{"id":315,"date":"2013-02-08T10:08:23","date_gmt":"2013-02-07T23:08:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/hellfireclub\/?p=315"},"modified":"2013-02-08T10:08:23","modified_gmt":"2013-02-07T23:08:23","slug":"normblog-on-flimsy-accusations-of-racism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/hellfireclub\/2013\/02\/08\/normblog-on-flimsy-accusations-of-racism\/","title":{"rendered":"Normblog on flimsy accusations of racism"},"content":{"rendered":"

Via Normblog<\/a> comes this story <\/a>about what seems from the facts revealed to be a flimsy accusation of racism.\u00a0Although the boy apparently denies making a Nazi salute at his teacher, it seems likely that he did so as an act of defiance. This sort of thing is\u00a0stupid, of course – thoughtlessly suggesting that an authority figure is demanding obedience\u00a0to a point comparable to totalitarian dictators like Hitler. Nonetheless, that meaning of a sarcastically offered Nazi salute to an authority figure\u00a0is well known. The teacher appears to have been equally stupid in insisting on\u00a0an interpretation of it as conveying a racist meaning.<\/p>\n

Subjective intention is not magical in its power to remove hurt. Damage can be done by acts that were not subjectively motivated by malice, by racism, or by anything else that merits strong condemnation of a person’s character. We do demand certain standards of care, reasonableness, thoughtfulness, and so on, above and beyond the absence of the worst kinds of mens rea<\/em>. This runs all through the law and through everyday moral standards. But there are two important points to be made here, slightly different from the points made by\u00a0Norm Geras.<\/p>\n

First, although a mere lack of thoughtfulness, etc., may merit criticism, it still not the same<\/em> as malice, malevolent feelings (such as racist ones), etc. If someone who is probably not motivated by racist intent nonetheless makes a gesture that could be reasonably interpreted as racist by an ordinary, reasonable person in the society, that’s probably what we should say (and how we should counsel them). We need to be careful in the extreme when we make\u00a0highly charged and highly damaging accusations, such as accusations of racism. So often, the charges are flimsy or frivolously tactical. They\u00a0are\u00a0thrown around carelessly, with little regard to the damage they can do to people’s reputations (as well as the psychological damage from being accused of something so abhorrent). Or worse, they are made for the deliberate purpose of causing hurt and damage to\u00a0reputation.<\/p>\n

Second, we need to be reasonable in our interpretations of people’s words and gestures. Certainly, the meaning that can reasonably be placed on a gesture, say, is not entirely controlled by the actual subjective intent of the person who made it. But nor is it controlled by the subjective interpretation of the person on the receiving end. It is controlled by usage, history, context, what might reasonably\u00a0be imputed to an individual given what\u00a0else is known about them, by\u00a0tacit semiotic codes that we are all socialised into, and so on.<\/p>\n

In this case, a Nazi\u00a0salute aimed at an authority figure, such as a\u00a0teacher, is most reasonably interpreted as a defiant\u00a0accusation that the teacher is behaving in an extreme\u00a0dictatorial manner. That is the well\u00a0known meaning of the gesture in our culture.\u00a0In many contexts, the accusation made by the person delivering the salute\u00a0may be stupid,\u00a0unfair, unreasonable, offensive, and so on, but it is what it is.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Via Normblog comes this story about what seems from the facts revealed to be a flimsy accusation of racism.\u00a0Although the boy apparently denies making a Nazi salute at his teacher, it seems likely that he did so as an act of defiance. This sort of thing is\u00a0stupid, of course – thoughtlessly suggesting that an authority […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":37,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30,37],"tags":[153,152],"class_list":["post-315","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture","category-in-the-news","tag-flimsy-accusations","tag-racism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/hellfireclub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/315","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/hellfireclub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/hellfireclub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/hellfireclub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/37"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/hellfireclub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=315"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/hellfireclub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/315\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/hellfireclub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=315"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/hellfireclub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=315"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/hellfireclub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=315"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}