Racism and Free Will

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Purple Knight
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Racism and Free Will

Post #1

Post by Purple Knight »

Must a racist also accept determinism? Do you agree with the below?

First, a little background.

I at one point tried to have this conversation with a Christian Identity pastor, and I believe it was because I wasn't quite descriptive enough of the epistemological issue and because I didn't impart my position correctly that the discussion sort of... failed.

I will be honest also in that I reject free will. I believe in determinism. I believe we are the sum of our parts and if we choose to eat a sandwich, that is a function of how we are created and the things that happened to us, and likewise if we choose to murder a person. I do not believe in personal choice very much, though I still try to be good.

Where I failed before was that I didn't explain properly that although I reject racism, and believe in determinism, I am also trying to point out that you must believe in determinism to be a racist. This time I made a chart.

Racist - Determinist ----------- Logical Consistency
- x ------- x ------------------------ Possible
- x ------- o ------------------------ Not possible
- o ------- x ------------------------ Possible (this is where I am)
- o ------- o ------------------------ Possible

If you believe that some races are more aggressive, more likely to commit crimes, not because of things that happened to them but because of how they were made, then you believe in determinism.

I was actually booted off that forum partly because the mods thought I was arguing for racism. I wasn't. I was arguing for determinism by making the attempt to get a racist to see that he already accepts determinism. If you're even a little bit racist... even a little tiny bit... you believe in determinism already. The accepted mantra is that all white people are racist so that means most of the Western world already accepts determinism.

The unfortunate consequence of arguing for determinism is that it also excuses Derek Chauvin just as much as it excuses any black murderer. It even excuses white people for their racism, which anti-racists well admit is a consequence of the system of institutional racism they grew up in.

It's troubling to me because both sides seem to believe that white people have free will, but black people do not. (I don't believe anyone has free will, but obviously this is not a popular position.)

By the anti-racist side, white people are given responsibility to somehow break an admittedly unbreakable cycle, which I see as tacitly admitted as unbreakable because, they say, it's never been broken. If there is not one exception, then perhaps, I argued, white people don't have free will either.

By the racist side, white people are seen to have more agency because they "choose" to commit fewer crimes. I put choose in quotations here because I think it's ludicrous. Their side assumes that people with free will would indeed make such a choice, which means they already concede it is not free will but simply another instance of people behaving as they evolved to behave.

Thus I made an enemy of everyone and was booted off the forum. Everyone believed I was arguing the opposite case when I was only arguing a conditional. By the time they were mocking me as retarded for believing that a human is the same as an apple or a bowling ball, I was mocking them in return for being too stupid to see that they agreed with each other that determinism was true, they were simply inconsistent on different points. Insults were allowed on that forum but I had insulted a mod and apparently called him a racist and that was the end of me.

And that's the story of how I was kicked off a "say anything, you'll never be banned for anything" forum.

I would very much like to have this discussion in a venue where it wouldn't simply fail.

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