I thought that white people couldn't have racism directed towards them these days? It's just supposed to be 'prejudice'...so making fun of a white person's accent would just be prejudice not racism...or have the terms been re-defined again when I wasn't looking?
Well according to at least one poster here, racism has nothing to do with motivations at all, and only the results matter, so unless you can demonstrate that making fun of someone's accent has some sort of measurable effect, you're out of luck on those charges.
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At the risk of further derision or disapprobation I will clarify that I didn't object to the movie, there are hundreds of films with American actors doing bad British accents, I'm looking at you Dick van Dyck, I just didn't like the 3 or 4 months of having people doing a terrible version of the lines to me in a bad impression of Powers or myself, it just got mildly annoying after a while.
I would be the first person to admit that in my case the lousy impressions were meant without malice, that I never had to worry about the impression being ended with a punch in the face and being told to eff off back to where I came from so I cannot compare my experience to an east indian kid hearing some Proud Boy doing an Apu impression to his face.
I got Corsi to put me on ignore and I'm still living in his head... fantastic.
It's not that racism has nothing to do with beliefs, it's that what matters is how beliefs influence actions, and that it's actions which need to be called out and addressed. The idea that "racist" should be a descriptive term instead of a perjorative one is coming straight from the work of prominent modern anti racists like Ibram X. Kendi, Layla Saad, and Michelle Alexander. If we continue to use the word 'racist' and 'racism' exclusively to describe motivations or internal biases, we're never going to be able to overcome it as an aspect of our society.
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No one is born racist or antiracist; these result from the choices we make. Being antiracist results from a conscious decision to make frequent, consistent, equitable choices daily. These choices require ongoing self-awareness and self-reflection as we move through life. In the absence of making antiracist choices, we (un)consciously uphold aspects of white supremacy, white-dominant culture, and unequal institutions and society. Being racist or antiracist is not about who you are; it is about what you do.
Kendi goes further, defining the word racist as: "One who is supporting a racist policy through their actions or inaction or expressing a racist idea." This incisive definition forces the reader to hold themselves accountable for their ideas and actions.
Venkataraman: When you call people either racist or antiracist, when you wrote, “It’s not a tattoo that you wear for life. It’s a peelable sticker that you can take on or put on or take off, depending on what you’re doing at any moment. Why do you think that’s important for people to see it as the peelable sticker and not the tattoo? Why is that an important distinction?
Kendi: I think it’s an important distinction because it’s reality. I think we should consider concepts based on the evidence. And for instance, we talked a little bit about white abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison who believed, on the one hand, the deeply antiracist idea that slavery is evil and it shouldn’t live another day and spent his career sort of expressing those antiracist ideas. But what Garrison also said at times is that slavery has separated Black people from humanity, that slavery has literally made Black people into groups, that basically slavery has made Black people subhuman. And so, therefore, he questioned during the Civil War, whether Black people were ready for the civil and voting rights and whether they needed a period of civilization. And so when he was challenging slavery and demanding its immediate abolition, he was being antiracist. In the same essay or the same op-ed or the same speech, he was also saying these people are bruised. He was being racist. Most people who express both racist and antiracist ideas support both racist and antiracist policies. So then we can’t essentially call them racist or antiracist. We have to state that this is what you are being in any given moment as opposed to who you are.
“My constant invitation to people is to be doing the work within themselves first. There’s a little of this energy right now. With so many businesses and brands being called out, there’s this feeling that once those are toppled, then we’re free; we’re in this post-racial society. It’s like, no, but you’re still racist. You need to examine the ways in which you hold these racist thoughts and beliefs, because that’s the only place where you have complete control. That is what your actual job is, to start with yourself first.
