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Trunkage

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That's true, but that's not what's going to happen. Kids will be taught some or all of those things, it's just not an explicit reading list. There is an obvious flip side to striking through that reading list in that the schools and teachers have more flexibility to use other events in their curriculum. I'm sure you don't believe "this is your reading list, here's a half dozen things about civil rights, the end" has lead to well informed students over the years. Nothing against Rosa Parks and MLK, but explicitly teaching about the same 20 line items in every civics or American history course through a 12 year education isn't really that great.
Id agree.

I really dont like how school history seems to distill people into a couple of lines. Or pretends that one or two people make a didifference. Or that the civil rights movement somehow popped out of thin air instead of it being a continual thing since the Civil War

Eg. Rosa Parks and MLK were only a very small part of the movement. Stop trying to reduce it down to one person. MLK did lots of things over about a decade. Maybe teach something other than one speech. Maybe talk about the double V movements of WW1 and 2 instead of just focusing on the 60s.

See also: Founding Fathers which usually gets reduced to the presidents and Hamilton like nobody else really did anything.

I know it's school stuff but repeating the same lines isn't teaching much
 
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Dwarvenhobble

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I didn't point that out.

On the societal-level, you wouldn't be well served by not factoring in ethnicity, but on the day to day interaction level, treating people as individuals is a good thing. I seriously don't understand how anyone could argue against that.
My apologies there then I know some-one brought up economic circumstances in this thread though as a possible bigger factor.
 

Seanchaidh

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That's true, but that's not what's going to happen. Kids will be taught some or all of those things, it's just not an explicit reading list.
There will be variation and since it's in Texas, probably not in a positive direction most of the time.

There is an obvious flip side to striking through that reading list in that the schools and teachers have more flexibility to use other events in their curriculum. I'm sure you don't believe "this is your reading list, here's a half dozen things about civil rights, the end" has lead to well informed students over the years. Nothing against Rosa Parks and MLK, but explicitly teaching about the same 20 line items in every civics or American history course through a 12 year education isn't really that great.
Teaching about the black freedom struggle has typically not been that great to begin with in the United States, but I only see this making it worse.
 

CriticalGaming

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@Asita literally everything you said about those directors is based entirely off their work and not on their merits as people. Thats fine because the entire basis of your opinion come exclusively from the product that they made. You see the difference right?

You can call a creative person a hack, and say that their creation sucks donkey nuggets and that is perfectly fine. You can even say they should be fired because they dont know what the fuck they are doing.

There is an obvious difference between someone sucking at their job and you wanting them gone because the said something you dont like. Abrams getting pulled off a movie because he failed as a director is different that if he got pulled off a film because he said a naughty thing on twitter.
 

Schadrach

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Has anybody in this thread actually said that or is that one of those things you just want me to take on faith?
Are you taking the guy cooking meth as a literal single guy cooking meth that if removed would solve all problems in the community forever, or as illustrative of the notion of being able to work within the community to fix community problems (identifying that Buckeye Billy's meth problem is causing broader issues outside Billy himself and acting to resolve it as a consequence)? Because I'm pretty sure it's meant to be the latter and by rejecting that idea you are rejecting the idea of a community being able to in a significant way fix itself as "too simple."

Now, if I'm misunderstanding and you were taking Billy Buckeye the meth cooking methhead (which is terrible business sense for a dealer, but wonderful business sense for an addict) as literal rather than as an illustrative example then I apologize.

Yeah, they pretty much just called some random teaching 'CRT' and then used that to vilify and ban it
To ban that random teaching, because the CRT ban laws I've read call out specific positions or tenets that are not to be taught, not just some vague "whatever feels like it might be connected to CRT." But then I see the same people argue that 1) those tenets are not part of CRT at all, but also that somehow 2) banning teaching them prevents using "real" CRT (and that it's impossible to truthfully teach history without using CRT) and that they 3) tend to also be enormously vague in defining what it is they mean by CRT.

