Something just clicked for me. Racism is about ethnicity not nationality.
Let me unpack that a bit ...
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If you have a problem with someone joining your workplace because they look like they do, or they have a "weird" name", or they don't speak the language properly (even if they're fully fluent), that's about their ethnicity.
If you have a problem with someone joining your workplace because it's a core part of the US government, and they're from China, and explicitly loyal to the CCP, that's about their nationality.
The first one is bigotry. The second one is politics.
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Only one of these is racism (the first one), but even the more serious kind. Which is not about the attitudes one individual has about others, or the things one does to others as a result.
The more serious kind of systemic. It's patterns show up in data about whole populations (or at least representative samples of them). But behaviour that may or may not be part of it can appear to be *the same behaviour* from an individual perspective.
We can't guilt trip our way out of this kind.
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Systemic racism works mostly on implicit bias. So people can't easily tell whether they're doing it or not. Which means conscientious individuals trying to fix our own behaviour - while it can and does reduce bigotry - cannot fix the systemic stuff.
Once, I firmly believed that the world was merely an accumulation of millions of individual actions. But what about network effects, and other ways the social background radiation can change and warp individual choices, without our awareness?
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If systemic racism can be fixed - and I genuinely hope it can - it can't be done through peer-to-peer moral persuasion. It has to be done through politics.
Politics that might includes systematically discriminating against countries known to introduce both bigotry and systemic racism into others. Being cautious about allowing their nationals to play any significant role in our social institutions. So addressing racism might involve stuff that looks superficially like racism.
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Which means we have to be able to have open-minded conversations about what is and isn't racism. We need to seriously consider the possibility that someone's actions that smell like racism are actually anti-racist or orthogonal. They need to seriously consider the possibility that is is.
On both sides of any given conversation, we need to avoid starting from assumptions and mutual condemnations. Starting instead with questions that start with "why?", and replies that answer them.
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I explain all this as context before I mention that I notice a lot of changes going on, in the power positions that determine the direction of large open source projects organisations. Given the Patriot Act and the Snowden revelations, I've never been entirely comfortable with how many of these orgs plant their flag in the US. Nor how many of the power positions are held by USAmericans. Particularly those with corporate affiliations.
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Because USAmerica is pretty clearly a nationality, not an ethnicity, I doubt anyone is going to mistake that for racism.
But, what about countries that are also geopolitically powerful, and institutionally compromised by authoritarianism nationalism (ie fascism), but much more ethnically monolithic? There might be equally good reasons to be concerned about Open Source orgs having their legal HQ in those countries, or their nationals being involved.
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But voicing concerns about the motives of nationals from authoritarian nationalist and ethnically homogenous countries looks superficially like racism. So again, we need to be able to examine it thoughtfully, because it may be or it may not.
If it's about targeted as specific individuals, it is. Because that's not the point. Non-racist concerns are about systemic biases, not individual people taking on roles.
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We need to be able to worry that the US is overly dominant in Open Source institutions (especially in its current form). But we may need to be equally concerned about China, or India, or Israel becoming overly dominant in Open Source institutions.
That means we need to be able to make observations about people from such countries taking up power positions, and what their backgrounds are. Without assumptions and condemnations. But equally with thoughtful checking our own assumptions.
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You and I don't speak English the same, even if we made an argument we came from wasp stock.
Moreover, again assuming wasp stock, there are lots of strange names. One of the characters in Future Sepsis is named Niamh (pronounced neev), which seems like a strange name, but it's Welsh, and even an English person might choose to name their child that despite not being directly Welsh.
Even the way someone looks, a lot of things can affect that I. The genetic side, the environmental side, or the cultural side without ethnicity entering the picture.
Then there are categories that the contemporary left believes are ethnic that actually aren't. Mexico, for example, is not an ethnicity. It is a state with a number of different ethnicities do the historical happenstance.
The left in fact often claims the same ethnicity is good and evil in their heuristic: an evil conquistador Spaniard European is now (without any real changes to genetics) a poor subjugated Mexican. The contradiction makes sense if it's not about ethnicity at all, but moral and power based.
