Scott Alexander

It doesn't make sense because there's no longer a rational impulse.

And so I'm going to back off from being helpful to black America because it doesn't seem like it pays off.

Like, I've been doing it all my life and the only outcome is I get called a racist.

That's the only outcome.

Scott writes, I have a piece called Against Murderism, where I talk about why it's so hard for people to agree on questions about racism in quotes.

The summary, although it would be possible to have someone be purely axiomatically racist, having it be a premise of their reasoning that they hate black people, in practice, few people are like this.

More typically, people have some argument, more like, 1.

I don't like specific bad thing.

2.

Minorities are more likely to have specific bad thing.

3.

Therefore, I like minorities less than whites.

You can't argue with one because the bad thing might be something like crime, which everybody dislikes.

You can't argue with two because sometimes you can find statistics showing it's literally true.

Your ability to argue with three, therefore I like minorities less than whites, depends on the exact form.

But some forms, like, if I knew nothing about two neighbourhoods except that one were 100% black and the other 100% white, I would probably prefer to live in the 100% white one, seem pretty strong.

But then what's left of being against racism?

We could think of racism as a bias that makes people update on racial topics far beyond what the data allows.

For example, if 0.1% of whites are murderers and 0.2% of blacks are murderers, this hardly means that you can't be nice to your white-collar, Harvard-educated black colleague, or that you should think of him as a potential murderer-in-waiting.

But even this might be giving the racists too much credit.