A “Racist0” is someone who has accurate priors about the behavior of people of different races.
Also I don’t see why calling Obama the “Food Stamp President” or otherwise criticizing his economic policy president makes one a jerk, much less a “Racist2″ unless one already believes that all criticism of Obama is racist by definition.
I’m honestly confused. You don’t see why calling Obama a “Food Stamp President” is different from criticizing his economic policy?
I guess I would not predict that particular phrase being leveled against Hillary or Bill Clinton—even from people who disagreed with their economic policies for the same reasons they disagree with Obama’s economic policies.
I guess I would not predict that particular phrase being leveled against Hillary or Bill Clinton—even from people who disagreed with their economic policies for the same reasons they disagree with Obama’s economic policies.
Well, Bill Clinton had saner economic policies, but otherwise I would predict that phrase, or something similar, being used against a white politician.
Given the way that public welfare codes for both “lazy” and “black” in the United States, do you think that “Food Stamp President” has the same implications as some other critique of Obama’s economic policies (in terms of whether the speaker intended to invoke Obama’s race and whether the speaker judges Obama differently than some other politician with substantially identical positions)?
“public welfare codes for both “lazy” and “black” in the United States”
Taking your word on that, what “other critique of Obama’s economic policies” are you imagining that would not have the same implications, unless you mean one that ignores public welfare entirely in favor of focusing on some other economic issue instead?
Basic economics says that what you pay for, you get more of. Therefore, when you extend long-term unemployment benefits, you get more long-term unemployment.
or
The current tax rate is too far to the right on the Laffer curve
or
The health insurance purchase mandate is unprecedented, UnAmerican, and unConstitutional
edit: or
People who pay no net income tax (because of low income and earned income tax credits) are drains on American society
(end edit)
without me thinking that the political opponent was intending to invoke Obama’s race in some way. None of these are actual quotes, but I think they are coherent assertions that disagree with Obama’s economic or legal philosophy. Edit: I feel confident I could find actual quote of equivalent content.
Of course, none of the ones you suggested are actually about public welfare, in the sense of the government providing supplemental income for people who are unable to get jobs to provide themselves adequate income. So what we have is not a code word, but rather a code issue.
Except the first one, but with how you framed it as “public welfare codes for...” I don’t see how that one wouldn’t have the same connotations.
Tl;dr: You have a good point, but we seem to be stuck with the historical context.
Unemployment benefits might qualify as public welfare. More tenuously, the various health insurance subsidies and expansions of Medicaid (government health insurance for the very poor) contained in “Obamacare.”
But your point is well taken. The well has been poisoned by political talking points from the 1980s (e.g. welfare queen and the response from the left). I’ll agree that there’s no good reason for us to be trapped in the context from the past, but politicians have not tried very hard to escape that trap.
The term “welfare president” has the advantage of not having a huge inferential distance (how many people know what a Laffer curve is?) and working as a soundbite.
I’m really curious now, though. What’s your opinion about the intended connotations of the phrase “food stamp President”? Do you think it’s intended primarily as a way of describing Obama’s economic policies? His commitment to preventing hunger? His fondness for individual welfare programs? Something else?
Or, if you think the intention varies depending on the user, what connotations do you think Gingrich intended to evoke with it?
Or, if you’re unwilling to speculate as to Gingrich’s motives, what connotations do you think it evokes in a typical resident of, say, Utah or North Dakota?
The direct meaning is reference to the fact that food stamp use has soured during his presidency. For generally, a reference to his governing style which includes anti-business policies and expanding entitlements.
I’m going to be charitable and assume that by “direct meaning” you mean to refer to the intended connotations that I asked about. Thanks for the answer.
That seems improbable. To pick the first example I Googled off of the Atlantic webside: Chart of the Day: Obama’s Epic Failure on Judicial Nominees contains some substantive criticism of Obama—can you show me where it contains “code words” of this kind?
It’s not an improbable claim so much as a nigh-unfalsifiable claim.
I mean, imagine the following conversation between two hypothetical people, arbitrarily labelled RZ and EN here: EN: By finding enough “code words” you can make any criticism of Obama racist. RZ: What about this criticism? EN: By declaring “epic”, “confirmation mess”, and “death blow” to be racist “code words”, you can make that criticism racist. RZ: But “epic”, “confirmation mess”, and “death blow” aren’t racist code words! EN: Right. Neither is “food stamps”.