Intersectionality at first glance looks like it makes certain groups more or less oppressed, but if you take it seriously, taken to its conclusions it actually means every human is unique and to make decisions solely on one or a couple attributes is to flatten them into something they are not.
@strypey I dont have the headspace to get into your meta analysis here
... however, I fancy lobbing at you some weird clip from Russian television programming I came across (which is equally above my paygrade):
https://www.reddit.com/r/lazerpig/comments/1p51r8i/nothing_tells_more_about_moscovia_than_russian
@indieterminacy
> some weird clip from Russian television programming
I have zero context for this. Could be real. Could be real TV footage with made up translation text. Could be generated by a Trained #MOLE. Who knows? The fact it's posted on dReddit with no reference to its source inclines me to assume the latter.
@sj_zero there's a lot in here. I'm not really sure how your conclusion (everything is an accumulation of individual decisions and actions) is supported by the rest of it, and I'm pretty sure I explained in the thread why I no longer find that conclusion credible.
My conclusion is that going by intersectionality every human is a unique combination of attributes that make us infinitely diverse, so any attempt to stack them together ends up failing.
@sj_zero
> going by intersectionality every human is a unique combination of attributes
That's not an axiom of intersectionality, it's just an observable fact accepted by everyone AFAIK.
> so any attempt to stack them together ends up failing
I don't understand what you mean by this.
@sj_zero
What it *seems* like you're saying is;
Because each person is unique, nothing can be said about populations in aggregate.
Which is clearly wrong, so it seems unlikely you're putting that forward as an argument. But it's equally clear it's not what intersectionality proposes, so it also seems unlikely you're saying it is.
Can you seen why I'm confused?
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@sj_zero
Let me supply an example to show why I think it's observably wrong that nothing can be said about populations in aggregate, or slices thereof.
"When the policy environment rewards enshittification, enshittifiers rise to the top of every company. Investors demand it. ... We could fire Zuck and all his bloodless billionaire pals tomorrow and a new cohort would step right into their shoes."
#CoryDoctorow, 2025
The confusion here isn’t personal. It comes from trying to use clean, totalising categories on a reality that is messy, layered, and often internally contradictory. My own framework starts from the assumption that paradox and inconsistency are normal features of the world, not bugs to be eliminated.
When I say “stacking fails,” I’m not saying statistics or population-level analysis are useless. Aggregates obviously exist and are useful at the level they’re meant for. The problem is a different one: stacking people into categories necessarily requires prejudice (Not in a moral sense, but in the sense that you must assume everything about someone based on a limited selection criteria). To reduce prejudice and get things more correct you need to add more attributes to separate people into those categories to make it more accurate, but in so doing the less coherent that category becomes. At sufficiently high resolution, you are no longer describing a group in any meaningful way, you are describing an individual.
That is not a mathematical failure. It is a categorical one. The error happens when you try to take that compressed, simplified image of a population and apply it back onto real, complex human beings.
This is why I am cautious about any framework, including intersectionality, that emphasises the stacking of people into identity variables. If a person is the intersection of dozens or hundreds of factors (history, class, ancestry, education, geography, culture, trauma, opportunity, neurotype, family, etc.), then no small handful of those factors can stand in for the whole person. The more seriously you take that idea, the more it breaks down low-resolution identity thinking. Your piles of people are almost random because even if in aggregate they look a certain way, individually they can be quite different. You can stack into more categories to try to capture people in a more robust model, but as you continue you end up with a near-infinitely complex model, with n piles to represent n people.
This also exposes how unstable many of our categories really are. Ethnicity is not clean or consistent. Language, names, appearance, and culture are shaped by environment, migration, class, and historical accident as much as ancestry. Mexico is a nation, not an ethnicity. A single person can descend from both conquered and conqueror, enslaved and enslaver, oppressed and powerful. These labels collapse under even mild historical or genetic scrutiny.
