey simply that a thing, such as an undertaking, was difficult or uncertain. An ex-convict might find getting a job to be problematic, for example.

The word can now be used to describe speech or media that could potentially cause offense. Why not simply use racist/sexist/-phobia? Because the point is to denounce without clearly defining what is being denounced. A SJW can claim that the depiction of women in X is problematic, and the reader who is familiar with the term will automatically fill in "sexist" or "misogynistic".

If you pay close attention, though, the word is actually used when those terms are too strong. Most people have some pretty specific ideas in mind when someone says the word "sexist". Generally, we think of people who believe that women should not enjoy the same rights as men. We think of places and times where women could not own property, could not vote, and were barred from working. Only a select few people would see sexism in a video game where the objective is to free a princess from captivity by a reptilian monster. Instead, the plot of Super Mario Brothers is deemed "problematic".

Besides the ambiguity, the word reeks of academic elitism. Racism and sexism are such pedestrian words where "problematic" sounds so suave, so smug. It also signals your virtue as one of the good people who doesn't hate everyone who doesn't look or act just like you. Using it makes you part of that special club who knows what's really going on in the world and has all the answers for how to fix it.

The road ahead will likely be difficult for those of us who choose to speak out because we believe in free speech, we understand basic economic concepts and we strive for rationality and logic. We are faced with the shrieking rhetoric and convoluted narratives of the SJWs, and they will huddle in their safe spaces and clutch desperately to the lies they have been telling each other. Truth, as always, will eventually win the day, but getting through the current dark age of anti-intellectualism may prove problematic, at least at first.