Of course, one way forward from this point is to taboo “code word”—for example, to predict that an IAT would find stronger associations between “food stamps” and black people than between “epic” and black people, but would not find stronger associations between “food stamps” and white people than between “epic” and white people.
I think “nigh-unfalsifiable” is unfair in general when it comes to the use of code words, but I’m not familiar with the facts of the particular case under discussion.
In fact, I fully expect that (for example) an IAT would find stronger associations between “food stamps” and black people than between “epic” and black people, but would not find stronger associations between “food stamps” and white people than between “epic” and white people, and if I did not find that result I would have to seriously rethink my belief that “food stamps” is a dog-whistle in the particular case under discussion; it’s not unfalsifiable at all.
But I can’t figure out any way to falsify the claim that “by finding enough ‘code words’ you can make any criticism of Obama racist,” nor even the implied related claim that it’s equally easy to do so for all texts. Especially in the context of this discussion, where the experimental test isn’t actually available. All Eugene_Nier has to do is claim that arbitrarily selected words in the article you cite are equally racially charged, and claim—perhaps even sincerely—to detect no difference between the connotations of different words.
I wouldn’t actually use IAT to find these kind of connections—I would look at the use of phrases in other contexts by other people, and I would look at the reactions to the phrases in those contexts.
To take a historical example from Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era by James M. McPherson: in the 1862 riots against the draft, one of the banners that rioters carried read, “The Constitution As It Is, The Union As It Was”. That this allusion to the Constitution is an allusion to the legality of slavery under said Constitution is supported by one of the other banners carried by the same groups of rioters: “We won’t fight to free the nigger”. If, in 1862, a candidate for state office out in the Midwest were to repeat (or even, depending on the exact words, paraphrase) that phrase about the Constitution, I think the charge of “code word” would be well-placed.
I agree that looking at deployment of phrases is a useful way of finding code words, but it is always vulnerable to “cherry-picking.” The second banner you mentioned might or might not have been representative of the movement.
Consider the hypothetical protest filled with “Defend the Constitution, Strike Down Obamacare” posters, which should not be tainted by other posters saying “Keep government out of Medicare”(1) but it is hard to describe an ex ante principle explaining how distinctions should be made.
(1) For non-Americans: Medicare is widely popular government health insurance program for the elderly.
Unfortunately, it seems to me that most of the information that “race” provides is screened off by various things that are only weakly correlated with race, and it also seems to me that our badly-designed hardware doesn’t update very well upon learning these things. For example, “X is a college graduate, and is black” doesn’t tell you all that much more than “X is a college graduate”; it’s probably easier to deal with this by having inaccurate priors than by updating properly.
For example, “X is a college graduate, and is black” doesn’t tell you all that much more than “X is a college graduate”
I’m not sure that what you have in mind here is screening, at least in the causal diagrams sense. If I’m not mistaken, learning that someone is a college graduate screens off race for the purpose of predicting the causal effects of college graduation, but it doesn’t screen off race for the purpose of predicting causes of college graduation (such as intelligence) and their effects. You’re right, though, that even in the latter case learning that someone is a college graduate decreases the size of the update from learning their race. (At least given realistic assumptions. If 99% of cyan people have IQ 80 and 1% have IQ 140, and 99% of magenta people have IQ 79 and 1% have IQ 240, learning that someone is a college graduate suddenly makes it much more informative to learn their race. But that’s not the world we live in; it’s just to illustrate the statistics.)
Unfortunately, it seems to me that most of the information that “race” provides is screened off by various things that are only weakly correlated with race,
Which are generally much harder to observe.
For example, “X is a college graduate, and is black” doesn’t tell you all that much more than “X is a college graduate”
Um, Affirmative Action. Also tail ends of distributions.
Um, Affirmative Action. Also tail ends of distributions.
I was under the impression that AA applied to college admissions, and that college graduation is still entirely contingent on one’s performance. (Though I’ve heard tell that legacy students both get an AA-sized bump to admissions and tend to be graded on a much less harsh scale.)
Additionally, it seems that there’s a lot of ‘different justification, same conclusion’ with regards to claims about black people. For instance, “black people are inherently stupid and lazy” becomes “black people don’t have to meet the same standards for education”. The actual example I saw was that people subconsciously don’t like to hire black people (the Chicago resume study) because they present a risk of an EEOC lawsuit. (The annual risk of being involved in an EEOC lawsuit is on the order of one in a million.)