At the same time, it is obvious that different people experience both advantage and disadvantage, often simultaneously, depending on which variable you examine. The same person can be privileged in one context and marginalised in another. This should make us extremely wary of flattening anyone into a single identity-based narrative.
The real danger appears when systems, not just people, take these simplified categories and operationalise them. Institutions, governments, policies, algorithms, and bureaucracies cannot deal with full human complexity. They are forced to compress people into boxes, risk profiles, types, and groups. Harm happens when those abstractions are mistaken for the actual human beings they are meant to represent.
Governance doesn't necessarily require universal aggregation. That's literally an invention of the modernist era. Before the beginning of the modernist era and the French Revolution, the concept that everyone in a nation needed to be standardized and modularized was not real. One of the reasons for systemic bigotry is that systems were allowed to expand and standardize and make assumptions about everyone living under them, whereas before that governance was more localized. There were problems with that approach as well, but different problems. With a modernist epistemology, this truth is quite invisible, because it's so strongly built into our worldview.
History is full of examples where aggregate observations were converted into essential rules about individuals. In the United States, the history of slavery and race turned a population-level historical condition into a permanent, inherited social status for millions of unrelated individuals. That was not science. It was the misuse of abstraction backed by power.
So I am not rejecting pattern recognition. I am rejecting the move where patterns are treated as people, when a simplified model becomes an identity, and an identity becomes a fate. The aggregate is not the individual. A label is not a human being.
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Back to the question of ethnicity, we can point to an individual Māori person who is wealthy, or one living in a cardboard box. But those are anecdotes.
It's only when you collect data across the whole Māori population (or a representative sample), that you can see the overall wealth of the Māori population in Aotearoa, and that it's a lot lower than the non-Māori population.
This reveals a systemic bias that can't be addressed by moving wealth from poor non-Māori to wealthy Māori.
@icedquinn
> always has been
Maybe, but that doesn't stop people from firing accusations of racism at people addressing political questions that touch on nationality. I can furnish examples if this isn't something you've come across. But see the rest of the thread.
the overt racism of the 1930s was more or less banned. covert racism is hard to ban anywhere that humans are allowed discretion. "implicit" racism as in the kind found where people prefer their own tribe--that's universal. every human has it unless there is damage to the wernicke center of the brain.
people get mad when i say if you have gotten to the point you are fighting biology itself then you aren't really going to get anywhere. and attempts to do so anyway have backfired with hilarious effect.
it turns out education can result in people over-correcting biases so they select minorities against qualification guidelines. i think it was an australia study where they used a pure blind process and were horrified that it selected white men. selection of women or black people basically disentegrates in purely rationalized methods (incl. a problem when some places tries to farm out selection to AIs, where the AI basically said women were worthless as soldiers according to its model data.)
there is also the argument of what are you trying to solve in the system? all roads lead to capitalism needs to die, in the end.
@sj_zero I really must get an account with no character limit for responding to these blog length comments. I used to have a Friendica account but I didn't login for a while and it got arbitrarily deleted 🙄
its just a way to not engage with the debate and get the little mkultra slaves to label you a bad person and engage in collective shunning without actually establishing that you hold the moral ground.
the labels tend to change because they wear it out. then they have to cultivate a new magic word and do it all over again.
Iirc, NY symphony made a big deal about switching to 'blind' auditions for DEI purposes, but had to quietly end the practice because their percentage of white guy hires went up dramatically 🤷♀️
the point here is that political adversaries are "advanced persistent threats." they are systems, they goal seek, and the counters for them have to equally be systems that suppress, divert or disperse the aberrant behaviors.
people tend not to be systems thinkers or do this and they focus on seeing flows and events and then trying to make the most obvious authoritarian responses possible. "someone is being racist" -> "oh, well don't let them do that!"
that's part of why i brought up covert racism when enumerating. its still deliberate, but the necessity of certainty for a criminal trial is at odds with the amount of ambiguity they can create by just "not finding them a suitable candidate." you have to actually find why they are doing this and correct it *there*.
