From what I know about Levittown (and similar post-war suburbs), the lily whiteness ultimately was caused by the Federal Government's refusal to offer guaranteed loans to all but a sprinkling of black families, in addition to sometimes setting up metaphorical roadblocks to developers who were willing to allow blacks and whites to buy houses on the same street.

I'm fairly sure that's true. The Color of Law is a good book that covers the history pretty thoroughly, for anyone interested.

My point again was making a business decision that is racist does not make the person racist. That was the whole point

So it's only racist if you do it for hatred, not for money? Um, yeah I'm gonna have to go ahead and disagree with you there.

Levittown was still racist when i grew up there

Anyone im not going to argue the point further except to say that if trump felt selling or renting to blacks would bring down value then he made a business decision that was racist but not because he was racist

I apologize for the tangent

And im glad there are laws preventing this, I'm not defending it. Im just saying people make racist decisions in business every day without being a racist

And my point is you shouldn't let people off the hook too easily. Or at least, "I'm not racist because my motivations weren't racist" shouldn't be where anyone stops thinking, especially the people making decisions with racist consequences.

I also don't think that it's necessarily always the most useful thing in the world to go from labeling actions/beliefs/statements/prejudices racist to labeling people as racist in an essentializing, final way, as though they could be no more and no less than "a racist". I get why people push back against that a little bit. I'm not really interested in villifying Levitt in particular.

But if someone routinely acts in a way that creates unjust racial inequality then that person is racist in the most important sense of the word. This is important in both directions: it's important to keep in mind that the goal of anti-racist social norms is to reduce unjust inequality, which is why outcomes matter more than the motivations. From the other side, that's also why it's useful not to over-essentialize people as "racist" (as an overarching social status) who aren't necessarily acting with malicious intent. Because doing so can distract from the actual goal: getting people to change their behavior.

But calling someone racist for making really important racist decisions is not particularly troublesome, to me.

Unimportant? It was basically my entire point

You sound like birdman

Bill Clinton was a full blown racist?

I didn't mean unimportant to your post, I meant unimportant to my view of the world.

Your line of thinking is simply put, bull****. Whatever reason one decides to engage in a racist act is, that person still CHOOSES to make a racist act something that is perpetrated by them. Committing the act is racist, full stop. Especially when the choices made are repeated ad nauseum

I would say that the situation for real estate developers in the 1950s was somewhat different from standard racist business practices supported by tropes like "I can't encourage black people to shop here because it will drive away white customers."

Most real estate developers in that time period would not have been able to finance their projects if they had insisted on having fully integrated neighborhoods.

Can we focus on the racist things trump does and says rather than his unknowable innermost feelings about race? TS and others would very much like to spend time arguing about the later rather than the former precisely because it is unprovable.

if someone routinely acts in a way that creates unjust racial inequality then that person is racist in the most important sense of the word. -well named

This!

There are parts of the post you quoted which speak directly against the idea of characterizing either Bill Clinton or Levitt as "full blown racists", if I understand your intended meaning. So no, I wouldn't say that.

But the way welfare reform (I picked it as the typical example here) was pursued was racist, yes, in the sense that it both contributed to racial inequality in an unjust way, and in that the way the political issue was framed leaned pretty heavily into some racist stereotypes.

This does not mean, in my view, that we ought to cast Clinton entirely out of polite society and label him "a racist" end-of-story.

If a white person enslaves a white person for reasons of pure personal gain, it's not racist (presumably?). This was very common in various places and times:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_slavery

But if a white person enslaves a black person for the exact same reasons of pure personal gain, it's automatically racist?

I do not think that is a tenable position. In fact, I would call it a highly untenable position.

Racism certainly served as a justification for continuing slavery, but it was mostly economic in a world largely indifferent to the suffering of the non in-group (serfs vs aristocracy, women vs men, white Vikings vs white Brits, children in factories). Life was hard and short and empathy was low. Africans rounded up Africans to sell to white and Arab slavers due to same reason (life was hard and short and empathy was low). Were the Africans rounding up Africans to enslave and sell into slavery racist in doing so?

As another historical example: when Muslims enslaved Europeans en masse for hundreds of years (much of the European Mediterranean coast was depopulated by Muslim slave raiders. Is that racism given that the races are different? Is it sexism given that it's men enslaving women for sex? In some parts (e.g. Kurdish regions under the Turks), boys were also enslaved as sex slaves and war conscripts. Racism? Sexism? Convenience?

All these terms (racism, sexism) applied to historical motives in world largely without modern empathy and dismissive of all non-in-groups seem a little ridiculous.

Let's grant the bolded. Would you say making racist decisions in business or politics when you have the opportunity to make non-racist decisions is also worthy of condemnation? That is, do you agree with the people who condemn Trump for utilizing racist rhetoric and business practices, but you're agnostic about exactly which evil motive drove him to do so? I.e. could be racism, or it could be cynical opportunism coupled with a lack of care for other people?

What's missing from your thought experiment is social and historical context. In a hypothetical world (or even just some far-flung place with a very different history), where no systematic discrimination on the base of race/ethnicity/skin color existed, there would be no "racism" per se. The concept wouldn't be useful. That is, there would be no reason to draw a distinction between two acts on the basis of the race/ethnicity/skin-color of the people involved in such a world, and thus no reason to describe either of your examples as racist.

But we in the contemporary western world are not living in such a hypothetical. What makes an act racist is its connection to the creation and maintenance of unjust forms of racial inequality. It's an historically contingent category and evaluation. "Racism" is only a meaningful category because our history has made it so. So, in your examples, chattel slavery was racist, because of its connection to the historical context. Regardless of the individuals involved in specific aspects of the slave trade. Whether or not slavery in other historical societies may be reasonably described as racist depends upon the details.

Of course, to be very clear, this does not imply that there's nothing wrong with enslaving white people or that doing so is somehow less morally repulsive.

Ok so maybe some cogs in the system at that time were passively racist. Granted.

Took less than a week for racism to take a firm hold here.

It is all a bit of fun.

A point just made in the last hour was, slavery in the us was not racist because white slavery exists.

Thisisfinedog.jpg

If your business becomes unprofitable, is it fair game to call it racist?

Imagine either being this ignorant or assuming other people are.

All these terms (racism, sexism) applied to historical motives in world largely without modern empathy and dismissive of all non-in-groups seem a little ridiculous.

TS is now driving the topic from trump's racist statements and actions to history hundreds of years ago. On topic? Good faith?

TS is trying to argue that Trump isn't racist by substituting a very particular definition of racism in rather than the one which is typically used. On topic? Close enough given that the topic was about Trump being racist. Although clearly the question was presuming the more normal definition of racism. Good faith? Meh.

The argument is supposed to be that "Trump isn't racist because <very carefully crafted definition of racism in which any act motivated by something other than racial animus isn't racist>."

I don't think this argument is really that interesting in a politics forum and I think the objections to it have been laid out already. It's also pretty clearly designed to be overly provocative. I think we should move on.

It's not a lie if you believe it. -George Costanza

You're not racist if you believe it. -ToothSayer