I was under the impression that AA applied to college admissions, and that college graduation is still entirely contingent on one’s performance. (Though I’ve heard tell that legacy students both get an AA-sized bump to admissions and tend to be graded on a much less harsh scale.)
A quick google search isn’t giving me an actual percentage, but I believe that students who’re admitted to and attend college, but do not graduate, are still significantly in the minority. Even those who barely made it in mostly graduate, if not necessarily with good GPAs.
One of the criticisms of colleges engaging in “AA” type policies is that they often will put someone in a slightly higher level school (say Berkeley rather than Davis) than they really should be in and which because of their background they are unprepared for. Not necessarily intellectually—they could be very bright, but in terms of things like study skills and the like.
There is sufficient data to suggest this should be looked at more thoroughly. In general it is better for someone to graduate from a “lesser” school than to drop out of a better one.
One of the criticisms of colleges engaging in “AA” type policies
Which policies were those again? Teetotalism, something to do with faith in a greater power, apologising to folks and, let’s see… 1,2,3… at least 9 others.
(ie. I put it that “AA” doesn’t work as a credible acronym. There are at least two far more obvious meanings for “AA policies” that must be ruled out before something to do with smart children gets considered as a hypothesis.)
I apologize. I was being lazy and assumed that since it was used multiple times above that folks following the conversation would get it from context. I didn’t realize that this conversation would so disquiet some people that they would get hung up on that, rather than addressing what many people think is a moderately serious problem, if not for society, then for the students who are basically being set up to fail.
But by all means let’s first have this silly little pissing match about not being able to track abbreviations through a conversation. It’s far more important.
Okay, but if not everyone graduates from college, and the point of admissions is to weed out people who’ll succeed in school rather than wasting everyone’s time, then how does a college degree mean anything different for a standard graduate, a legacy graduate, and an affirmative-action graduate? (Note that the bar is lowered for legacy graduates to the same degree as affirmative-action graduates, so if you don’t hear “my father also went here” the same way as “I got in partly because of my race”, then there’s a different factor at work here.)
Okay, but if not everyone graduates from college, and the point of admissions is to weed out people who’ll succeed in school rather than wasting everyone’s time, then how does a college degree mean anything different for a standard graduate, a legacy graduate, and an affirmative-action graduate?
In the extreme case where being above a given level of competence deterministically causes graduation, you’re correct and AA makes no difference; the likelihood (but not necessarily the prior or posterior probability) of different competence levels for a college graduate is independent of race. In the extreme case where graduation is completely random, you’re wrong and AA affects the evidence provided by graduation in the same way as it affects the evidence provided by admission. Reality is likely to be somewhere in between (I’m not saying it’s in the middle).
(Note that the bar is lowered for legacy graduates to the same degree as affirmative-action graduates, so if you don’t hear “my father also went here” the same way as “I got in partly because of my race”, then there’s a different factor at work here.)
It depends on the actual distribution of legacy and AA graduates.
and the point of admissions is to weed out people who’ll succeed in school rather than wasting everyone’s time
I’d say that the point of admissions is less to weed out people who’ll succeed from people who’ll waste the school’s time than to weed out people who’ll reflect poorly on the status of the school. Colleges raise their status by taking better students, so their interests are served not by taking students down to the lower limit of those who can meet academic requirements, but by being as selective as they can afford to be. Schools will even lie about the test scores of students they actually accept, among other things, to be seen as more selective.
Has anyone ever claimed that any criticism of Obama is racist by definition? I only ever see this claim from people who want to raise the bar for racism above what they’ve been accused of. It’s not like targeting welfare to play on racism is a completely outlandish claim—I hope you’re familiar with Lee Atwater’s very famous description of the Southern Strategy:
You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger” — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me — because obviously sitting around saying, “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”
Has anyone ever claimed that any criticism of Obama is racist by definition?
No, they just declare each individual instance ‘racist’ no matter how tenuous the argument. The rather ludicrous attempts to dismiss the Tea Party as ‘racist’ being the most prominent example.
A “Racist0” is someone who has accurate priors about the behavior of people of different races.
That’s the R2 way of phrasing R{1,2}, like “race traitor” is the R3 way of phrasing R1 or celandine’s phrasings are from an R1 perspective. (Not saying you are a jerk; just trying to separate out precisely such connotative differences from these useful clusters/concentric rings in peoplespace.)