“The thing about allyship is that you don’t get to name yourself an ally. Black and brown people get to name you an ally, and you can’t be an ally to all the Black people. You may be an ally to one particular person who has said, “Because of the way you consistently show up for me, you are an ally for me.” We’re seeing this rush to say “This is my Black Lives Matter statement, and these are the changes we’re going to be making,” but it’s also about slowing down — because you’re just catching up to something that isn’t new. It’s new to you, but it’s not new. When you move too fast and you’re moving with these still unexamined unconscious racist thoughts and beliefs, you’re actually going to do more harm because you don’t yet know what you don’t know.”
Anecdotally, my girlfriend is Indian, loves the Simpsons, but finds the Apu character (and many of the jokes about Indians in the show) incredibly racist and offensive.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Winsor_Pilates
Interesting.
As an Indian myself, I've yet to meet any other Indian who is even mildly offended by Apu.
I assumed this whole thing was just woke white people making an issue out of something trivial we didn't care about at all.
Me, my family & friends all loved Apu.
I’m wondering if anyone finds this MADtv skit racist
I think people generally like to see themselves represented in a comedic way, so long as they're in on the joke and not just the butt of it.
My first serious girlfriend thought Peter Sellers' Indian accent in The Party was the funniest thing she'd ever seen. Granted it was more a poke at her parents (from India) than her (Indo-Canadian) but she never saw it as mean spirited at all.
In my view, you haven't transcended racism until a person from one group can make good natured fun of another group - precisely because of its otherness - without catching flak for it.
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Key & Peele had to start doing skits about Latinos, because Latinos were stopping them in the streets and getting mad at K&P for not making fun of them.
I just came across a really racist show on the Dark Web against us little old Canadians.
It's these two guys called Bob and Doug Mckenzie on some TV station called SCTV...I think it's a racist network in general, they make fun of vampires too. It's unsettling that this racism against the race of Canada is allowed in this day and age.
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Racism isn’t about motivations, it’s about results. It’s not a “sinister moral corruption” it’s active or silent support of racist ideas and policies.
Here is why intentions are what really matter to moral judgments of people, a la "this person is a racist". Let's take four examples: Person A, Person B, Person C and Person D.
Person A supports a policy throughout his life because he believes it will help the community. He has no expectation that it will have disproportionate effects on the black community, and his entire focus is on what it will do to help society at large. He spends his entire life fighting for this policy, and dies still supporting it. Shortly afterwards, it becomes clear through a series of studies that the policy has had widespread negative effects on black people.
According to Driveway's premise, Person A was a racist. He never had any motivations even tangentially related to race, but it doesn't matter, because the results were bad for a racial minority.
Person B supports the same policy, but he lives longer than Person A. He comes to learn that the policy has a negative impact on the black community, which is surprising and dismaying to Person B. However, Person B decides that he still supports the policy notwithstanding its negative effects, because the studies also show that the policy helping society in many other important ways. However, he spends the remainder of his life trying to mitigate the harm that the policy is disproportionately causing to racial minorities. He isn't particularly successful, and when he dies, the policy, which he still supports for its broader good outcomes, is still disproportionately harmful.
According to Driveway's premise, Person B was also racist. He actively tried to make things better for the black community for years, but because he also supported a policy that disproportionately harmed them - albeit for other reasons - he was only slightly less racist than Person A. Perhaps if he'd been more successful in mitigating these effects, we could consider him less racist, but as it turned out, his best efforts did not produce results. Because results are what matters, those efforts don't matter in our analysis of his racism.
Person C is an alt-right troll. He thinks that black people get a leg up in modern society, and resents the very concept of affirmative action as prejudice against white people. He thinks that most of the issue with black policing is that black culture is violent and thuggish. When he gets into a position of power, he supports a couple of policies that he knows will have a small, but measurable, harmful effect on black people, just out of spite, and to produce a response from his political opponents. He's just trying to "trigger the libs", and he doesn't much care about the harm he's doing to black people. After all, it's relatively minor.
