Doug wrote:
>And do racist insults cause no harm? The isolated one, probably not.
>But how often are racist insults isolated? They're usually part of a
>pattern of speech that's embedded in a social hierarchy. The speech
>both reflects and reinforces the hierarchy. That's not harmless.
Here's an anecdotal example of how deeply imbedded the power of racist insults is here. A friend of mine is a mental health worker in San Francisco. Once she was with a patient from a group home where people were, theoretically anyway, transitioning from institutional to semi-independent living. My friend was on a weekly outing with this patient and they were riding on the bus. As he generally did when he was out in public for more than just a little while, this guy was getting increasingly agitated. And, as he also often did when out in public, he proceeded to make the situation worse by starting to yell "n-word, n-word, n-word" out of nowhere. Long story short, at the next stop my friend is scurrying to get this guy off the bus and away from riders who took great offense at this outburst. She wound up shoving the guy into a phone booth, throwing her arms across the door and yelling "he's mentally ill, he's mentally ill." That problem solved, the next problem was the guy obsessing for the rest of the day about my friend calling him mentally ill.
[WS:] What this story illustrates is stereotyping - which is an integral part of human cognition. We all do it in all social situations. It is hard wired in our brains. It is not possible to get rid of it without lobotomizing people.
Stereotype is a cognitive response to emotional reaction to something that may pose a threat 9which is pretty much reflexive). It is basically an attempt to reason in a situation when sufficient information is not available. You see a members of an ethnic group that is known to have a higher probability of committing a crime. Your automatic emotional response is fear, which your "thinking brain" (cortex) is trying to resolve by utilizing information available to it. An in most situations there is insufficient information - since we have no way of knowing who the person in question is and what his intentions are. Consequently the brain may use the only information available - memorized hearsay - and that often leads to the formation of a stereotype.
Racism is a very different cognitive phenomenon - it is a conscious belief that a particular ethnic groups is inferior (mild version) and should be discriminated against (strong version) that is held *regardless* of any empirical evidence. In other words, a negative stereotype will disappear if the holder finds additional information that disproves it - e.g. that the menacing looking guy on a deserted after 8PM Baltimore metro is a Johns Hopkins surgeon going home later than usual. A racist belief, by contrast, will not disappear under similar circumstances - in fact empirical evidence is irrelevant for racists.
Here is another real life example, from my own life. When my ex was student at UC Santa Cruz, we lived in student housing on the campus. One day on a weekend, I was approached by a Black guy who asked for help. He said that he was a new student moving with his family to student housing, but his wife's car broke down before they reached Santa Cruz, and he needed money to fix it. Unfortunately, his old folk could send him cash only on Monday. I was initially suspicious (the initial automatic emotional reaction mentioned earlier), but then I started thinking. I realized that anyone could be in a similar situation, so there is no reason to hold negative stereotypes against this guy. So I wrote down his name and address from his driver license and "loaned" him $200.
When my Ms. Radical-Fuck-the-Rich-and-the-White-Middle-Class ex learned about it, she was furious and called me a whole bunch of names of which "idiot" was the mildest. However, our finances were rather thin back then and $200 was a considerable amount of money, so her wrath was understandable. Of course the guy did not return the money, and his driver's license turned out to be fake. When I reported that incident to the campus police, they were bewildered that someone could be that naïve.
The above was an example of stereotyping that was resolved based on empirical evidence. That evidence turned out to be fake, but that is another story. Had it been a racist belief, I would have told the guy to go to hell, in which case I would have been $200 ahead.
The way lefties tend to approach this subject is crude, self-righteous, and judgmental, devoid of any sense of proportion or attempt to understanding what is actually going on. You are either with us, or you are an asshole, fascist, racist, and disgrace to the humankind. This self-righteous, judgmental way of thinking is the main reason that I parted my ways with the left. I used to be quite annoyed by that, in the way as I was annoyed by religious preaching. Today, I for the most part ignore it as I do any other noise. Life is too short to waste it on such bullshit.
Wojtek