anti-racism
Article
anti-racism is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between May 10, 2021 and November 30, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as “vague category of thing including feminism, anti-racism, and LGBT activism”; “anti-racism has even more achievements than effective altruism”. It most often appears alongside cancel culture, Obama, Reddit.
Metadata
- Category: Concepts
- Mention count: 2
- Issue count: 2
- First seen: May 10, 2021
- Last seen: November 30, 2023
Appears In
Related Pages
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- cancel culture (2 shared issues)
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- Obama (2 shared issues)
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- Reddit (2 shared issues)
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- Twitter (2 shared issues)
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- “How do you do, fellow kids?” (1 shared issues)
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- NotAllMen (1 shared issues)
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- TheResistance (1 shared issues)
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- 1950s - 1990s (1 shared issues)
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- 2000s (1 shared issues)
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- 2010s (1 shared issues)
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- 4chan (1 shared issues)
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- 80,000 Hours (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
We tend to conflate feminism and anti-racism under the general heading of "social justice", but this blinds us to important details. From about 2011 to 2014, the Internet was obsessed with gender, with race on the back burner. 2014 to 2016 was a sort of transition period, and after that the Internet became obsessed with race, with gender almost forgotten.
II. New Atheism, New Feminism, New Anti-Racism
Feminism and anti-racism had always been lumped together as "social justice", but for the first few years feminism was the big sister and anti-racism the tag-along little brother. There just wasn't the same kind of flourishing anti-racism blogosphere, probably because there are way fewer black people than women, and in those early days they were less likely to have good Internet connections. The usual pattern I saw was for people to talk about gender, and then mention at the end that it was also applicable to race "Here's why men need to check their male privilege - and did you know white people have white privilege too?"
I checked to see if I was being a giant hypocrite, and came up with the following: wokeness is just a modern intensification of age-old anti-racism. And anti-racism has even more achievements than effective altruism: it’s freed the slaves, ended segregation, etc. But people (including me) mostly criticize wokeness for its comparatively-small failures, like academics getting unfairly cancelled. Why should people judge effective altruism on its big successes, but anti-racism on its small failures?
Maybe a better answer is to judge movements on the marginal unit of power. An anti-woke person believes that giving anti-racism another unit of power beyond what it has right now isn’t going to free any more slaves, it’s just going to make cancel culture worse.