15 July 2010

Advice

Hey, NAACP:

Calling someone who is a bigot a racist tends to work because they know they are and are aware that society disapproves. You can get a bit of shame going on there and that gets them to change. If that shame thing doesn't work out, they tend to overcompensate and become obviously bigoted to others and then the changes are affected by outside pressure.

Calling someone who is not a bigot a racist, however, doesn't work. They know they are not a racist and that you are wrong. This doesn't have any incentive to pressure them to change; they know they are already embodying the ideal you are espousing. Enlisting outsiders to pressure them into "changing" doesn't work because they are already not racists and can't change into something they already are.

What this accusation really does is make them think (or realize) that your organization is not working for the ideal of racial equality at all, but rather have another agenda only tangentially related to racism (at best) or that your organization is just as racist as white power groups (at worst).

You should also take note that the people whom you are calling racists formed a group large enough to affect policy nearly spontaneously in a very short time frame. A group that is likely large enough to be able to ignore you because the sanctions you impose are readily and easily bypassed. Your one tool to influence the majority was guilt over slavery and "Jim Crow". When you abandon the high ground and make baseless accusations, that guilt evaporates as if it had never been; and honestly your tirades have been tiresome for some time, you're making this easy for us. But this is the hill you've chosen to die on, so be it.

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