Iustin Pop <ius...@debian.org> writes: > On 2025-07-17 09:50:09, Jonathan Kamens wrote:
>> Whether there can be racism against white people is an incredibly >> complex question with a ton of baggage, about which many PhD >> dissertations have been written and I'm sure many more will be. >> This particular discussion we are engaged in here is hard enough >> without going down this particular rabbit-hole. It's off-topic for this >> list, and it's unlikely that anybody's mind will be changed on this >> particular issue by a discussion here. So can we please, just… not get >> into it any further here? > No, it's not off-topic, or not entirely. The post I replied to was saying > "it's fine to be racist against white people". No, it was not. It was saying that racism by definition has to involve a power gradient, and that definitionally something is only racist if aimed at a disfavored group by a group with more social power. You may disagree vigorously with this definition -- many people do! -- but this is a real definition of racism that is widely used in both academic and casual contexts by many other people. Please note that everyone I have ever encountered who holds to that definition *also* believes that racism is not the only bad thing that someone can possibly do, that just because something is not racist doesn't mean that it's okay, and that there are many discriminatory things that people can do that are not good and that should not be socially acceptable. The argument over the definition of the specific label "racism" does not change that. As Jonathan said, this is an argument over which many doctoral theses have been written, and I absolutely guarantee you that no one's mind will be changed about the definition of racism in this thread. The people who prefer that definition have heard all these arguments before, many many times, and still believe in that definition. The people who dislike that definition dislike it intensely and are very unlikely to change their minds about that, certainly not due to a debian-devel thread. All that pursuing this definitional disagreement is going to do is make a bunch of people angry at each other without clarifying anything about what Debian will do. -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