The discussion goes "Oh, we need more black high school graduates because high school graduates in aggregate make more money than non-high school graduates". Those aggregates are true, but by systemetizing that, you don't necessarily ensure those students go off to make more money. Instead, you devalue high school educations and get a situation like the US sees where the university degree becomes the new baseline. This ends up harming all high school students as a whole, at the cost of nominally but not necessarily practically improving the lot of the individual students involved.
The person who is harmed the most by this game is the hardworking and diligent black high school student who does the work to earn a high school diploma honestly, only to have their work devalued by a system that hoped to elevate blacks, resulting in individual harm.
(Baltimore just happens to have a lot of majority black areas which is why it ends up being a focus here)
https://foxbaltimore.com/news/project-baltimore/state-test-results-23-baltimore-schools-have-zero-students-proficient-in-math-jovani-patterson-maryland-comprehensive-assessment-program-maryland-governor-wes-moore
> more intersectionality
i think the thing being said here is that its basically rooted in a base claim "i'm being oppressed, as a black woman" and responding to the counter proofs "women in business is up to 30-50% now" and "black people in business are nearly in line with per capita norms" by saying "but not if you add these extra bayesian priors until my claim becomes true."
in a sense it IS just arguing about which priors get stacked in to the analysis. which can both be a conversation worth having (it 'might' be true that people are exhibiting irrational hatred for this specific tuple) but is also in the usual bayes problem of being very easy to select dimensions to get the outcome you want (p-hacking.)
thus intersectionality becomes an unlimited instrument to ignore whatever claims or measures of progress are desired by just manipulating the tuples.
@strypey provided you are fine with a person from China who supports a Taieanese party
@sj_zero
> If you wanted an account here I'll approve it no problem
Thanks, I'll consider it. What software do you run under the hood? I just heard Friendica has native ATProto support and I'm kind of curious to test that (and see if their UX is any better).
> the 500 character limit seems really annoying
It's fine for general chatter. Also I actually find it helps me compose what are effectively blog posts, by forcing me to lock a version of each paragraph before proceeding to the next one.
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@sj_zero On first reading, I agree with far more here than I disagree with. In particular I agree that technocratic governance creates problems, because public servants are heavily inventivised (or even contractually obliged) to optimise for whatever politicians decide to have measured. Regardless of negative real would consequences that can foresee from doing so.
The Adam Curtis series The Trap explores this problem in some detail using Blair's New Labourism as the main example.
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One difficulty in this kind of discussion is that you're in the US (I presume) and I'm in Aotearoa. So our local context, and particularly the scale that "national" government happens at, is wildly different.
After all, a NZ Parliament governs fewer people than the Mayor of New York. Indigenous people make up about 15% of our population, and while their ancestors were treated appallingly by mine, we totally lack a post-slavery minority. These differences matter when it comes to policy.
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So we can try to talk about racial politics purely on the level of abstractions. Which could produce theoretical agreement, but very little actionable output. I find this frustrating.
Or we can try to ground the discussion in specific examples, as you do in your second post. At the risk of ending up talking at cross purposes. Because we lack sufficient understanding of each other's local politics, and what we do know is a funhouse mirror version from our ideological counterparts there.
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I'm assuming of course that you know *anyone* who lives in Aotearoa, or has been here, and that they're probably somewhat like-minded. Both of those assumptions could be wrong.
But I'm painfully aware that I see the US through a sort of lime green, liberal lens. Because I don't have a lot of direct contact these days with left anarchists and left libertarians in the US.
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Meanwhile a lot of the self-declared anarchists and libertarians here come across as paleo-conservatives, if not outright fascists (spreading obviously wrong anti-Jewish nonsense, anti-scientific Great Replacement bollox, etc). Which as you might imagine, tends to push me back towards the aforementioned liberal frame. Even though I'm sure there are other perspectives I'd vibe with more (CrimeThinc and C4SS are good examples, I should read them more).