According to Driveway's premise, Person C is also racist, but is clearly not as racist as Person A or Person B. His motivations are selfish and demonstrate a disregard for the interests of minorities, but his motivations are not what's important. The results of his policies harm a racial minority, but not as much as the policies supported by Person A or Person B, and those results are what we're basing our assessment of racism on.
Person D is a white supremacist. He would proudly describe himself as such. He hates black people, and his fondest wish would be the extermination of their race from the face of the Earth, which in his view should be the sole domain of whites. So, he spends his life attempting to carry out this ethos, including by securing a place in politics. Unfortunately for him, he is not even slightly successful in achieving his goals. He manages to get certain policies enacted that he thinks will be harmful to black interests, but it turns out that they have the opposite effect of what was intended, and actually improve the lives of black people on a broad scale. Moreover, his hatred for black people is so revolting that his world view simply produces a backlash against white nationalism. He ends his life still hating black people, bitter and angry at his failures to harm them on a societal scale.
According to Driveway's premise, Person D is not remotely racist. Just the opposite. His motivations were clearly hateful, but again, motivations are not the concern, and the results - unintentional as they may have been - were uniformly good for racial minorities, and particularly the black community. You can call him a bitter, hateful person, but, apparently, not a racist.
Obviously these results are absurd. Judging someone to be racist is a moral indictment of their character, first and foremost. If I call someone a racist, and the charge sticks, that has implications for their employment and social standing, just as it would if you convincingly called someone a pedophile. These are judgments about the type of person someone is, what they care about, and what they think is right or wrong.
Intentions are what matter when we judge someone morally. The simplest example I'm aware of is the house fire scenario. My house burns down, and my neighbour's house with it, killing my neighbour. What you think about me depends on to what extent I intended that result. If I had no intention whatsoever - say the house fire started from a freak short circuit that I couldn't have foreseen - your moral judgment of me follows. If I left the stove on, I was careless, and that produces a different moral judgment. If I intentionally burned down my house to collect the insurance money, and my neighbour was unintentional collateral damage, that produces yet another moral judgment. If I burned my own house down because I knew it would cause his to catch fire, and I was really just trying to murder my neighbour, that's another case still. The only difference here is the motivations - the results are the same in each case. But the label applied to the person in question - in the case we were talking about, "racist", but here, "innocent" "careless", or "arsonist", or "murderer" - is dependent entirely on motivations.
In short, the attempt to re-define "racist" to allow it to be applied to people despite their motivations preserves the moral stigma of that label, but allows it to be used against anyone you like, destroying their reputation in the process. The goal is to be able to treat person A and person B like we generally treat person D. That project simply needs to fail.
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The idea that racism is about result and not intention stems from dumb virtue signalling. It's a horrible idea. Pretending that it intention doesn't matter is a dangerous idea.
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^since humans exclusively support or oppose a single governmental policy over the course of their lives this example is flawless and I concede.
Thing is, Corsi would be SO happy if I were his kid’s teacher.
This response is obvious nonsense. Not only is it that case that many people support a single policy throughout their lives, it's also irrelevant to the point of those hypotheticals, which should be really very obvious. Leaving aside your ideology (which I see as essentially religion, and I don't think religion should be taught to kids), I don't think anyone should be teaching anyone anything if they can't recogize that. So, no to the second part also.
But whatever, I've said my piece and you yours, this is sort of defeats the purpose of having you on ignore, so I'll leave it alone.
__________________ "The great promise of the Internet was that more information would automatically yield better decisions. The great disappointment is that more information actually yields more possibilities to confirm what you already believed anyway." - Brian Eno
Just so I'm clear on the last few pages:
Singh calling Bloc guy racist = bad?
Singh writing an op-ed in the Globe and Mail that says the Bloc guy is racist = good?
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The idea that racism is about result and not intention stems from dumb virtue signalling. It's a horrible idea. Pretending that it intention doesn't matter is a dangerous idea.
Unsurprisingly, the guy who refuses to show any evidence that he actually knows what people are talking about on the topic of systemic racism shows up to dismiss the conversation he doesn't understand as nothing but “virtue signaling”.