Snowflake meaning weak or fragile never made sense. Snowflake the insult was made for people who see themselves as extra special and unique who need to announce all the ways they are different then regular people so you know how special they are, because every snowflake is completely unique but also perfect. That the insult transformed somehow to mean "easily offended" is a great loss to the English language.
I always thought the implication was both of those things going together -- "I'm extra special and unique and perfect and you need to know it but if you apply even the slightest challenge against me I'm going to melt."

Good news: that's called "intersectional feminism". You might've heard of it from right wing weirdos with rantsonas a few years back
It would be, but "intersectional feminism" is very, very bad at addressing men's issues except to the degree that those issues effect black, gay, and/or trans men and also do not benefit women. And then it frames them as issues that primarily effect black, gay, and/or trans people and tries to draw attention to how badly black, trans and/or lesbian women are effected.

Hell, let's look at BLM again. Basically every measure of the criminal justice system that shows black folks are treated worse than white folks (and thus stand as evidence of oppression of blacks and the reason why talking about criminal justice reform is framed in terms of race) has men being treated worse than women to a similar or larger degree (which means nothing, for some reason). So, you'd think being all intersectional about it they'd draw attention to it being a men's issue and not just a black issue, right? Or at least it being a worse issue for black men?

Instead, they did precisely the opposite. They made a point of drawing attention to black women killed by police. Despite 19 out of 20 people killed by police being male.

CRT covers far more than just laws, and even if it did, if that's your standard, then pretty much every social science field is historical.
...and also, every field is math. All of them. No exceptions. Nearly every field (every field that isn't pure math) is physics as well. So, should we talk about how quantum chromodynamics is central to the understanding of law?

You literally can't teach CRT at primary school level.
Then laws prohibiting teaching it at a primary level would fundamentally not be a problem, even if what they prohibited was genuinely CRT, right?

If this were a batch of poor Appalachian white kids that some white educators were looking to teach differently, would that be a problem?
If this were a batch of poor Appalachian white kids:

1) There would be a push to "fix" them using Appalachian English, instead of a push to treat it as equally valid and equally correct, as anti-racists push for acceptability of AAVE. That AAVE is given more serious treatment as a dialect than Appalachian English (I was subjected to years of being told it was backward hillbilly talk, fundamentally wrong and no one will take you seriously if you use it - by teachers who were themselves white Appalachian folks) probably says something interesting, but I'm not planning to go deep there.
2) Nobody would be talking about how they should be given a quota or other special benefits, precisely because they're poor white kids.

Education, Black Students get less
More specifically, poor neighborhoods get less. Because we do educational funding primarily off of local property taxes being funneled into local schools. Which is a fundamentally stupid way to do it. For example, we could pool funding state(or even nation)-wide and distribute per school based on a base number for fixed costs and per student additional funding for costs that scale with student body size. Which would make where exactly you live have a much lesser effect on what kind of education you receive.
 
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ObsidianJones

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iWell, based on all those things, the former is more important. I mean, even if you didn't feel oppressed, everything you listed above would still be issues, especially the voter suppression.

Also, I know you weren't trying to make this argument, but bear with me - the legacy of segregation, and redlining, and among other things...doesn't that do a better job of explaining why African Americans underperform in academia compared to other groups? Surely that's a better explanation than the idea of inherent traits? Your first link highlights the underfunding of schools, so surely an increase in funding would go a long way to help solve those issues?
Thanks for acknowledging.

Also, you're absolutely right. It does a lot to explain most of the issues plaguing the African American underperformance. Which does a lot to prove how African Americans live in a Racist Society.


"The aggregate of people living together in a more or less ordered community."

So, whatever happens to that community as a whole actually reflects their over all experience. Even if it isn't America as a whole. Even if it's literally two thousand people tops who just happens to hate African Americans and got to higher echelons of power just to screw over the Black Populous as a whole... the black community is still screwed.

