Well, that is racist, isn't it? I guess the point is that the bot doesn't appreciate when something's being racist for educational and historical purposes. Reminds me of Facebook taking down important but disturbing primary source journalism.
Yes, and that's one of the problems with a zero-tolerance policy of censoring problematic speech - doing so without understanding and allowing for historical context means whitewashing history as well, because history itself is problematic in modern terms. Huckleberry Finn and Uncle Tom's Cabin have been banned from school libraries for similar reasons, missing the point entirely.
Uh... no? It's a simple, straightforward English phrase. Speech which is problematic, as opposed to speech which is not.
"Problematic" being defined as "constituting or presenting a problem or difficulty."
Racist speech in historical documents constitutes and presents a problem or difficulty for modern readers. That's kind of the entire premise of the posted article. There is no doublespeak or newspeak or whatever "1984" is supposed to imply, involved.
> May I suggest that ``problematic'' speech is often simply what people don't like to hear?
To be fair, that's just a restatement of the original definition. If someone doesn't want to hear a certain kind of speech, then they find it problematic.
> Now, platforms definitely should choose sensible defaults, but one should be able to easily opt out of them.
Also to be fair, Facebook apparently caught the error and corrected it, and it does have plenty of ways to opt out as a user.
The biggest problem here seems to be the assumption that a sensible policy can be automated.
When a settler's cabin was attacked, the warriors would attack everyone -- armed men plus unarmed women and children. At the end of the attack, captured women and girls would often be raped then killed. The surviving men would be scalped and tortured to death over a couple of days. The injured would be hacked to death by the Indian women and children. You can debate how often this happened, but first-hand stories are relatively common in surviving military personnel diaries from the time.
What would be our reaction today if a group of people attacked a family and did such things? We talk about the horror of mass shootings, but they don't even come close to that level of horrifying. All of this violated the rules of war and decent behavior. After seeing the remains of this horror show, what would you be inclined to do when you caught up with the perpetrators?
Mens Rea
If I sell you the Brooklyn Bridge and demand payment in Monopoly money, who's the real crook? I would be because I sold what I did not own and reaped a profit (however small) at your expense. If an Indian sold land they didn't believe they owned for what they believed to be valuable, who was the real thief?
Consider scalping. While it is generally considered a method of trophy collecting, the meaning was deeper. A scalped warrior was denied access to the eternal hunting grounds. Literally, to their minds, scalping was a way of keeping someone from going to heaven. Doing this from the motive of hatred or payment by the French/British was still the ultimate condemnation (and in the case of payment, without even the excuse of honor).
The re-writing of history to fit current politics doesn't do society any favors.
I like how we begin your story in media res with the settler's cabin already established as if ordained by the laws of nature, disrupted from its idyllic divine creation by these warriors perpetrating violence.
I thought it axiomatic that squatting on someone else's property was not the same as butchering someones entire family.
That aside, you cannot claim land cannot be owned then claim ownership over it. However, if ownership can be claimed, then who is the owner, the thief or the thief who steals from the first thief?
Consider the Sioux. People think of the Sioux as the plains Indians, but they lived in the great lakes area. The Iroquois stole their land from them. In turn they fought to drive off the semi agrarian Pawnee Indians (who had good relations with the settlers -- probably because they were settling down themselves) winning a decisive victory by massacre.
If you go farther back than that, there is tribe after tribe fighting and butchering the previous one.
Going to Europe, you see the same pattern. Tribes butcher each other until they are conquered or a tribe survives long enough to settle and establish dominance. I don't hear about the land argument when discussing those indigenous peoples (and unlike the Indians, most of them believed land could be stolen).
I believe two wrongs don't make things right and in the case of scalping both parties were evil.
Torture and revenge are not justice. If a man raped, tortured, and killed a little girl then her mother hunted him down and tortured him to death the same way he made her daughter suffer, both acts would be the same action. Both would be evil. The motive and duress of the mother would lead to a different mens rea and different punishment because anyone except a psychopath would understand the difference in situation.
Perhaps they could just tag content as racist, but still let it show - just give it a rating or visible highlight.
