Bigotry, Definitions, and Point-Scoring

Let's just say racism, there are a host of analogous forms of bigotry, but let's start there. I think it's a safe assumption that we all agree racism is a problem. Even people who do racist things are quick to say, "It's not racist." That seems to me to be a small piece of evidence that suggests maybe we all do. 

I'm sure, if I scramble, I can find a few fringe people out there who are proud to be labelled racist, but I'm going to act under the assumption that's a very small minority, and for the purposes I'm after at the moment, a negligible one.

So we all agree racism is a problem. That must mean that, if it's possible to eliminate, we'd all think the world would be a better place without it. So, what might eliminating racism look like?

That's where it all goes to hell. The answers to that question are myriad, and they're all predicated of diverging concepts of what racism is. We don't, I sure hope, want to claim that racism is subjective or relativized. We'd rather all be talking about the same thing. But it isn't sufficiently clear that we are. 

Let me give a wild, beetle-in-the-box example to exaggerate what I mean. If I idiosyncratically call roses "baseball games", and you are unaware of this idiosyncrasy, we might get into a very serious argument about whether or not I saw a dozen baseball games in a vase.

What we think the meaning of the word is has huge impacts on what we think should be done if we want to eliminate the phenomenon, just as we might have radically different strategies if we both want to eliminate baseball games. 

So my first point is that we'd better be clear what we're talking about.

My second point is, I hope, a bit broader.

Whatever we think racism is, we must at least acknowledge that it involves very deep-seated, engrained attitudes about people, some we might not even be aware of consciously. These kinds of attitudes do not simply fall off overnight. It requires years (decades? generations?) to identify and acknowledge them, confront them, deal with them, eliminate them. A well-crafted pithy jab simply isn't up to the task. 

And here's where I hope to get broader: the idea that there's an Us and a Them, and that by making these little jabs at Them will "take down" those views we find so contrary to our own doesn't just miss the point. It's positively counterproductive. Across the spectrum--Us and Them--there is work to be done sniffing out these attitudes in ourselves and setting to work on them. Point-scoring does nothing to aid this process, it causes us to bury these attitudes even deeper. It polarizes the conversation and pushes diverging points of view to unnecessary extremes. It prevents the process. 

(I would say something similar about political discourse. Then again, one could argue that toeing the party line is another form of bigotry).

I don't have a nice clean solution to conclude with, because that's the nature of the thing. To assume otherwise is dangerous and arrogant. However, Voltaire does come to mind: "Il faut cultiver notre jardin."

"What kind of music do you like?"

It's over complicated to answer this question. It is for me, it is for you. No one treats it that way, and I don't know why not. 

Firstly, the idea of genrefication in music is pretty problematic. I can't make it make sense to say there are two artists in the same genre, barring some very general similarities or pretty general differences. There are general sounds, I suppose, but one artist can shift and re-shape, morph, bend, break, invent, etc all within the same genre, so that what is at one end of the spectrum, while ostensibly the same genre, has very little in common with what's at the other end.

Really all a genre name is meant to do is simplify out all of those little complexities: to find a way of talking about music while also ignoring every one of its interesting features. It is unhelpful shorthand. 

On the other hand, to dig into all of the fine-grained distinctions, multiply our genre lexicon to the extent that it would be able to handle all of those distinctions would also be unhelpful, because no one would know what anyone else was talking about. Setting up those genre lines would be just as nebulous as not setting them up: ask two country music fans what "real country" is, and you'll get three different answers, each of them supposed to mean "this is definitional of the genre", but actually just means "this is something I like".

In short, the genre game is just nonsense.

But Secondly, I don't pay much attention to genre anyway. I don't mean to say I have "eclectic" tastes, that's just as unhelpful and obnoxious as anything else. What matters to me most is lyrics, what they're about, how they're phrased. Whether or not I'm hearing something put in a way I've never heard it put before, etc. Individual people are "better" or "worse" at that (this is subjective, I just mean I like it more or less), and they're spread out all over. It's not eclectic, it's really only one thing I like. That one thing just doesn't map at all onto the concept of genre.

So is this a reasonable answer to the question?

Well, yes and no. It adequately answers what I'm looking for (I think), but that isn't what's being asked for is it?

Because, Thirdly, this question only exists to weasel the shorthand genre answer out of someone, not because that's helpful. It isn't. It's so that we can use this (non-)information to make character assessments of other people. It's to decide if you and I belong to the same category, and if we do, we can be friends, and if not it's going to be rocky. 

Based on practically no information at all!

It's amazing to me that anyone ever has friends.