You see, it doesn't matter if it's two thousand or 30 million. The outcome is still the same. African Americans are disadvantaged due to decisions that were not up to them, and they are given limited power to change it. And in fact, the same people who limited their power to begin with decided to get together. They endeavored to continually strip down the black communities power in a way where they never specifically said "Oh, yeah, we're doing it because they are black and we don't want them having any agency" because that would be against the law... but somehow, these new bills and removal of rights seem to always land at the feet of African Americans.

It's never because they have black skin that we removed their funding for school. It just so happens to be that way all around America.

it's never because they have a shared past of slaves that we're not going to hire them. It's because they have poor education. And never mind that I vote to funnel more education to my white family. They should find a way around that... over there... not at my work.

It's never because we've collectively made sure they can only live and exist in these poor reservation ghettoes that they more likely to commit crimes. Why would you think it has anything to do with poor education and the fact that we severely limit the jobs they are able to get. They are just lazy. They should be able to magic up jobs in a way that no other culture has been able to before. We weren't lazy during the Great Depression. There were just no jobs. But just because I and most other white people in my position will only hand out one or two token positions that blacks aren't in the higher rungs of business. It's because of the education I continually vote to be worse for them (but that really doesn't matter) and the fact that we'll never hire them (although that shouldn't matter because the aforementioned ability they should have to magic up jobs). So you see, they have plenty of options (That we made up and we'll never really give them) but they just choose to commit crime.

It's never because of the things that were just mentioned that we have to overpolice them to the point where a minor infraction (like weed smoking) has to be a felony for black people but not even a concern for white people. It's because they are inexplicably dangerous. No, I can't think of any reason why they would even be angry or unable to provide for themselves and don't scroll up for any reason. They are just like that. So we need to arrest them. We need harder laws because they aren't thriving under the draconian rule we put them under. We need to always bump up the sentencing to what we think are reasonable but what the United Nations would find cause for alarm. And you know what else? They have it too good in our prison system designed to basically make anyone who steps in there a lifer because they will never be able to find a job again and in most states lose their basic rights to vote. We need to institute sla... wait, sorry, that was Granddad's term. We need to institute prison labor. Maybe make a whole industrial complex over it. Hmm. Could be a good revenue source...

But hey. We never outright said it was because it's because they have a different skin color and background than us. We did everything we could to avoid saying it outright. How could anyone think this is racist?
 
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CriticalGaming

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This seems relevant. Outsyder is right.

The reason why people are so upset about this is that they can't separate the thing they like from the person that they don't and they have no clue how to cope with that.
 

Asita

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@Asita literally everything you said about those directors is based entirely off their work and not on their merits as people. Thats fine because the entire basis of your opinion come exclusively from the product that they made. You see the difference right?

You can call a creative person a hack, and say that their creation sucks donkey nuggets and that is perfectly fine. You can even say they should be fired because they dont know what the fuck they are doing.

There is an obvious difference between someone sucking at their job and you wanting them gone because the said something you dont like. Abrams getting pulled off a movie because he failed as a director is different that if he got pulled off a film because he said a naughty thing on twitter.
Read on, for I fear that this is a case where the choice of initial illustration may have distracted from the point.

"That said, even if my arguments were pure ad-hominem, like "they're self-important asshats and a blight on the industry" (...ye gads, that hyperbole is painful to write), that would not in itself constitute harassment. Regardless of how unpleasant I am or how much you dislike what I say, the determinant factor of harassment is not whether I'm criticizing the work or the person, but whether or not I'm making repeated uninvited contact for the sake of tormenting my target in a way that a reasonable third party would find socially and/or morally unreasonable."

For the sake of judging whether or not it's harassment, it doesn't matter if I'm calling them bad directors, self-important asshats, or anti-christs. It doesn't matter whether my criticism is defensible and intuitive or comes out of left field. What determines if it is harassment is whether or not the alleged harasser is hounding the person. It's not a question of what my criticism is, it's a question of my actions. For the sake of hopefully easier example, if I were to call you "a big fat phony", it doesn't matter what my reasons are; it's not harassment in itself. If, however, I were to shout that you were a big fat phony on the street, then at work, then dial up your phone to 'remind' you of your phoniness, leave messages to that effect in your yard, etc...that quickly becomes a damn good case that I'm harassing you, even though my criticism has not changed. This is because harassment is better defined by actions than words. That I called you a phony in this scenario is irrelevant, as would be my reasons or justifications for doing so. What makes it harassment is the stalking behavior employed to enable me to do so ad nauseum.
 

