You think you can numerically measure racial privilege? By all means, explain how you do that.
I don't - I'm a linguist, cognitive scientist, and programmer, not a sociologist. But obviously there are ways. For example, you can send out otherwise identical resumes with a stock photo of a black vs. white person to potential employees and record the rate of replies - a higher rate of replies shows a white person has an easier time finding a job...
That sounds like a numerical measurement of racism. Is "racial privilege" just a synonym for racism in your terminology?
In the U.S., getting your desirability for employment evaluated without regard to race, creed or color is a right. In your country is it a privilege?
In NYC between 2014-2017 inclusive, for example, a weapon was found on 9% of the white suspects frisked but only on 6% of black and latino suspects frisked - see
page 18 here.
That's only a correlation study and it didn't even have a control group. And again, equal protection of the law is a right in this country, not a privilege.
Your lack of imagination doesn't show it can't be done, and believing so only shows your hubris.
My opinion that it can't be done derives not from hubris but from my general skepticism as to whether sociology qualifies as a science and from my particular skepticism as to whether the people who make such claims can even provide an objective, non-ideological definition of "racial privilege".
What part of Politesse's post suggests to you that they were talking about the equivalent of other truck drivers?
Loren wrote:
The problem is that it's all but impossible to fix background. Blaming racism provides an "easy" fix whose costs are supposedly borne only by the evildoers and thus don't matter. In the real world the costs are borne by everyone and the result is counterproductive anyway. There are some true racists and I have no problem with punishing them but disparate results is a hopelessly inadequate way to find them.
Politesse replied to that passage thusly:
...this obsession with guilt and personal culpability is distracting from the actual problems, preventing true inequlaities from being addressed by derailing the conversation into a discussion about the aggrieved feelings of the accused, in which it is assumed but never stated that the feelings of the accused should be considered more important or more justified than those of their original victim.
Loren pointed out the harm to "the equivalent of other truck drivers", and Politesse answered him by casually equating them to the the equivalent of people actually "harming and killing other traffic participants", by calling a victimized person "their" victim.
So you claim based on a dubious interpretation of their words which you never bothered to justify.
Why dubious? Do you have an alternate theory as to what the antecedent of "their" was?
Talking about trumped up accusations, as far as I can you never asked Politesse whether the "they" in their "their original victim refers to people who knowingly discriminate against minorities, to people who unwittingly acted in ways that put minorities at a disadvantage, to people who benefit from white privilege without any active role in creating it, or to random people who just happen to be white - yet you assumed it must be the latter and built your entire case of calling them a mean bully on that interpretation of yours.
Why would I ask Politesse? He wrote in plain English. The antecedent of "their" was transparently "the accused". If he wanted to claim it was something else, he could do that, and then we'd check if the evidence backs him up. If you want to claim it was something else, you could do that, and then we'd check if the evidence backs you up.
So who are "the accused"? Well, everybody you listed above is accused. To call the victim "their original victim" is to claim "the accused" are guilty. But saying "Fault is irrelevant" indicates one has no intention of supplying proof of guilt. And all of the accused are innocent until proven guilty.
You don't get to have it both ways. When you paint a person you're imposing costs on as actually guilty, you aren't entitled to the rhetorical advantage this gives you of appearing not to be doing an injustice to the innocent, unless you pay for that rhetorical advantage in the coin of evidence for his guilt.
For the record, here's the complete sentence from which you pulled it. If you actually bother to read the whole sentence, you will find that...
Stop doing that. Stop making trumped-up accusations that you must on some level know are almost certainly false. Don't say things you should be ashamed of saying. Yes, I bothered to read the whole sentence. I do not believe for a second that you actually believe I didn't.
Assuming that you didn't read it is the most benevolent interpretation of your behaviour.
You are evidently not a competent judge of benevolence. Don't trump up accusations and delude yourself that you're doing it for my benefit. You did it for the sake of rhetoric.
The alternative is that you consciously decided to attach an arbitrary interpretation to it without as much as checking back with the author.
False dilemma fallacy. He wrote in plain English and there was nothing arbitrary about my interpretation. Feel free to propose an alternative interpretation that isn't painfully strained.
...your entire case rests on an arbitrary interpretion of Politesse's word that not only competes with other possible interpretations, but is contradicted by things they said in the same sentence.
If we were to suppose he didn't mean "the accused" collectively, but was only talking about some guilty subset such as one you list above, then the entire response would make no sense as an answer to Loren's objection. It would simply have been play-acting at answering him. Loren, after all, was talking specifically about the harm and injustice
to innocent people. But perhaps you would regard yourself artificially shoehorning consistency into Politesse's meaning, at the expense of the presumption that he was taking his discussion with Loren seriously and trying to give him a substantive answer, as
benevolent.
