in mind in terms of “serious claim, not to be made lightly”, but I acknowledge your well-made points re: burden of proof on the latter.
I also worry about distribution of claims in terms of signal v noise. I think there’s a lot of racism in modern society, much of it glaring and harmful, but difficult to address (or sometimes out of the overton window to even speak about). I don’t think matters are helped by critiques that go to lengths to read racism into innocuous texts, as the author of one of the critiques above has done in my view (in other materials, and on social media).
I agree that reading racism or white supremacy into innocuous texts is harmful, and for the specific instances I’m aware of, it both involved selective quote mining, and also the mined quote wasn’t very damning even out of context.
Thanks Linch. I’d had
P1: People in X are racist
in mind in terms of “serious claim, not to be made lightly”, but I acknowledge your well-made points re: burden of proof on the latter.
I also worry about distribution of claims in terms of signal v noise. I think there’s a lot of racism in modern society, much of it glaring and harmful, but difficult to address (or sometimes out of the overton window to even speak about). I don’t think matters are helped by critiques that go to lengths to read racism into innocuous texts, as the author of one of the critiques above has done in my view (in other materials, and on social media).
I agree that reading racism or white supremacy into innocuous texts is harmful, and for the specific instances I’m aware of, it both involved selective quote mining, and also the mined quote wasn’t very damning even out of context.