Tuesday, July 7, 2020
Racism and identity politics
This video is an interesting take on the whole diversity issue.
Essentially Peterson argues that even though there are measurable, objective differences between different groups, the differences are realtively small. They are not significant next to the differences between individuals.
Therefore any argument for diversity based race or gender is basically a racist one, because it essentially states that the major differences between a white person and, let's say, and Asian person are determined by their race, and not by their persons. So an Asian person is more alike to all other Asians, a black person to all other blacks, and a man is to all the men in the world. This reduces a person essentially to his or her "group" being race, gender, sexual orientation, age or anything else.
This is obviously racist, and I do agree with his conclusion on this particular point -somewhat. Indeed the whole problem and paradox of identity politics is that it is fundamentally racist.
But then he further argues that the real basis of diversity is the individual. I am not certain I can accept this, however.
Those small differences he mentioned added up do amount to visible/detectable differences between individuals. Peterson makes the mistake of taking these differences on their own, and not looking at their cummulative effect. Taken as a whole, these differences do amount to an overall variation between groups, even though certain members of the groups may indeed be more similar to another person from a different group than to members of their own group.
So no. I do think it is still important to have as many types of people in groups as possible, although it is probably true that it does not necessarily mean that you have to focus on the "emphasised" grouping, like gender or race. While it may seem like a no-brainer that including a black guy in a group of lawyers may add an extra point of view, I would argue that if that token black guy is coming from the same Harvard environment as the rest of his pastry white co-workers, he will not bring as much diversity of point of view into this group as a white kid for Idaho who attended to community college (or, god forbid, someone from an European country) would. If you include a black guy who is coming from a ghetto, you are getting there, however. But this is the point that Jordan is pressing: just by picking a random feature, and making it into the sole basis of "diversity", you are essentially a racist (if this feature is race), or, indeed sexist (if it is gender).
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