CriticalGaming

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"That said, even if my arguments were pure ad-hominem, like "they're self-important asshats and a blight on the industry" (...ye gads, that hyperbole is painful to write), that would not in itself constitute harassment. Regardless of how unpleasant I am or how much you dislike what I say, the determinant factor of harassment is not whether I'm criticizing the work or the person, but whether or not I'm making repeated uninvited contact for the sake of tormenting my target in a way that a reasonable third party would find socially and/or morally unreasonable."
That "harassment" while unsavory is avoidable by the person to simply block you. And it isn't exactly the point of the issue at stake here. Because we are talking about the demand of removal from a job for a person strictly on the basis of that person's opinions and no other metric. You still speak from a viewpoint of what the person has done with their work, not necessarily their viewpoints (though it might devolve into that).

Harassment itself is not good universally, but I feel like that goes beyond the scope of the main argument of the thread.
 

Asita

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That "harassment" while unsavory is avoidable by the person to simply block you. And it isn't exactly the point of the issue at stake here. Because we are talking about the demand of removal from a job for a person strictly on the basis of that person's opinions and no other metric. You still speak from a viewpoint of what the person has done with their work, not necessarily their viewpoints (though it might devolve into that).

Harassment itself is not good universally, but I feel like that goes beyond the scope of the main argument of the thread.
Of course harassment isn't good. I don't think anyone's disputing that. What we are disputing, however, is the conflation of "criticizes for factors you believe to be irrelevant" with harassment, which as a matter of definition has less to do with what was said than it does the accused harasser going to unreasonable lengths torment their victim with repeated contact. The two are very different subjects.
 

CriticalGaming

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Of course harassment isn't good. I don't think anyone's disputing that. What we are disputing, however, is the conflation of "criticizes for factors you believe to be irrelevant" with harassment, which as a matter of definition has less to do with what was said than it does the accused harasser going to unreasonable lengths torment their victim with repeated contact. The two are very different subjects.
True but that's not what is happening here. People have demanded the removal of a person from their own creative work, strictly on the merits of that agreeing with that person politically. Nothing to do with the work itself or the job done on the work.

Normal harassment, used to just call somebody a dickhead, is different than agenda based harassment that is trying to destroy a career based on personal bias. They are different entities imo, though they can technically be both called harassment one is clearly on a different level.

If you call someone a dick on twitter or whatever, it is very easy for person to simply block you and not engage with it. Even if you have to be blocked on multiple social networks. The handling of that is different than a social movement rallying against your political views, because you can silence and block an individual but you can't do so for a crowd of crazies all screaming nonsense at you.

An individual can be reasoned with, rationalized, a crowd cannot. Ten people who are screaming that the sky is Pink can silence the one person who is correctly saying the sky is blue. Truth doesn't matter to mob justice, only the agenda that the crowd has rallied around.
 

XsjadoBlayde

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Ultimately, this more-often-than-not-strawman boils down to right-wingers don't like it when "free speech!" can organise in ways that don't benefit their particularly damaging brand of plans.

Unrelated video, but not really unrelated, depending on how far observation can last;

 
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ObsidianJones

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This seems relevant. Outsyder is right.

The reason why people are so upset about this is that they can't separate the thing they like from the person that they don't and they have no clue how to cope with that.
Outsyder is half right.

It's not about art. It's not about the person. It's not about even the issues. Society as a whole has become too aggressive and bitter. One side will point to the other, but the fact of the matter is that we can choose on how we respond. I'm sure everyone will instantly read that and go to the side that they personally detest, but it happens all over for everything.

Kaepernick got death threats for kneeling.

.

