Saturday, December 23, 2017

Homeopathic Racism

Update:  Please see comments about where I got some of this wrong.

Update 2: I don't know that I have ever deleted a post entirely.  I have vague memory of it but can't tie it to a subject.  I got this wrong enough that it should come down.  There are parts of it I still like.  The concept of people getting overexcited by homeopathic dilutions of racism, sexism etc is worth keeping and I may bring it back soon.  But the person I accused of this didn't do what I claimed she did.  I researched her original paper, but not her surrounding comments when it hit the news, and that changed everything. It concerns the description of "Jingle Bells" as racist, and the professor does not think the song is still racist today.  She was just pointing out that its origins are a bit worse than we might think.

I am thanking Richard Johnson for putting me on to the complete story.  Sorry to be deleting the comments.

As I am teaching a Sunday School class on the Ten Commandments starting in about a two weeks, and have decided that the directions not to bear false witness are much more expansive than I have observed before, I figured I had better delete the whole thing, regardless of how clever I thought some of the writing was.

4 comments:

james said...

I'm stealing the phrase "homeopathic racism."

For those not familiar with homeopathy...

Sam L. said...

Racism diluted until there's less than a millionth left? Imagination will increase it by 10 orders of magnitude.

james said...

No, no, the dilution makes it more powerful, right?

Sam L. said...

Well, that's their story, and They're sticking to it, James! I'm sticking with mine own in-ter-pre-ta-tion.