Care to actually give a substantive response that shows you at least know what people are talking about this time? Or will you again claim you don't have time for that and then slip out the back door?
Here is some info from the Alberta Civil Liberties Research Centre. Maybe you use this as a starting point to join the conversation and say what you disagree with and why.
Defining "RACISM": The Power Factor
In our experience, anti-racism education is a (rewarding and transformative) process that involves integrating an analysis of history and systemic/institutional processes with personal and particular, and often-emotional experience.
As you introduce ways of understanding racism, for example, you are likely to be asked a number of questions based on participants' particular experiences, incidents, locations, and perspectives; you are very likely to find that white participants will be very anxious to show that they are not racist, or do not "mean" to be. (See our sections on Intentionality and Individual and Systemic Racism; See our definition of Systemic Racism). You may be asked questions such as the following:
"If I notice someone's skin colour is different from mine, is that racist?"
"Can people of colour and Indigenous people be racist towards white people?"
"What if I didn't mean to be racist? Is it still racism?"
Understanding that power is the primary feature of racism is key.
An effective, brief definition of racism that works very well as a visual aid, and focal point for discussion, is this:
Racism = Racial Prejudice + Power
By Racial Prejudice we mean: a set of discriminatory or derogatory attitudes based on assumptions deriving from perceptions about race/skin colour.
Despite discourses to the contrary—we live in a society that is structured as a hierarchy. (See our definitions of Colour-Blindness/ Colour Evasion and Democratic/Liberal Racism). An expression of racial prejudice (in words and/or actions) always originates from somewhere on this hierarchy, and is directed at someone/a group in another location on the hierarchy.
By Power we mean: the authority granted through social structures and conventions—possibly supported by force or the threat of force—and access to means of communications and resources, to reinforce racial prejudice, regardless of the falsity of the underlying prejudiced assumption. Basically, all power is relational, and the different relationships either reinforce or disrupt one another.
The importance of the concept of power to anti-racism is clear: racism cannot be understood without understanding that power is not only an individual relationship but a cultural one, and that power relationships are shifting constantly. Regardless of the type of power, including socially-imbued power, all can be used malignantly and intentionally. However, this need not be the case as individuals within a culture may benefit from power of which they are unaware.
Racism:
occurs when an expression of Racial Prejudice emerges from a more powerful/privileged location in the hierarchy, and is directed at an individual/group in a less powerful/privileged location;
occurs where the target of the prejudice has less power than the perpetrator;
is top-down;
is an exercise of power;
refers not only to social attitudes towards non-dominant ethnic and racial groups but also to social structures and actions which oppress, exclude, limit and discriminate against such individuals and groups. Such social attitudes originate in and rationalize discriminatory treatment;
can be seen in discriminatory laws, residential segregation, poor health care, inferior education, unequal economic opportunity and the exclusion and distortion of the perspectives of non-dominant Canadians in cultural institutions (Thomas, 1987);
refers to “a system in which one group of people exercises power over another on the basis of skin colour; an implicit or explicit set of beliefs, erroneous assumptions, and actions based on an ideology of the inherent superiority of one racial group over another, and evident in organizational or institutional structures and programs as well as in individual thought or behaviour patterns (Henry & Tator, 2006, p. 352).
Racism = Racial Prejudice + Power
In our experience, the above definition elicits a number of comments, frequently revolving around specific incidents and sorting through whether or not a specific act constitutes "racial prejudice" or "racism." Often, white people will want to argue that they too can be the victims of racism, or that a specific action was not racist (or even prejudiced) because it was not intended to be racist or prejudiced. Below are some questions/comments that can arise relating to Racism = Racial Prejudice + Power:
"I've heard/been the target of stereotypes about white people isn't that reverse racism?
"Can people of colour and Indigenous people be racist towards white people?"
"I didn't know."
