Scott Alexander

If 0.1% of whites are murderers and 0.2% of blacks are murderers, does that mean you should make a Twitter account, N-G-G-R-K-I-L-L-E-R-1-4-8-8?

who posts, you look like chimp, I will enjoy murdering your family during the race war, under every picture of a black person that comes across your timeline?

No, because a lot of people do do that.

I'm not language czar, but if you force me to define the word racism, I would call it a bias which makes people take the flaws of an ethnic group, whether real or imagined, further than they would normally go, until whatever core of useful insight they contained becomes caricatured and exaggerated, and they're being used more to spread hatred and fear than to communicate useful information.

None of this is original or interesting, and I'm only saying this cliched and obvious thing so we're all on the same page.

There was a footnote after the word racism.

It says, of course, it's always valid to taboo your words and replace the symbol with the substance, and as soon as we reach some debate where the impasse is the definition of racism, I'm fine with agreeing that this word is hard to define and trying to switch the debate to something more substantial in every particular case.

Back to the text, there's a cartoon.

Coworker says, I hear you're a slave owner now.

And a bald man replies, that is unfair.

I buy a few Elbonians on the internet and suddenly I'm the slave owner guy.

The coworker replies, you are literally an owner of slaves.

And the bald guy replies, I prefer to think of them as bad negotiators.

End quote.

Scott writes, so was Adams' comment racist in this sense?

By now we can probably rehearse the arguments of both sides.

Liberal, it's okay to be white is a known 4chan white supremacist slogan.

They chose it as their slogan precisely so it would be awkward when people called them out for saying it, and so they could retreat to saying, we just said it was okay to be white, which surely nobody can hold against us.

This is stupid, we're under no obligation to pretend we don't know this, and those 26% of black people who are against it, were against it on this basis.

And the conservative argument, yeah, but the poll didn't ask, do you agree with it as a 4chan white supremacist slogan?