Perhaps also add a “historical” or “contemporary” tag.
People could opt out, but more importantly, we could see who is posting racist stuff vs. it being censored before hand and not allowing anyone to engage with the poster.
I’m not certain nerfing all social media is the answer.
Things should be taken in historical context. What's completely politically correct and progressive today will be horrific tomorrow.
A BBC exec recently criticized Monty Python for being politically incorrect (in today's terms). Of course they were on the leading edge at the time, and now they are being vilified.
Political correctness is the western equivalent of the hard-line extremists that destroy ancient art in the middle east. It's just wrong.
I find the case of Monty Python extremely important because some of their sketches are even more poignant (and funny!) today. Many would have no chance of being created and aired. However, the painful issues behind them, such as following some dogmas with blind faith and the consequences of such actions, are still there and watching Monty Python today gives young viewers a refreshing perspective.
"Merciless Indian savages" isn't something we should just accept because we must reject political correctness. The Europeans who came to Anglo-America were usually impoverished societal rejects, with difficult economic or religious situations yet airs of superiority over the American natives. The oppression they experienced at the hands of richer Europeans back in the old world was redirected at the other group they could punch down towards: the natives who had been recently genocided by foreign diseases and gunpowder.
This is a very common human trait. When you have a group of people experiencing hardship, they will look for someone at a greater disadvantage than them to redirect their retribution to. The economic hardships that Germany felt after WW1 were blamed on the marginalised Jews. Most people in the antebellum South were poor, not wealthy plantation owners, but of course the entire white population could punch down towards what they viewed as childish or animalistic slaves. Today economic downturn and lack of jobs can be blamed on illegal immigrants, instead of the galloping wealth disparity.
This has got nothing to do with being very careful with speech so as to not offend anyone. It's got nothing to do with political correctness or incorrectness. These words, "merciless Indian savages" are about one of the greatest atrocities committed in the name of freedom.
You claim "punching down" as a motive. What evidence do you have?
Your claim that disease is genocide is ignorant (probably linked to the "smallpox blankets" hoax). There was no germ theory at that time. They thought you'd catch smallpox from bad humors and that blood letting could cure it. In contrast, blankets were super expensive. Making thread and weaving it was a painstaking affair before automated looms. A goodwill gift of blankets being turned into a desire for mass murder is quite a large shift. Likewise, it wasn't illegal to sell guns to Indians until long after the homestead slaughters happened.
The average American settler family lived on less than $2 per day (less than $60/month) in today's money. For contrast, the average Chinese individual monthly income is $850 or around $28/day. Any settler was way more oppressed than anyone alive today.
The "oppression lens" of history and politics is seldom (if ever) useful for rational discourse. It forces a propagandized view of the situation.
When you've been genocided, whether intentionally or not, when you've been displaced from your lands, whether intentionally or not, and when you're being fighting wars with those who intentionally or not were responsible for this, yeah, this is punching down. Bear in mind that by the time when Europeans were landing, the native population had already been literally decimated -- 95% of the native population of the east coast was already dead. The modern US is in a very literal sense a post-apocalyptic society.
You can be poor and still be punching down. There's always someone further down you can find. Illegal Mexican immigrants in the US are often quite racist against black people, for example. Or other impoverished European immigrants against the Irish in the 19th century.
This isn't about guilt and you seem to be defending against some kind of guilt. Guilt and blame is utterly pointless, especially close to 250 years later. All we can do now is recognise that "merciless Indian savages" is a kind of dehumanisation of a group of people that had already suffered greatly at the hands of Europeans and would continue to do so still for centuries to come.
Genocide is defined as intentional. For this reason, smallpox in America (like the black death in Europe) is not genocide while the Young Turks killing Armenians or Saddam Hussein gassing Kurds is genocide.
As to the idea of "punching down". The North was punching down when they invaded the South and forced them to free their slaves. I think this was a good thing. Having power and using it isn't synonymous with evil. The issue with "punching down" is that it implies that position always entails abuse. People who use the phrase always seem to shut up when the punching down is in their favor.
> Illegal Mexican immigrants in the US are often quite racist against black people, for example.