(N.B. that if this definition wasn’t question-begging and/or indexical it would imply that iff accurate priors are equal over races then the genuinely colorblind are racists.)
That’s the R2 way of phrasing R{1,2}, like “race traitor” is the R3 way of phrasing R1 or celandine’s phrasings are from an R1 perspective. (Not saying you are a jerk; just trying to separate out precisely such connotative differences from these useful clusters/concentric rings in peoplespace.)
Possibly, I couldn’t quite figure out Mixed Nuts’ definitions because he seemed to be implicitly assuming that accurate priors were equal over races.
(N.B. that if this definition wasn’t question-begging and/or indexical it would imply that iff accurate priors are equal over races then the genuinely colorblind are racists.)
Well they aren’t. Nevertheless, I should probably have said something more like:
A “Racist0” is someone who rationally believes that priors aren’t equal over races.
You left out one common definition.
Also I don’t see why calling Obama the “Food Stamp President” or otherwise criticizing his economic policy president makes one a jerk, much less a “Racist2″ unless one already believes that all criticism of Obama is racist by definition.
I’m honestly confused. You don’t see why calling Obama a “Food Stamp President” is different from criticizing his economic policy?
I guess I would not predict that particular phrase being leveled against Hillary or Bill Clinton—even from people who disagreed with their economic policies for the same reasons they disagree with Obama’s economic policies.
Well, Bill Clinton had saner economic policies, but otherwise I would predict that phrase, or something similar, being used against a white politician.
You haven’t answered my question:
Given the way that public welfare codes for both “lazy” and “black” in the United States, do you think that “Food Stamp President” has the same implications as some other critique of Obama’s economic policies (in terms of whether the speaker intended to invoke Obama’s race and whether the speaker judges Obama differently than some other politician with substantially identical positions)?
“public welfare codes for both “lazy” and “black” in the United States”
Taking your word on that, what “other critique of Obama’s economic policies” are you imagining that would not have the same implications, unless you mean one that ignores public welfare entirely in favor of focusing on some other economic issue instead?
A political opponent of Obama might say:
or
or
edit: or
(end edit)
without me thinking that the political opponent was intending to invoke Obama’s race in some way. None of these are actual quotes, but I think they are coherent assertions that disagree with Obama’s economic or legal philosophy. Edit: I feel confident I could find actual quote of equivalent content.
Of course, none of the ones you suggested are actually about public welfare, in the sense of the government providing supplemental income for people who are unable to get jobs to provide themselves adequate income. So what we have is not a code word, but rather a code issue.
Except the first one, but with how you framed it as “public welfare codes for...” I don’t see how that one wouldn’t have the same connotations.
Tl;dr: You have a good point, but we seem to be stuck with the historical context.
Unemployment benefits might qualify as public welfare. More tenuously, the various health insurance subsidies and expansions of Medicaid (government health insurance for the very poor) contained in “Obamacare.”
But your point is well taken. The well has been poisoned by political talking points from the 1980s (e.g. welfare queen and the response from the left). I’ll agree that there’s no good reason for us to be trapped in the context from the past, but politicians have not tried very hard to escape that trap.
The term “welfare president” has the advantage of not having a huge inferential distance (how many people know what a Laffer curve is?) and working as a soundbite.
Here is another example of my point that one can claim any criticism of Obama is racist if one is sufficiently motivated.
Well, yes by finding enough “code words” you can make any criticism of Obama racist.
Yes, that’s certainly true.
I’m really curious now, though. What’s your opinion about the intended connotations of the phrase “food stamp President”? Do you think it’s intended primarily as a way of describing Obama’s economic policies? His commitment to preventing hunger? His fondness for individual welfare programs? Something else?
Or, if you think the intention varies depending on the user, what connotations do you think Gingrich intended to evoke with it?
Or, if you’re unwilling to speculate as to Gingrich’s motives, what connotations do you think it evokes in a typical resident of, say, Utah or North Dakota?
The direct meaning is reference to the fact that food stamp use has soured during his presidency. For generally, a reference to his governing style which includes anti-business policies and expanding entitlements.
I’m going to be charitable and assume that by “direct meaning” you mean to refer to the intended connotations that I asked about. Thanks for the answer.
