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this post was submitted on 14 Apr 2024
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One time I was sitting in coffee shop doing some work. There was a group of college girls who sat down right next to me and started talking loudly. Not a big deal, I'm used to the coffee shop being loud and working with other people talking.
But, of course, I can't help but overhear their whole conversation.
They start off on racism. It's amazing to all of them that people would pass judgment on people because of their race. How foolish! Why would you generalize a whole group of people like that? Just pure ignorance.
And then, in a perfectly smooth transition, they started talking about zodiac signs and how, well, one time I dated a Sagittarius, but never again! They are the worst. And they all started agreeing that you could really judge people based on their sign, although there was some disagreement as to how you could generalize certain signs. Because, well, I dated an Aries one time and he was actually fantastic and not impulsive or quick-tempered at all, so I'm not sure it's a core part of the sign.
...
I'm often reminded of absurdity of this conversation here on lemmy when people start generalizing rich people. Thanks. It's a fond memory for me.
Tribalism
SpongeBob imagination meme
The problem with all the rich people is the power they have compared to poorer people: it means the assholes amongst them can do way more harm than the assholes amongst poorer people.
The problem with rich people who acquired most of their wealth (rather than inherit it) is that, given how modern society operates, they're a group of people self-selected on personal characteristics like lack of empathy, manipulation, deceit and abnormally high greed (also some qualities such as drive, but those are self-rewarding and don't really help others who come in contact with them).
So having a negative posture when it comes to rich people by default is like avoiding a "bad neighbourhood" - it doesn't mean you think everybody who lives there or goes there are bad people, it just means you think bad people are more commonly found there and can do whatever they want there with impunity.
If (maybe even when) our societies were fairer, the default opinion and posture about rich people would be different.
Being biased against individual rich people is not like avoiding a bad neighborhood, it's like crossing the street when you see a black person because black people are overrepresented in crime statistics, regardless of whether the latter is true.
The difference between our examples is the difference between refraining from action and activelly taking action, and you need to have closed your eyes in the 60s and have kept them closed really hard since then to trully believe that there is any kind of active action against the rich in present day society.
In fact it doesn't take much to find countless cases where the rich get priviledged treatment that others don't get (lower taxes, priviledged outcomes in the Justice System, better outcomes for their children, the entire panoplia of life improving products and services which cost lots of money to mention just some of they ways in which they get better treatment), which curiously is the exact opposite of the spirit of the example you gave.
If people were actually using Monsieur Guillot's invention on people just because they're rich, then you would've been entirelly right, but that's almost exactly the opposite of what's happenning in present day Western society were the rich even have average higher life expectation that all the rest.
I'm not saying the rich have it hard, only that generalizing every individual in a group of people because of how you perceive the group in general is backwards thinking; saying it's okay to be wary of a rich person because you have a poor opinion of rich people, is equivalent to being wary of a black individual because you have a poor opinion of black people. This doesn't mean they are equally disadvantaged groups.
Unless you're arguing that the only reason it's bad to be racist against black people is because they are a traditionally disadvantaged group. Is that the case?
That's why I made a very clear distinction in my original post about people who inherited their wealth and people who made themselves rich or richer, whilst you seem to be throwing those who make active choices to make or expand their wealth into the same pot as those who had such choices imposed on them.
(It's strange that I'm having to fill-in the gaps of that over simplistic example of yours by actually pointing out the actual principles. "Black people examples" are not principles, they're just ultra-simplified illustrations of much broader principles which are sadly overabused in neoliberal political discourse)
As for people who were born in wealth, I agree that it would be unfair to treat them badly upfront just for what they were born with: one should treat them like everybody else and only judge them after seeing their choices and actions.
Personally I try and not have biases against people who were simply born into wealth (and I have met a couple, so I've actually practiced it), but most definitelly will pass judgements on rich people's choices.
So, is it okay to cross the street when you see a black person coming based on what they are wearing?
Although I have to laugh at my post being met with "over simplistic" when you're whole point is "if you've made a lot of money, you have to be a bad person."
Re-read my whole post.
If after that you still don't get the difference between actual discrimination and judging others on the basis of their personal choices and actions, then I can only conclude your "argumenting by black-person example" is just mindless parroting of the kind of oh-so-common American Neolib simpleton shit that only works with the intellectually lacking or mindless tribalist, rather than being the product of you actually thinking things through on this subject.
What you wear is a choice.
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In that example of yours "black" is an irrelevant detail to anybody but a racist, because the color of a person's skin is irrelevant either way to judging a person and acting on that judgment, for those who are not racist.
When guided by the basic principle of "I shall not judge or treat differently people on things they had no choice in", there is almost always a clear non-discriminatory fairness maximizing path in any "black person example" because the principle is very clear about the category of things one can judge others on, and that's most definitelly not skin color (or gender, or sexual orientation or even inherited wealth) because that's not a choice of an individual to have.
It's only those applying learned, case-by-case supposedly anti-racist recipes that end up sooner or later colliding with the contradictions in them due to the inherent racist architecture of any recipes that explicitly take in account a person's race - if you're thinking about somebody's race when interacting with them then you're still operating in the very same mental framework as all racists, giving weight in your decisions to something a non-racist would treat as irrelevant, and hence discriminating on race.
From that same principle of mine it's also pretty easy to derive that it's fair to judge people on their actions of activelly trying to gain more and more wealth beyond need and on the methods they use, whilst it's not fair to judge people on merelly having being born into wealth (though what the choose to do later with it is fair to judge) because the former judges their choices but the latter would judge something they did not choose and hence would be unfair.
Class is fundamentally different from race, culture, or some bullshit star signs, because it gives you outsized power and influence over the world around you. Combine that with the fact that people will generally act in ways that help them and the people important to them, and you can see how wealth can both corrupt people and warp the society they live in.
It's not hard to see how rich people are generally worse people: every time they pay someone less even when they could reasonably afford more, or raise rent beyond a modest profit, they are actively contributing to the problem.
What, you can't figure out the difference between someone hoarding money, and someone being born under a particular stat sign?
No, I can. I also know a lot of rich people and a lot of poor people and understand that they are all individual people and it's stupid to generalize them. Maybe not quite as dumb as generalizing people based on their sign, but pretty damn close.
That story is a great analogy of what happens in such Lemmy comments. Similarly with comments about landlords and CEOs.
And generations. Born in a certain year? You obviously have a certain attitude. We already know how you vote, how informed or ignorant you are on various topics, and how you spend your money. Just from the year you were born! Amazing, right?!