Meghan Linsey got death threats for singing while kneeling


Most of the Sequel Star Wars people received some sort of harassments, including death threats


Kojima got death threats


Sterling


The Last of us 2's... everybody.


The point is, more important than the opinion, is the clout that is behind the opinion. If I can comfortably sink a few million to a political party that can actually affect tangible change in other people's lives, my opinion suddenly becomes more important than someone who can not. Such as Cawthorn.

Our collective opinions on this forums mean little more than sparring. You're not worried about mine. I'm not worried about yours. I wasn't even worried about Houseman's. I could block him and my life was fine. As his life was fine that I blocked him.

But as recent events have shown, who is elected matters. Who is supported matters. Opinions don't matter if people don't act on them. Opinions that people support, fund, and rally for are no longer "just opinions". Like an idea stops being an idea when you put it into action. These are no longer opinions, they are movements of influence that will determine the lives of others.

After a while, it no longer becomes about the work of art. It's about how that work of art empowers individuals to affect the lives of others with 'just their opinions'... and millions upon millions of dollars and other such influence.
 

TheMysteriousGX

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Actually, I'd generally take issue with any group under the proviso of "this group is inherently different" (in terms of intelligence).
...
Actually, it would be kind of disturbing no matter who made the argument. Heck, if it was a different ethnicity, it would probably be more disturbing, though less surprising. The idea of different groups having inherent traits is something that's usually used to demonize groups.
...
Long answer? Quite likely yes, because taking your scenario as writ, you're using an inherent trait (white) to describe their scenario, so you're therefore assuming that there's something inherent about them that requires a different approach. If you're arguing that these kids (or any kids) need a different type of schooling because of their poverty, then that's getting into more sensible territory, because poverty isn't an inherent trait, and we know that poverty makes schooling harder.
It's about poverty and local conditions you ding-dong. The race aspect is coincidental because of our fucked-up levels of racial segregation. It will stop being "inherent" when the poverty stops being a heritable trait.
If this were a batch of poor Appalachian white kids:

1) There would be a push to "fix" them using Appalachian English, instead of a push to treat it as equally valid and equally correct, as anti-racists push for acceptability of AAVE. That AAVE is given more serious treatment as a dialect than Appalachian English (I was subjected to years of being told it was backward hillbilly talk, fundamentally wrong and no one will take you seriously if you use it - by teachers who were themselves white Appalachian folks) probably says something interesting, but I'm not planning to go deep there.
2) Nobody would be talking about how they should be given a quota or other special benefits, precisely because they're poor white kids.
Yeah, probably. White people don't care about our own. I mean, Black people will take to the streets over a dodgy police killing while White people will look at a video of a man getting shot while groveling in a hallway, then only complain about it when Black people are in the streets protesting a dodgy police killing.

We might not be completely sure, but if you have a way of quantifying that difference, I'm happy to hear it.

Like, do you agree that it's impossible to have a perfect merit? That there's all sorts of advantages and disadvantages? Because I can imagine this scenario where B gets extra marks for their circumstances, and beats A by virtue of those extra marks, so then A stops taking tutoring so their penalty is reduced, or claims poverty. And that isn't too far from cases of claiming identity to rig affirmative action systems (this isn't just an American thing, we see similar examples in India, where people claim to be in a caste that they're not).

The scenarios of Student A and Student B may not be neutral, but the means of evaluating them are. It's very reasonable to have special support for someone in poverty, but in regards to actual assessment? Again, how can you quantify that?
Personal judgement, honestly.
Because you can't quantity it.
Because the idea that you can quantify a person down to a number is bullshit.
Because meritocracy is a sham, and the sooner we stop lying to ourselves the better.
When the Earth reverses its rotation, I'll get back to you.
Hey, as long as we can both agree in the Objective Truth of Earth's westerly rotation.

Then laws prohibiting teaching it at a primary level would fundamentally not be a problem, even if what they prohibited was genuinely CRT, right?
Except that's not what the laws are. The laws are about removing civil rights history as mandatory parts of the curriculum and monitoring teachers for wrongthink.
 