That seems improbable. To pick the first example I Googled off of the Atlantic webside: Chart of the Day: Obama’s Epic Failure on Judicial Nominees contains some substantive criticism of Obama—can you show me where it contains “code words” of this kind?
It’s not an improbable claim so much as a nigh-unfalsifiable claim.
I mean, imagine the following conversation between two hypothetical people, arbitrarily labelled RZ and EN here:
EN: By finding enough “code words” you can make any criticism of Obama racist.
RZ: What about this criticism?
EN: By declaring “epic”, “confirmation mess”, and “death blow” to be racist “code words”, you can make that criticism racist.
RZ: But “epic”, “confirmation mess”, and “death blow” aren’t racist code words!
EN: Right. Neither is “food stamps”.
Of course, one way forward from this point is to taboo “code word”—for example, to predict that an IAT would find stronger associations between “food stamps” and black people than between “epic” and black people, but would not find stronger associations between “food stamps” and white people than between “epic” and white people.
I think “nigh-unfalsifiable” is unfair in general when it comes to the use of code words, but I’m not familiar with the facts of the particular case under discussion.
I agree in the general case.
In fact, I fully expect that (for example) an IAT would find stronger associations between “food stamps” and black people than between “epic” and black people, but would not find stronger associations between “food stamps” and white people than between “epic” and white people, and if I did not find that result I would have to seriously rethink my belief that “food stamps” is a dog-whistle in the particular case under discussion; it’s not unfalsifiable at all.
But I can’t figure out any way to falsify the claim that “by finding enough ‘code words’ you can make any criticism of Obama racist,” nor even the implied related claim that it’s equally easy to do so for all texts. Especially in the context of this discussion, where the experimental test isn’t actually available. All Eugene_Nier has to do is claim that arbitrarily selected words in the article you cite are equally racially charged, and claim—perhaps even sincerely—to detect no difference between the connotations of different words.
I wouldn’t actually use IAT to find these kind of connections—I would look at the use of phrases in other contexts by other people, and I would look at the reactions to the phrases in those contexts.
To take a historical example from Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era by James M. McPherson: in the 1862 riots against the draft, one of the banners that rioters carried read, “The Constitution As It Is, The Union As It Was”. That this allusion to the Constitution is an allusion to the legality of slavery under said Constitution is supported by one of the other banners carried by the same groups of rioters: “We won’t fight to free the nigger”. If, in 1862, a candidate for state office out in the Midwest were to repeat (or even, depending on the exact words, paraphrase) that phrase about the Constitution, I think the charge of “code word” would be well-placed.
I agree that looking at deployment of phrases is a useful way of finding code words, but it is always vulnerable to “cherry-picking.” The second banner you mentioned might or might not have been representative of the movement.
Consider the hypothetical protest filled with “Defend the Constitution, Strike Down Obamacare” posters, which should not be tainted by other posters saying “Keep government out of Medicare”(1) but it is hard to describe an ex ante principle explaining how distinctions should be made.
(1) For non-Americans: Medicare is widely popular government health insurance program for the elderly.
Agreed—it’s not a mechanical judgment.
Yup, looking at venues in which a phrase gets used is another way to establish likely connections between phrases and ideologies.
Unfortunately, it seems to me that most of the information that “race” provides is screened off by various things that are only weakly correlated with race, and it also seems to me that our badly-designed hardware doesn’t update very well upon learning these things. For example, “X is a college graduate, and is black” doesn’t tell you all that much more than “X is a college graduate”; it’s probably easier to deal with this by having inaccurate priors than by updating properly.
I’m not sure that what you have in mind here is screening, at least in the causal diagrams sense. If I’m not mistaken, learning that someone is a college graduate screens off race for the purpose of predicting the causal effects of college graduation, but it doesn’t screen off race for the purpose of predicting causes of college graduation (such as intelligence) and their effects. You’re right, though, that even in the latter case learning that someone is a college graduate decreases the size of the update from learning their race. (At least given realistic assumptions. If 99% of cyan people have IQ 80 and 1% have IQ 140, and 99% of magenta people have IQ 79 and 1% have IQ 240, learning that someone is a college graduate suddenly makes it much more informative to learn their race. But that’s not the world we live in; it’s just to illustrate the statistics.)
Which are generally much harder to observe.
Um, Affirmative Action. Also tail ends of distributions.
I was under the impression that AA applied to college admissions, and that college graduation is still entirely contingent on one’s performance. (Though I’ve heard tell that legacy students both get an AA-sized bump to admissions and tend to be graded on a much less harsh scale.)
