Tom Ritchford
1 min readFeb 12, 2021

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My objection to your article comes from the verb "to be". :-)

Saying everyone "is" a racist makes the term useless, and more, encourages people to misbehave ("everyone does it!") You are programming people to have "racist" as part of their self-image.

On the other hand, saying that everyone thinks racist thoughts, but we can choose whether or not to act on those thoughts, encourages people to do better.

I mean, what reward does your program offer to your average white supremacist American? Even if they give up their evil ways, they'll still "be" a racist, so what's the point?

And we can't kill them all, unfortunately, so we really have to try to program them to do better.

To be honest, I avoid using the verb "to be" as much as possible, because it has so little meaning and is so open to misuse. Almost all racist statements involve the verb "to be", which lets you tar some huge group of humans with the same brush with no mental effort.

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