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CriticalGaming

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Well I think that is one of the things that the internet "unlocked" unfortunately. Before the internet, social awkward shut-ins who had anger problems and couldn't deal with their frustrations and whatever, couldn't showcase their social ineptitude publically.

Today they can unfortunately.

I think it stems from two problems.

1. People who genuinely have a mental health or social stunting that prevents them from any rational way to express not liking a thing. These people have no middle ground it is either "I love you", or "die fucker!" and nothing in-between.

2. people who know that there are often no consequences for being a crazy fucker online. So what's the most outrageous shit I can say to someone online? "I'll kill or rape you fucker" is basically the only to things they can come up with. But the key thing is that they get a rise out of the person they are talking shit too, and getting attention for themselves even if anonymously.

Maybe it is a combination of both. Either way, both are typically fairly benign as I can't think of any instance ever in which a public death threat was ever manifested in person.

And i think it's doubly made worse by those very articles which publicly reveal what's happened allegedly. So the "victim" uses it as a platform of attention, while at the same time bringing attention to the people who would do such things. So it feeds upon itself.
 

Casual Shinji

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In my experience, cries of 'cancel culture' are little more than a rallying cry of the pretentious and self-righteous who don't give the matter appreciably more thought than whether or not it's criticism (particularly widespread criticism) that they think is "wrong" or comes from people they believe themselves to be ideologically opposed to. If either of these are true, then it's 'cancel culture'. If neither is, it's not cancel culture. Generously speaking, the only justification ever needed to accuse me of such in the above is that my words might inspire others to hold a similar (wrong in the accuser's view) position, thereby "artificially" drying up the demand and popularity of the product and thus 'canceling' the people behind it. Hence 'cancel culture' in their minds.
This right here. This is why cancel culture is bogus, and why whatever definition it ever had was force-fed out of it. 99% of the time it's used as a cry for 'our side is being attacked/criticized'. And it's typically convervatives who love pulling this, as it's one of the few cards they (feel they) can pull in this regard, since they rarely have to deal with racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia, them being the biggest providers of it 'n all. But "cancel culture"? Ooh, THAT'S something that makes THEM feel marginalized. Now THEY can play the victim, see how those libs like that.
 

Schadrach

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Except that's not what the laws are. The laws are about removing civil rights history as mandatory parts of the curriculum and monitoring teachers for wrongthink.
Prior to the newest Texas bill, all of the anti-CRT laws that had come up name some specific and pretty narrow ideas, tenets, or beliefs not to be taught, usually with more narrow language like that they can't be "compelled or directed to adopt or affirm" those tenets. Typically, the list includes that any race is inherently inferior to any other, that any race should be given worse treatment than another and that members of any race should feel guilt over the actions of other persons in the past because those persons were the same race. Those three show up in basically every anti-CRT bill, but some have as many as 9 in the list, some include sex or national origin as well as race, etc. I've seen more than a few people claim the things I mentioned - that those tenets are unrelated to CRT, that they can't teach history honestly without CRT, and that somehow a law that prevents them from making students adopt not-CRT prevents them from using real CRT.

The new Texas bill is a different sort of bill, and I want to sit down and actually read it before I comment too much on it. If you've got a specific part of it to draw my attention to, I'm interested.
 

Terminal Blue

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Not 1:1, but absolutely related, and it develops early on. Babies will generally develop a preference for people who look like them at 6 months of age.
One major reason I'm sceptical of this is that, at 6 months of age, babies aren't actually capable of knowing what they look like.

How can racial biases not in-group biases?
Because again, they don't always align.

The most famous example would be the Clark doll experiment (although the Clarks actually did a whole bunch of similar experiments). If racism were motivated by in-group bias, then black children should assign positive value to dolls that have a similar skin and hair colour to them, but the experiment actually found the opposite, as has almost every experiment looking at racial bias in children. Black children replicate the negative associations and feelings about blackness that they encounter in their lives and the culture around them, and they do so at a developmentally crucial stage which informs their expectations of how they should be treated and how they should treat others. That is a racial bias.