"I didn't ‘mean' to be prejudiced/racist, therefore it isn't racism."
"It was just a personal opinion."
"I was just doing my job and following procedure."
Forms of racism
Spoiler!
Quote:
Forms of Racism
Individual and Systemic Racism
"It was just a personal opinion."
"I was just doing my job, and following procedure."
"Anyone can apply for that job."
"Anyone can play hockey or take music lessons in this city."
Racism occurs between individuals, on an interpersonal level, and is embedded in organizations and institutions through their policies, procedures and practices. In general, it may seem easier to recognize individual or interpersonal acts of racism: a slur made, a person ignored in a social or work setting, an act of violence. However, "individual" racism is not created in a vacuum but instead emerges from a society's foundational beliefs and "ways" of seeing/doing things, and is manifested in organizations, institutions, and systems (including education). Below are some useful definitions:
Individual Racism refers to an individual's racist assumptions, beliefs or behaviours and is "a form of racial discrimination that stems from conscious and unconscious, personal prejudice" (Henry & Tator, 2006, p. 329). Individual Racism is connected to/learned from broader socio-economic histories and processes and is supported and reinforced by systemic racism.
Because we live in such a culture of individualism (and with the privilege of freedom of speech), some people argue that their statements/ideas are not racist because they are just "personal opinion." Here, it is important to point out how individualism functions to erase hierarchies of power, and to connect unrecognized personal ideologies to larger racial or systemic ones. (That is, individualism can be used as a defensive reaction.) This is why it is crucial to understand systemic racism and how it operates.
Systemic Racism includes the policies and practices entrenched in established institutions, which result in the exclusion or promotion of designated groups. It differs from overt discrimination in that no individual intent is necessary. (Toronto Mayor's Committee on Community and Race Relations. Race Relations: Myths and Facts)
It manifests itself in two ways:
institutional racism: racial discrimination that derives from individuals carrying out the dictates of others who are prejudiced or of a prejudiced society
structural racism: inequalities rooted in the system-wide operation of a society that excludes substantial numbers of members of particular groups from significant participation in major social institutions. (Henry & Tator, 2006, p. 352)
Some forms of systemic racism may be more explicit or easier (for some) to identify than others: the Indian Residential School System in Canada; Jim Crow Laws in the US; the exclusion of African-American golfers from elite, private golf courses in the US; the way that "universal suffrage" did not include Indigenous North American women (nor did Indigenous men receive the vote until 1960, unless they gave up their status/identity as Indigenous).
Some Canadian examples of systemic racism include: the 1885 Head Tax, the 1923 Exclusion Act, the 1897 Female Refugee Act, passed in Ontario, which criminalized 'immoral' and 'incorrigible' acts conducted by women if they were found to be pregnant out of wedlock or drunk in public.
Other forms or manifestations of systemic racism may not be as readily obvious to some, usually those privileged by the system. Click here to see three more examples of systemic racism.
Fortunately, individuals can be anti-racist within, and despite, systems and institutions that are systemically racist.
"I didn't know. I didn't mean to be prejudiced/racist, therefore it isn't racism."
Spoiler!
Quote:
In discussions about the definition of racism, white people will frequently argue that a particular statement or action does not constitute racism because racism was not intended. As noted elsewhere, in Human Rights law and anti-racism education, intentionality is irrelevant. It is the effect/impact of the action on the target person/group that is to be considered and takes precedence.
In addition, people may argue that they had never been taught the correct or appropriate information—"I didn't know"—and therefore they cannot be racist. However, while their statement may be factually correct, ignorance does not justify racism or mitigate the effects of their actions; it can be another form of defensiveness. To assist individuals in identifying "what they know or do not know," a number of Learning Actions have been designed to address Knowledge Gaps.
__________________
"If stupidity got us into this mess, then why can't it get us out?"
Here is why intentions are what really matter to moral judgments of people, a la "this person is a racist". Let's take four examples: Person A, Person B, Person C and Person D.