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So I don't know, do you think we could have a useful cross-national discussion about race politics? What form would you see that taking, and with what kind of focus?
@prabirkc
> provided you are fine with a person from China who supports a Taiwanese party
... and that you have reason to believe that's actually the case, rather than being a convenient smokescreen. Yes, exactly.
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A lot of the work I'm doing is taking my somewhat alien frame, and trying to translate it into something you'd understand. Considering I haven't published meditations on post-metamodern superpositional epistemology yet, it isn't reasonable to use those tools directly without making my somewhat long posts chapter length, so relating it to examples and mental frames we both can understand is the only way we can have a meaningful conversation.
Directly applicable to me, Ottawa wants to blame me for their historic actions, but the truth is I have more in common with my local indigenous friends and neighbors than "my kind" in Ottawa (or for that matter, in Toronto) who rule. Ottawa apologizes on "my" behalf while queuing up the next intolerable acts they'll apologize for on "my" behalf tomorrow. Meanwhile I get to watch the land my grandfathers lived in stagnate and rot. My grandfathers didn't take anyone's kids, they died young of silicosis. Yet because as an aggregate they could throw my grandparents (and possibly yours as well, did they do anything wrong per se?) into a stack of people so they could take personal responsibility for the actions of a ruling class that oppressed everyone in various ways.
Meanwhile, my paternal grandfather died young and bitter at a government who told him he was fighting the fascists in Italy for freedom only to slowly become totalitarian and choke out all the freedoms he fought for.
I'm curious: left-handed folks make up approximately 15% of the population, and makes on average almost 20% less than right-handed folks. Do you see this as prima facia evidence of 'systemic bias' against the left-handed?
@sj_zero
> Neither of us are Americans
Oh that's right your Canadian. Which changes some of details, but my point remains; huge differences in local context, scale, demographics, etc, that make it hard to have a grounded discussion on stuff like racial politics. Highly contextual stuff relative to something like, say, mathematics, which is pure abstraction anyway, or physics which is grounded but much more universal.
You said the fact that Maori people earn less on average is proof of systemic racism. Is it also your contention that group average differences based on characteristics other than those highlighted in the progressive stack are also proof of systemic discrimination?
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@nicholas
> You said the fact that Maori people earn less on average is proof of systemic racism
Proof isn't really a relevant word outside of mathematics. In most domains, the best you can do is prove the null hypothesis.
Let's say I was an honest social scientist, and I knew I tend to believe in systemic racism against Māori. I would recognise that if I looked for evidence that fits that frame, I'd almost certainly find it.
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So because I'm honest, I would structure my research as a series attempts to find disconfirming evidence for the theory of systemic racism against Māori. In other words, to prove the null hypothesis.
Every time my research fails to find the disconfirming evidence I've made an honest attempt to look for, that builds supports the theory.
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So coming back to your question, if the stats showed Māori earn more on average, that would be disconfirming evidence.
Although obviously you'd have to probe for flaws in the stats collection, and confounding variables that might explain that as an exception. Just as you do for if they do show an aggregate earnings gap, which does support the theory of systemic racism.
Because that gap on its own doesn't prove anything. Once confirmed, it's just one data point.
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But when you see population-level evidence for outcome gaps across a range l of mostly unrelated areas, all of which support the theory, and a lack of disconfirming evidence (that holds up to scrutiny)? And we do; health outcomes, life expectancy, infant mortality, media representation, treatment in the justice system, etc, etc. That's about as a close as you get to proof in social science.
(5/5)
In answer to the second part of your question;
@nicholas
> group average differences based on characteristics other than those highlighted in the progressive stack are also proof of systemic discrimination?
Yes. Of course. Subject to all the caveats about evidence-gathering discussed above.
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Finally, in this context, I'll try to address your original question. Apologies for the dismissive reply, but your second try was much easier to parse.
It's not about the relative size of population. It's about uneven distribution of power (political, financial, social, etc). Women are a larger population than men. Indigenous Africans were a much larger population in Apartheid South Africa than their colonisers.