Okay, for brevity let's do this in one go.

Racism is a discreet ideological system. It is not a "power game", whatever that is supposed to mean, and yes, it is predated by the material condition of white supremacy because that's just how things worked out in this timeline. Racism is distinct from other forms of prejudice, it is not better or worse than them save in one very important and relevant sense which we'll talk about later.

The ancient Greeks did sometimes exhibit a degree of cultural chauvinism, but they were also a diverse selection of societies that spanned hundreds of years and thousands of miles. Their relationship with the idea of foreignness was diverse and, in many cases, not easily represented in modern terms, because the Greeks did not have a Abrahamic sense of morality. What they also did not have is an understanding of race. At absolute best, some Greeks believed in climatic determinism, which is a kind of proto-racism based on the idea that the climate you grow up in influences the mystical forces in your body and changes the kind of person you are. Climatic determinism is possibly a part of the evolution of racism, but it is also not racism.

Similarly, China is an unbelievably huge place with an unbelievably long history. Sinocentrism, and the idea of the superiority of Han Chinese culture, is a common theme but it is, again, cultural chauvinism rather than racism. At times, marriages between ethnic groups were discouraged for fear of cultural syncretism. At other times, such marriages were made mandatory in order to improve social cohesion. Resemblance to racism is supercficial.

The Islamic situation is probably the closest you're going to get, but it starts to fall apart as soon as we start digging because Islamic slavery isn't generally chattel slavery (although there are exceptions, particularly in Africa itself). It is household slavery. Often, slaves were women who were kept as concubines. But here's where the analogy to racism really starts to break down, because concubines would bear children, and those children were not slaves. Concubinage, horrible as it might be, ensured that mixed race people were everywhere in the Islamic world for hundreds of years, particularly in positions of wealth and power because that meant their fathers could have afforded more concubines. Imagine a racist society trying to deal with that.

None of this is racism, and I don't mean that in the sense that all of it is good or all of it is morally acceptable, I just mean that it is not racism. There is no intelligible idea of race here, at best we can maybe see some of the ingredients of racism, like climatic determinism and the exclusion of religious minorities from protection against horrible treatment, but the resemblance is ultimately superficial. These are not societies where racism exists.

And that distinction between racism and other culturally specific justifications for cruelty or barbarism would not matter at all were it not for one very important fact. Racism still exists.

All of these cultures with their own little systems for dividing up people into groups, with their own prejudices and ideas and justifications for cruelty, are gone. Time or modernity has swept them all into the dustbin of history, except for one. One single violent, ugly, hierarchical system of thought that has been systematically imposed onto most of the world by the people who, for whatever reason, ended up in a position to impose their system of thought onto the world. That single system, that way of dividing the world into groups based on inherent nature and heredity and blood, is what we call racism. Racism isn't just a part of our history, it's a necessary feature to explain the world we live in today. That is really all that distinguishes it from any other awful thing which happened in history, and thus the only reason why it matters.

Whether this lets people off the hook or not is meaningless, because the goal is not guilt. The goal just justice. The goal is to live in a world where racism, and its legacy, no longer exist, just as all those other culturally specific systems of prejudice no longer exist.

Because I've literally seen people claim that 2+2=5.
..and assuming that is true (which is a stretch) why do you think they think that?

Don't give me some bollocks about "alternate ways of knowing" or some misquoted phrase you stole from a rantsona video. This is a specific claim, I want a specific answer. Why do these people think, definitively, that 2+2=5. That's a weird way to think, and I'm sure an open minded and intellectually curious person like yourself was fascinated to find out the reasoning behind it.

No, the reasons aren't the same, but it's absolutely a form of racial determinism - that certain groups are inherently suited to different styles of learning than others.
No, it's actually not.

I'm going to be very clear. I don't agree with what was said there, at least not in the immediate sense, but it's not racial determinism and I'm confused as to why, outside of intentionally hostile reading, you would assume that it is.