Person A supports a policy throughout his life because he believes it will help the community. He has no expectation that it will have disproportionate effects on the black community, and his entire focus is on what it will do to help society at large. He spends his entire life fighting for this policy, and dies still supporting it. Shortly afterwards, it becomes clear through a series of studies that the policy has had widespread negative effects on black people.
According to Driveway's premise, Person A was a racist. He never had any motivations even tangentially related to race, but it doesn't matter, because the results were bad for a racial minority.
Person B supports the same policy, but he lives longer than Person A. He comes to learn that the policy has a negative impact on the black community, which is surprising and dismaying to Person B. However, Person B decides that he still supports the policy notwithstanding its negative effects, because the studies also show that the policy helping society in many other important ways. However, he spends the remainder of his life trying to mitigate the harm that the policy is disproportionately causing to racial minorities. He isn't particularly successful, and when he dies, the policy, which he still supports for its broader good outcomes, is still disproportionately harmful.
According to Driveway's premise, Person B was also racist. He actively tried to make things better for the black community for years, but because he also supported a policy that disproportionately harmed them - albeit for other reasons - he was only slightly less racist than Person A. Perhaps if he'd been more successful in mitigating these effects, we could consider him less racist, but as it turned out, his best efforts did not produce results. Because results are what matters, those efforts don't matter in our analysis of his racism.
Person C is an alt-right troll. He thinks that black people get a leg up in modern society, and resents the very concept of affirmative action as prejudice against white people. He thinks that most of the issue with black policing is that black culture is violent and thuggish. When he gets into a position of power, he supports a couple of policies that he knows will have a small, but measurable, harmful effect on black people, just out of spite, and to produce a response from his political opponents. He's just trying to "trigger the libs", and he doesn't much care about the harm he's doing to black people. After all, it's relatively minor.
According to Driveway's premise, Person C is also racist, but is clearly not as racist as Person A or Person B. His motivations are selfish and demonstrate a disregard for the interests of minorities, but his motivations are not what's important. The results of his policies harm a racial minority, but not as much as the policies supported by Person A or Person B, and those results are what we're basing our assessment of racism on.
Person D is a white supremacist. He would proudly describe himself as such. He hates black people, and his fondest wish would be the extermination of their race from the face of the Earth, which in his view should be the sole domain of whites. So, he spends his life attempting to carry out this ethos, including by securing a place in politics. Unfortunately for him, he is not even slightly successful in achieving his goals. He manages to get certain policies enacted that he thinks will be harmful to black interests, but it turns out that they have the opposite effect of what was intended, and actually improve the lives of black people on a broad scale. Moreover, his hatred for black people is so revolting that his world view simply produces a backlash against white nationalism. He ends his life still hating black people, bitter and angry at his failures to harm them on a societal scale.
According to Driveway's premise, Person D is not remotely racist. Just the opposite. His motivations were clearly hateful, but again, motivations are not the concern, and the results - unintentional as they may have been - were uniformly good for racial minorities, and particularly the black community. You can call him a bitter, hateful person, but, apparently, not a racist.
Obviously these results are absurd. Judging someone to be racist is a moral indictment of their character, first and foremost. If I call someone a racist, and the charge sticks, that has implications for their employment and social standing, just as it would if you convincingly called someone a pedophile. These are judgments about the type of person someone is, what they care about, and what they think is right or wrong.
Intentions are what matter when we judge someone morally. The simplest example I'm aware of is the house fire scenario. My house burns down, and my neighbour's house with it, killing my neighbour. What you think about me depends on to what extent I intended that result. If I had no intention whatsoever - say the house fire started from a freak short circuit that I couldn't have foreseen - your moral judgment of me follows. If I left the stove on, I was careless, and that produces a different moral judgment. If I intentionally burned down my house to collect the insurance money, and my neighbour was unintentional collateral damage, that produces yet another moral judgment. If I burned my own house down because I knew it would cause his to catch fire, and I was really just trying to murder my neighbour, that's another case still. The only difference here is the motivations - the results are the same in each case. But the label applied to the person in question - in the case we were talking about, "racist", but here, "innocent" "careless", or "arsonist", or "murderer" - is dependent entirely on motivations.