Illegal immigrants leave a terrible situation to work the worst kinds of jobs here because they are still better than what Mexico offers. They live under constant threat of deportation too. You then paint these people as having privilege and say they're all racists. If punching down is a thing, you might just win a medal.
More interesting to me is that this reply from the editor:
>>
Editor Casey Stinnett wrote afterwards of the offending paragraph: "Perhaps had Thomas Jefferson written it as 'Native Americans at a challenging stage of cultural development' that would have been better.
>>
Seems racist as well. Not from Jefferson, but from the editor. The only real “challenge” was that the colonies wanted their land and resources and were willing to do anything it took to get them.
Perhaps the point is that racism isn’t just words, but also intent.
Jefferson was racist, trying to mask that with language may be hard.
The closest thing I can come to is just admitting one is racist or awareness of your own projections.
“The native Americans are a strong mirror for our own disowned savageness. For the way in which our disconnection from Self and has lead to a quest for power and resources which have blinded us to the common humanity we share with all peoples. Our inability to resolve the savageness we harbor towards our own humanity within us leaves us no choice but the futile attempt to destroy its reflection in those we project it upon.”
Why is it invalid to assign value to two different cultures? E.g. IMO a culture that encourages genital mutilation or slavery is inferior to a culture that doesn't. (Although in practice all such value assignments are highly multi-dimensional, so there might not be an overall ordering.)
Edit: This isn't a comment on whether or not Jefferson's evaluation of his and the natives' cultures was valid or correct.. but what I gather from your comment, is that you're implying any such value judgement is "racist" ("culturist"?).
It's less 'invalid' than a slippery slope (though I appreciate your counterargument that there are many axes to measure on). For example, it was expedient for Jefferson's government to present the original inhabitants as "merciless savages" since demonizing the people you are forcibly displacing and exterminating is easier to explain away. "Merciless savage" is not some sort of objective comparison of social development, it's a simple denial of common humanity, which seems to always lead to terrible things. Ironically of course the early US was "a culture that encourages slavery" (as were many Native American groups, but never on the same scale).
Oh, yeah, I completely agree that the context makes this more complicated and morally dubious... It's just that these days, people seem to be more opposed to the phrasing of something, as opposed to its actual meaning (or the actions that follow). I definitely think that even if we can all agree that some people are "savages" and their cultures are less worthy in every dimension than ours, this still doesn't give us the right (or excuse) to kill/murder/oppress them.
I imagine it would be hard to find a society that is "less worthy in every dimension" than another (and I'd be especially wary of making that comparison with your own society and another). That strikes me as close to the viewpoint Jefferson was espousing, and while I wouldn't suggest romanticizing Native American cultures (also popular, in other circles), they clearly had (and still have) their strengths and weaknesses. So I doubt there could (or should) be any kind of agreement on who are "savages" - in part because that seems to be a much more loaded value judgement than bland but less-loaded glosses like "simpler societies" - plus it's not clear what they're being found wanting for, failing to produce their own Industrial Revolution? Not developing modern medicine? Not writing novels or symphonies? Those are good things, but hardly all that humans are capable of.
White Americans progressively pushed the American Indians off of their land, and in reaction, there were many cases where the American Indians responded by slaughtering the families of white American settlers -- not just the men but non-combatant women and children. So one can see why many white Americans did regard the American Indians as "merciless savages", and also what caused the American Indians to behave as they did.
That's an incredibly simplified view of what actually happened, and therefore a false narrative - about what you'd expect from watching a Hollywood movie. In many cases, American Indian tribes had been fighting each other for millenia, and thought they could use the newcomers to their advantage against enemy tribes. The Sioux, for example, were newcomers to the plains, having recently driven out / exterminated other tribes that had been there for quite some time.
If you're interested in this sort of history, there are many good books. Here's one:
Thank you for this. Balance it hard to find. The fact is that we are speaking not of a monolithic nation, but of individual tribes with unique histories. Lumping Native Americans into a single bucket, while politically useful, is ahistorical. Nations war over access to land and resources. This is just at true of the first nations as it is of the new worlders.
