I'm a great fan of the Namiki Vanishing Point fountain pen myself. I find that the convenience of the retractability means that I use it more often.
But the real reason I'm commenting here is for want of a better way to reply to your comment over in ap_racism. I didn't want you to think that I'd ignored your comment, but I can't respond to you there because I've been removed from the community, which you might take as a sign that I'm impenetrably committed to my White privilege.
To feel that prejudice implies antipathy is to warp the standard definition of the word.
Eh? Gordon Allport's well-known definition from The Nature of Prejudice is Prejudice is an antipathy based on faulty and inflexible generalization. It may be felt or expressed. It may be directed toward a group or an individual of that group. In my experience, that's how the word is commonly understood. So I'm puzzled. What do you regard as the standard definition of the word?
You imply that benign people can't be prejudiced/racist, and that is very, very far from the truth.
Agreed! I hadn't meant that to be my implication.
I take you to mean by “benign” something along the lines of people who are acting out of what they think are positive intentions. There are many ways in which one can be benign in this sense while still acting out of prejudice. And in the context of pervasively racist society, actions that are racist in their consequences are inevitable. So benign people can be prejudiced and racist.
But the tricky point I was trying to get at is that one can be racist --- one can do things that contribute to racist injustice --- without it always being a consequence of prejudice. I find that linking racism to prejudice too tightly leads us to either define racism too narrowly (as most Whites would do) or to overextend the idea of prejudice in one way or another (as I think happens sometimes in forums like ap_racism sometimes) in order to connect to racism's many manifestations.
For example, in an earlier comment on that post I cited college admissions. One can be a college admissions officer who isn't acting out of prejudice and still be racist. Even if we redact from college applications anything that might tell the admissions officer an applicant's race, so that a prejudiced response is impossible, the officer can still be contributing to a racist admissions process, racist because of how it fits into a bigger system of education which is racist in its processes, distribution of resources, et cetera.
But the real reason I'm commenting here is for want of a better way to reply to your comment over in ap_racism. I didn't want you to think that I'd ignored your comment, but I can't respond to you there because I've been removed from the community, which you might take as a sign that I'm impenetrably committed to my White privilege.
To feel that prejudice implies antipathy is to warp the standard definition of the word.
Eh? Gordon Allport's well-known definition from The Nature of Prejudice is Prejudice is an antipathy based on faulty and inflexible generalization. It may be felt or expressed. It may be directed toward a group or an individual of that group.
In my experience, that's how the word is commonly understood. So I'm puzzled. What do you regard as the standard definition of the word?
You imply that benign people can't be prejudiced/racist, and that is very, very far from the truth.
Agreed! I hadn't meant that to be my implication.
I take you to mean by “benign” something along the lines of people who are acting out of what they think are positive intentions. There are many ways in which one can be benign in this sense while still acting out of prejudice. And in the context of pervasively racist society, actions that are racist in their consequences are inevitable. So benign people can be prejudiced and racist.
But the tricky point I was trying to get at is that one can be racist --- one can do things that contribute to racist injustice --- without it always being a consequence of prejudice. I find that linking racism to prejudice too tightly leads us to either define racism too narrowly (as most Whites would do) or to overextend the idea of prejudice in one way or another (as I think happens sometimes in forums like ap_racism sometimes) in order to connect to racism's many manifestations.
For example, in an earlier comment on that post I cited college admissions. One can be a college admissions officer who isn't acting out of prejudice and still be racist. Even if we redact from college applications anything that might tell the admissions officer an applicant's race, so that a prejudiced response is impossible, the officer can still be contributing to a racist admissions process, racist because of how it fits into a bigger system of education which is racist in its processes, distribution of resources, et cetera.
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