In short, the attempt to re-define "racist" to allow it to be applied to people despite their motivations preserves the moral stigma of that label, but allows it to be used against anyone you like, destroying their reputation in the process. The goal is to be able to treat person A and person B like we generally treat person D. That project simply needs to fail.
Well, this is a technically correct answer to driveways question, but I'm going to disagree with you somewhat.
Trying to judge people on their intentions is a bad idea that leads to a whole host of problems, too many to list them all here really, but I'm going to just mention a few:
- It's impractical, we don't know what someones intentions were, even if they tell them they might lie, possibly also to themselves. People quite often just don't know their own intentions, and when they do they usually have a multitude of intentions at work at any time, some of which are good and some of which are kind of ####ty. But even if a person knows their intention, we can never be sure if they're honest about it unless telepathy is suddenly invented, so it's kind of a useless standard. Good for philosophy lecture hypotheticals, but a lot of the time useless in practice.
- It almost inevitably leads to moral relativistic dead ends in the tone of "Hitler was a good person because he intended to make the world a better place for all people; it's just that his definition of "people" was problematically narrow." Or as another example, if I hit my child, it really doesn't matter if my intention was to make her a better person, nor does it matter if in that particular case it happens to make her a stronger person in ways which end up benefitting her. The action is what matters. Intent is not magic that makes the action okay.
- As a social guideline it's really bad to tell people they're judged by their intentions. It can very easily lead to a "you get what you measure" kind of thing. The whole subculture of toxic virtue signaling where people loudly support ideas they often KNOW are bad or worthless is born out of this idea of judging people on their intentions. If your intentions are what makes you a good person, then it doesn't matter if the action is stupid or pointless or even bad. People who believe intention is what matters will still support it because they think it's so important to demonstrate your intention (either to themselves or to others). It also often leads to people to believe that stupid actions can become good in the long run just because people do it with good intentions.
You need to judge people by their actions, while considering both intentions and results.
For example, in Finland we currently have a neonazi in the governing body of our public radio company. Generally speaking, the action of someone looking for a position in that body is considered if not virtuous, at least the action of a good public servant, as it's an unglamorous behind the scenes job.
However, since that person is a neonazi or at least openly marches with other neonazis who literally want to end both Finland and democracy (creating a larger united Scandinavian fascist country for white people is their openly stated goal), it is worth considering that probably in this case we should not label this action "public service", but rather "infiltrating public radio with the intent of distorting it's message to better serve neonazi goals". It's bad because his intentions are bad even if in the end he can't find a way to do real harm in his position.
Also, sometimes if the results is bad, you need to make up for it even if you didn't really do anything wrong or intend to do anything bad. For example if I borrow your playstation and it breaks, it doesn't really matter if it was a complete accident I had no way of predicting. I'm still responsible for the result of my actions. Just like I'm still responsible for trying to help fix problems created by systematic racism, even if I didn't mean anything bad or do anything knowingly myself.
Intent in itself however is not bad. Just thinking openly racists thoughts is not in itself bad, if you don't try to do anything racist nor cause any real harm.
It is possible to be a racist and a good person. You can for example be a racist defense attorney who genuinely always does the best for their clients even when they sometime think very little of them. That probably means your intention to do your part for the proper functioning of the legal system is stronger than your racist tendencies, and causes your actions to be good.
So
TLR;
People should not be judged by intentions OR results, but their actions (where "action" includes anything that has an affect on other people, including words or even inaction).
However, considering either intentions or results or both is often necessary to properly contextualize what the action was.
Last edited by Itse; 06-21-2020 at 03:15 PM.
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