{"version": "1.0", "type": "rich", "title": "Joseph Heath: How to beat racism", "author_name": "kontextmaschine", "author_url": "https://kontextmaschine.com", "provider_name": "kontextmaschine", "provider_url": "https://kontextmaschine.com", "url": "https://kontextmaschine.com/post/167684302928/", "html": "<a href=\"http://nationalpost.com/opinion/joseph-heath-how-to-beat-racism\">Joseph Heath: How to beat racism</a>\n<p><a href=\"https://collapsedsquid.tumblr.com/post/167681627595/joseph-heath-how-to-beat-racism\" class=\"tumblr_blog\" target=\"_blank\">collapsedsquid</a>:</p>\n\n<blockquote><blockquote><p>\nThere is a very astute insight here into the psychology of race. What \nmatters is not so much the differences between individuals but which \ndifferences we choose to invest significance in. This is the good news \non race. It suggests that the best way to overcome race may simply be to\n distract people from it. If there is nothing else to attract people\u2019s \nattention, the set of physical characteristics that distinguish race \nwill be regarded as significant, but this can be overcome by reducing \nthe salience of these characteristics. There is probably nothing we can \ndo to stop people from classifying others into groups and developing \nanimosity toward those whom they regard as belonging to an out-group. \nYet even if we are unable to change this basic feature of human \npsychology, we can develop an effective work-around, by manipulating the\n environment so that people classify each other in ways that are less \nsocially pernicious. For example, instead of allowing people to fixate \non inherited features of individuals \u2014 such as skin colour \u2014 we could \nencourage them to focus on arbitrary or symbolic features \u2014 like hair \nstyle. The advantage of hair style is that it can easily be changed, and\n so does not translate into permanent disadvantage for any class of \nindividuals. <br/></p></blockquote><p>I object to this plan because wealth is inherited.<br/></p></blockquote>\n\n<p>This is the exact same \u201ccolorblind\u201d racial ideology that America had settled on until it got talked down in the last decade</p><p>This is just people grokking why that fence was there now that they see what happens without it</p>"}