All Cops are Racists - Unfalsifiability

richard smith writes:

hasty generalization

noblenutria@gmail.com writes:

So it is a non sequiter because it is a division fallacy?  It does not follow that all individual police officers are racist just because the institution of policing is racist.  

I have been trying to figure out if this "equation" is falsifiable.  If it is not then it is meaningless.  
Racism = power plus privilege

Some counterarguments to this argument are...

There are powerless people people who are still racist, such as a racial-epithet-hurling pennyless hobos.  The equation believers say that if the hobo is white then he is racist because he is a member of a powerful class.  If the hobo is non-white then he is not racist because then he is not from a powerful class.  

Another argument is that non-white rich people can be racist.  The equation believers say it does not matter if non-white person is a billionaire.  If he is not white then he is not powerful.  Therefore he is not racist but merely prejudiced.  

According to the equation believers white equals powerful and non white equals not powerful.  Maybe this is the unfalsifiable part of the problem.  Maybe to the equation believers there is nothing which would prove to them that white did not equal power.  

TrappedPrior (RotE) writes:
[To noblenutria@gmail.com]

So it is a non sequiter because it is a division fallacy?  It does not follow that all individual police officers are racist just because the institution of policing is racist.  

Yes, this is correct. Unless of course, they're using a forked definition of racism, in which case, you're dealing with a word game, not an argument.

Racism = power plus privilege

It is worth noting that this 'equation' is an out-of-context rip from academia. The originator intended it to be  stipulative and used alongside the normal definition of racism, to indicate that it is not symmetrical - minorities will face the brunt of any racism that takes place in society. Woke people appear to have taken it and used it to argue that one cannot be racist towards whites, which would not follow.

Aside from that, though, there are other fallacies.

Vague -  what does 'power' mean here? What 'power' are we talking about? Power to change the system? Power to discriminate? If it's the latter, does everyone not have this since everyone is  able  to discriminate? 

Division -  whites are overall the most powerful (in terms of resources) racial group in the U.S. Does that mean all whites have 'power'? We cannot infer this, as evidenced by the existence of poor whites.

Incongruous  - what sort of 'racism' is even being defined here? It appears to be describing institutional racism at the expense of individual occurrences of discrimination. If a black person (A) tells a white person (B) that they're lesser than them because they're white, where's the institution backing me up? If it does not exist, does that mean that a clearly racially discriminatory message ceases to be 'racist'? If we reverse the roles and B is racist to A, there's no institution backing them up either - they're just a random racist white person. Is this act also racist?

The third one is important. I've seen people on Twitter argue that discriminatory statements targeting whites are either a) not racist, just 'racially prejudiced' or b) not a problem, because there's no 'institutional effect' - but is this not the case for all isolated instances of racism? If I scream the n-word at someone, there's no 'institutional effect' either.

noblenutria@gmail.com writes:

Thanks

This helps me because most of my friends believe this racism=prejudice plus power, white people are born racist, black people by definition can't be racist and it has been a morbid hobby of mine to study these arguments and try to counter them.  

I have ascertained from equation believers that white people have all the power until institutional racism is torn down.  After that there is no institutional effect and white people are no longer born racist and black people can be racist to white people.  

This is a way in which the equation is unfalsifiable because the institution of racism might never be torn down to the satisfaction of the equation believers.  Racism has gotten tamer over the years in that the worst types of overt racism are on the decline, but smaller types of racism arise in the public consciousness, like racist microagressions, so institutional racism may never end, so white people will always have all the power, and the assertion that white people will stop being institutionally racist eventually in unfalsifiable.  

I think the "its not racist its racially prejudiced" argument is a distinction with no difference fallacy: as if racist insults are bad and a racially prejudiced insults are giving someone good advice or something.  

GoblinCookie writes:

Since this is not a Scientific statement, unfalsifiability does not really matter.  It is also quite falsifiable, since if only one cop is found not to be a racist then the statement is falsified.

The statement would work better if they said Most Cops are Racist.  But that is not how rhetoric works unfortunately, people prefer absolute claims even though they are rarely true.