X-Git-Url: http://unremediatedgender.space/source?p=Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git;a=blobdiff_plain;f=content%2Fdrafts%2Flink-see-color.md;h=99e030798ddd5eb3f958c43d37faca1ebfa3fc5b;hp=0bb5ff5f314c4151c27695910e9c248a093d460f;hb=bb985c792ca11f6fa3d420852e1a1f964b27835c;hpb=c8de5865c13ff09531a83c2ac712bf3172f4217c diff --git a/content/drafts/link-see-color.md b/content/drafts/link-see-color.md index 0bb5ff5..99e0307 100644 --- a/content/drafts/link-see-color.md +++ b/content/drafts/link-see-color.md @@ -1,10 +1,17 @@ Title: Link: "See Color" -Date: 2021-02-28 -Category: other -Tags: linkpost, video, ideology, Steven Universe +Date: 2021-03-08 +Category: commentary +Tags: linkpost, video, ideology, Steven Universe, race, categorization Status: draft -Whether or not you _support_ the ideological transition from late-20th-century individualist "content of their character" liberalism to the [successor ideology](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Successor_ideology), as a student of the arts, you've got to admit that [the new _Steven Universe_ anti-racism public service announcement](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJkVgGYm4xo) is a _masterfully well-executed_ piece of propaganda. It's _actually persuasive_. I've _never seen anything like it_. +> _Here we are in the future +> Here we are in the future and it's wrong_ +> +> —["Who We Are"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AN9QWefQ7XE), _Steven Universe: The Movie_ + +Whether or not you _support_ the ongoing ideological transition from late-20th-century individualist "content of their character" liberalism to the [successor ideology](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Successor_ideology), it is imperative that students of literature and the arts know how to judge propaganda on its merits: not everything that tries to teach good morals is good _art_, and not everything your ideological enemies put out is badly done, either. + +It is in this spirit that I say that [the new _Steven Universe_ anti-racism public service announcement](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJkVgGYm4xo) is a _masterfully well-executed_ piece of propaganda. It's _actually persuasive_. I've _never seen anything like it_. @@ -12,22 +19,24 @@ There's some sense in which I think the creators "got lucky" with this short—I In contrast, "See Color"'s attacks on old-school liberalism _land_. We open to a '90s-alike PSA invoking the "doesn't matter if you're black, white, or purple" trope (which has been cringe for as long as I (born 1987) can remember, but which I imagine sounded progressive the _first_ time someone said it), until Amethyst breaks character to object to the script— -> AMETHYST: Woah, woah, woah. Hold up a minute here. Ugh, who wrote this? I think it kind of does matter that I'm purple? I mean, I'm purple because I'm literally an alien. - +> AMETHYST: What the—woah, woah, woah. Hold up a minute here. Ugh, who wrote this? I think it kind of _does_ matter that I'm purple? I mean, I'm purple because I'm literally an alien. +> > BLACK KID: Well I'm not an alien, but it definitely matters to me that I'm black. - +> > WHITE KID: Yeah, it makes a difference that I'm white. [to BLACK KID] I know the two of us get treated, very differently. - +> > AMETHYST: I just think it's messed up to compare me being an alien, to you two being different races. You're both human; you're totally biologically the same. Adding purple people into a lesson about human racism makes no sense. - +> > BLACK KID and WHITE KID: [in unison] Yeah, that is pretty weird. - +> > WHITE KID: I think people with the 'black, white, or purple' thing because adding a fantasy race in there helps distract from the actual racism black people have to deal with. - +> > BLACK KID: Right. My experience with anti-black racism is really specific. Other people of color experience other forms of racism, too. But you won't see any of that if you don't see color. - +> > AMETHYST: Dude, so this entire public service announcement could be a ploy to avoid talking about racism altogether! Hey, ah, could we get a rewrite where we appreciate each other without erasing what makes each of us different? -[TODO: the function of saying "or purple" is to appeal to a principle of equality: if there were purple people, they would get covered by the universal rule. But, Amethyst really is an alien, which would be a different cluster] +How is the old-school liberal to reply to this? The function of saying "or purple" is to appeal to a _principle_ of equal treatment. Adding a fantasy race in there highlights the universality of our commitment to equality: purple magical alien gem superheroines might not exist, but if they _did_, they would be entitled to the same rights and dignity as everyone. + +But how should our principle of majestic equality be applied? [Categories summarize information](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries)—[cluster-structure in the real world](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WBw8dDkAWohFjWQSk/the-cluster-structure-of-thingspace). As a matter of AI design, there would be no _functional_ reason to assign entities to different categories, if they didn't differ in _some_ decision-relevant ways. The reason it's pretty weird to reference Amethyst's skin color in a lesson about human racism, is because the challenges Amethyst might face as a gem in a world of humans—perhaps the perceptual skew of living thousands of years when most humans don't see a hundred—is going to depend on the ways in which gems and humans are actually different, which don't apply to humans of different races who are relevantly the same. -[TODO: notice the subtle asymmetry where, for the black kid, being black is important _to her_, whereas the white kid acknowledges that being black "makes a difference"—the white kid saying that being white is _matters_ to her would not be OK; "other people of color" suggest that racism against white people isn't possible—and from usage, this actually "feels right" to me; people complaining about wokeness being racist don't feel very persuasive] +In this way, we see that old-school liberalism is effectively the position that race _shouldn't exist_ as a cognitively meaningful category. But is it that easy? If there's some sense in which race _does_ exist—even just as a social "type tag" based on superficial anatomy markers in humans who are [otherwise totally biologically the same](/2020/Apr/book-review-human-diversity/)—then verbally claiming to pretend that it doesn't, isn't a realistic or _honest_ strategy for remediating the harm done by [unfair conventions that culturally evolved around the presence of the category](/2020/Jan/book-review-the-origins-of-unfairness/).