The atrocities committed by the US government against the first nations should not be whitewashed. Neither should the atrocities committed by one tribe against another. But few would contest the obvious truth that the former greatly exceeded the latter in terms of scope and effectiveness, particularly due to the imbalance of power.
I don't. But I also don't stigmatize it. They treated the white settlers just like they treated rival tribes - as competitors for land and resources. As in nearly all of human history, these conflicts are settled by war and bloodshed.
How advanced is facebook's "hate speech detector" anyway? It seems like they're just checking a blacklist of bad words and maybe doing some rudimentary NLP.
47 comments
[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 110 ms ] threadNot surprising, however.
Uh....1984, much?
Uh... no? It's a simple, straightforward English phrase. Speech which is problematic, as opposed to speech which is not.
"Problematic" being defined as "constituting or presenting a problem or difficulty."
Racist speech in historical documents constitutes and presents a problem or difficulty for modern readers. That's kind of the entire premise of the posted article. There is no doublespeak or newspeak or whatever "1984" is supposed to imply, involved.
Of course, I think it's their right to choose what they want to hear. But that does not mean I defend censorship.
How to filter the content they consume should be every individual's choice.
Now, platforms definitely should choose sensible defaults, but one should be able to easily opt out of them.
To be fair, that's just a restatement of the original definition. If someone doesn't want to hear a certain kind of speech, then they find it problematic.
> Now, platforms definitely should choose sensible defaults, but one should be able to easily opt out of them.
Also to be fair, Facebook apparently caught the error and corrected it, and it does have plenty of ways to opt out as a user.
The biggest problem here seems to be the assumption that a sensible policy can be automated.
I mean.. not sure I disagree
What would be our reaction today if a group of people attacked a family and did such things? We talk about the horror of mass shootings, but they don't even come close to that level of horrifying. All of this violated the rules of war and decent behavior. After seeing the remains of this horror show, what would you be inclined to do when you caught up with the perpetrators?
Mens Rea
If I sell you the Brooklyn Bridge and demand payment in Monopoly money, who's the real crook? I would be because I sold what I did not own and reaped a profit (however small) at your expense. If an Indian sold land they didn't believe they owned for what they believed to be valuable, who was the real thief?
Consider scalping. While it is generally considered a method of trophy collecting, the meaning was deeper. A scalped warrior was denied access to the eternal hunting grounds. Literally, to their minds, scalping was a way of keeping someone from going to heaven. Doing this from the motive of hatred or payment by the French/British was still the ultimate condemnation (and in the case of payment, without even the excuse of honor).
The re-writing of history to fit current politics doesn't do society any favors.
Who's rewriting what now?
That aside, you cannot claim land cannot be owned then claim ownership over it. However, if ownership can be claimed, then who is the owner, the thief or the thief who steals from the first thief?
Consider the Sioux. People think of the Sioux as the plains Indians, but they lived in the great lakes area. The Iroquois stole their land from them. In turn they fought to drive off the semi agrarian Pawnee Indians (who had good relations with the settlers -- probably because they were settling down themselves) winning a decisive victory by massacre.
If you go farther back than that, there is tribe after tribe fighting and butchering the previous one.
Going to Europe, you see the same pattern. Tribes butcher each other until they are conquered or a tribe survives long enough to settle and establish dominance. I don't hear about the land argument when discussing those indigenous peoples (and unlike the Indians, most of them believed land could be stolen).
Torture and revenge are not justice. If a man raped, tortured, and killed a little girl then her mother hunted him down and tortured him to death the same way he made her daughter suffer, both acts would be the same action. Both would be evil. The motive and duress of the mother would lead to a different mens rea and different punishment because anyone except a psychopath would understand the difference in situation.
Perhaps also add a “historical” or “contemporary” tag.
People could opt out, but more importantly, we could see who is posting racist stuff vs. it being censored before hand and not allowing anyone to engage with the poster.
I’m not certain nerfing all social media is the answer.
A BBC exec recently criticized Monty Python for being politically incorrect (in today's terms). Of course they were on the leading edge at the time, and now they are being vilified.
Political correctness is the western equivalent of the hard-line extremists that destroy ancient art in the middle east. It's just wrong.
Just because something is from the pages of history, doesn't mean it should be presented as perfectly fine today - that's also wrong.
This is a very common human trait. When you have a group of people experiencing hardship, they will look for someone at a greater disadvantage than them to redirect their retribution to. The economic hardships that Germany felt after WW1 were blamed on the marginalised Jews. Most people in the antebellum South were poor, not wealthy plantation owners, but of course the entire white population could punch down towards what they viewed as childish or animalistic slaves. Today economic downturn and lack of jobs can be blamed on illegal immigrants, instead of the galloping wealth disparity.
This has got nothing to do with being very careful with speech so as to not offend anyone. It's got nothing to do with political correctness or incorrectness. These words, "merciless Indian savages" are about one of the greatest atrocities committed in the name of freedom.
Your claim that disease is genocide is ignorant (probably linked to the "smallpox blankets" hoax). There was no germ theory at that time. They thought you'd catch smallpox from bad humors and that blood letting could cure it. In contrast, blankets were super expensive. Making thread and weaving it was a painstaking affair before automated looms. A goodwill gift of blankets being turned into a desire for mass murder is quite a large shift. Likewise, it wasn't illegal to sell guns to Indians until long after the homestead slaughters happened.
The average American settler family lived on less than $2 per day (less than $60/month) in today's money. For contrast, the average Chinese individual monthly income is $850 or around $28/day. Any settler was way more oppressed than anyone alive today.
The "oppression lens" of history and politics is seldom (if ever) useful for rational discourse. It forces a propagandized view of the situation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_smallpox#Epidemics_...
You can be poor and still be punching down. There's always someone further down you can find. Illegal Mexican immigrants in the US are often quite racist against black people, for example. Or other impoverished European immigrants against the Irish in the 19th century.
This isn't about guilt and you seem to be defending against some kind of guilt. Guilt and blame is utterly pointless, especially close to 250 years later. All we can do now is recognise that "merciless Indian savages" is a kind of dehumanisation of a group of people that had already suffered greatly at the hands of Europeans and would continue to do so still for centuries to come.
As to the idea of "punching down". The North was punching down when they invaded the South and forced them to free their slaves. I think this was a good thing. Having power and using it isn't synonymous with evil. The issue with "punching down" is that it implies that position always entails abuse. People who use the phrase always seem to shut up when the punching down is in their favor.
> Illegal Mexican immigrants in the US are often quite racist against black people, for example.
Illegal immigrants leave a terrible situation to work the worst kinds of jobs here because they are still better than what Mexico offers. They live under constant threat of deportation too. You then paint these people as having privilege and say they're all racists. If punching down is a thing, you might just win a medal.
>> Editor Casey Stinnett wrote afterwards of the offending paragraph: "Perhaps had Thomas Jefferson written it as 'Native Americans at a challenging stage of cultural development' that would have been better. >>
Seems racist as well. Not from Jefferson, but from the editor. The only real “challenge” was that the colonies wanted their land and resources and were willing to do anything it took to get them.
Jefferson was racist, trying to mask that with language may be hard.
The closest thing I can come to is just admitting one is racist or awareness of your own projections.
“The native Americans are a strong mirror for our own disowned savageness. For the way in which our disconnection from Self and has lead to a quest for power and resources which have blinded us to the common humanity we share with all peoples. Our inability to resolve the savageness we harbor towards our own humanity within us leaves us no choice but the futile attempt to destroy its reflection in those we project it upon.”
I'm fairly certain that you could even automate the transformation of text such that it remains essentially the same without triggering any bots.
Edit: This isn't a comment on whether or not Jefferson's evaluation of his and the natives' cultures was valid or correct.. but what I gather from your comment, is that you're implying any such value judgement is "racist" ("culturist"?).
If you're interested in this sort of history, there are many good books. Here's one:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17571536-the-heart-of-ev...
The atrocities committed by the US government against the first nations should not be whitewashed. Neither should the atrocities committed by one tribe against another. But few would contest the obvious truth that the former greatly exceeded the latter in terms of scope and effectiveness, particularly due to the imbalance of power.