Additionally, it seems that there’s a lot of ‘different justification, same conclusion’ with regards to claims about black people. For instance, “black people are inherently stupid and lazy” becomes “black people don’t have to meet the same standards for education”. The actual example I saw was that people subconsciously don’t like to hire black people (the Chicago resume study) because they present a risk of an EEOC lawsuit. (The annual risk of being involved in an EEOC lawsuit is on the order of one in a million.)
A quick google search isn’t giving me an actual percentage, but I believe that students who’re admitted to and attend college, but do not graduate, are still significantly in the minority. Even those who barely made it in mostly graduate, if not necessarily with good GPAs.
One of the criticisms of colleges engaging in “AA” type policies is that they often will put someone in a slightly higher level school (say Berkeley rather than Davis) than they really should be in and which because of their background they are unprepared for. Not necessarily intellectually—they could be very bright, but in terms of things like study skills and the like.
There is sufficient data to suggest this should be looked at more thoroughly. In general it is better for someone to graduate from a “lesser” school than to drop out of a better one.
Which policies were those again? Teetotalism, something to do with faith in a greater power, apologising to folks and, let’s see… 1,2,3… at least 9 others.
(ie. I put it that “AA” doesn’t work as a credible acronym. There are at least two far more obvious meanings for “AA policies” that must be ruled out before something to do with smart children gets considered as a hypothesis.)
I apologize. I was being lazy and assumed that since it was used multiple times above that folks following the conversation would get it from context. I didn’t realize that this conversation would so disquiet some people that they would get hung up on that, rather than addressing what many people think is a moderately serious problem, if not for society, then for the students who are basically being set up to fail.
But by all means let’s first have this silly little pissing match about not being able to track abbreviations through a conversation. It’s far more important.
No slight intended and I hope you’ll pardon my tangential reply. I know you weren’t the first to introduce the acronym.
Okay, but if not everyone graduates from college, and the point of admissions is to weed out people who’ll succeed in school rather than wasting everyone’s time, then how does a college degree mean anything different for a standard graduate, a legacy graduate, and an affirmative-action graduate? (Note that the bar is lowered for legacy graduates to the same degree as affirmative-action graduates, so if you don’t hear “my father also went here” the same way as “I got in partly because of my race”, then there’s a different factor at work here.)
In the extreme case where being above a given level of competence deterministically causes graduation, you’re correct and AA makes no difference; the likelihood (but not necessarily the prior or posterior probability) of different competence levels for a college graduate is independent of race. In the extreme case where graduation is completely random, you’re wrong and AA affects the evidence provided by graduation in the same way as it affects the evidence provided by admission. Reality is likely to be somewhere in between (I’m not saying it’s in the middle).
It depends on the actual distribution of legacy and AA graduates.
I’d say that the point of admissions is less to weed out people who’ll succeed from people who’ll waste the school’s time than to weed out people who’ll reflect poorly on the status of the school. Colleges raise their status by taking better students, so their interests are served not by taking students down to the lower limit of those who can meet academic requirements, but by being as selective as they can afford to be. Schools will even lie about the test scores of students they actually accept, among other things, to be seen as more selective.
I think it’s more a case same observations, different proposed mechanisms.
Has anyone ever claimed that any criticism of Obama is racist by definition? I only ever see this claim from people who want to raise the bar for racism above what they’ve been accused of. It’s not like targeting welfare to play on racism is a completely outlandish claim—I hope you’re familiar with Lee Atwater’s very famous description of the Southern Strategy:
No, they just declare each individual instance ‘racist’ no matter how tenuous the argument. The rather ludicrous attempts to dismiss the Tea Party as ‘racist’ being the most prominent example.
That’s the R2 way of phrasing R{1,2}, like “race traitor” is the R3 way of phrasing R1 or celandine’s phrasings are from an R1 perspective. (Not saying you are a jerk; just trying to separate out precisely such connotative differences from these useful clusters/concentric rings in peoplespace.)
(N.B. that if this definition wasn’t question-begging and/or indexical it would imply that iff accurate priors are equal over races then the genuinely colorblind are racists.)
Possibly, I couldn’t quite figure out Mixed Nuts’ definitions because he seemed to be implicitly assuming that accurate priors were equal over races.
Well they aren’t. Nevertheless, I should probably have said something more like: