I am a Racist
That's right. I'm a racist. I do, have, and will have sometimes violent and often dismissive impulses about random strangers that are different from me. These impulses are borne of fear of others, fear of that which I don't understand, and hatred for those that don't honor me ( or whom I feel don't honor me) and mine. I have used the word 'nigger' in anger and meant it (OK, not as an adult) I have looked askance at the way people dress and talk. I often imitate and parody foreign accents for the amusement of those around me. I suspect ( if I don't think about it too much) that my particular culture is superior, by which I mean better, more noble, more advanced, and more grounded in goodness then your culture, oh gentle reader. I'm pretty sure (again, if I don't think about it too much) that people who don't speak English well are not as smart as me. I have knowingly and unknowingly helped people who resemble me (or whom I can relate to better) to the detriment of those who look different from me. I'm a racist and a classist and a sexist and an age-ist.
But before you sneer at me, before you discount me and my views as purient and vile. Before you warn your children to stay away from me, advise your dog to bite me, and your cat to pee in my shoes, there is something I'd like to tell you: I bet you're a racist too. And a classist and an age-ist and a host of other kinds of 'ists' that I'm not prepared to rattle off this afternoon.
Now, the clever introspective ones among you are nodding, likely mumbling half in shame and half in dogged acceptance of the human condition, "yes, yes, Capo, I'm a racist too' while the less introspective among you are saying, shouting maybe even, "No, No capo, I'm not a racist. I love red and yellow black and white people equally. " But before you tell me some of your best friends are the other and discuss you fondness for 'ethnic food' and 'African art' or 'Norse mythology' or whatever element of the other you have chosen to embrace I should tell you that your pleas will fall on largely deaf ears. It is not that I won't trust your sincerity or that I won't believe you like/love these things that are different from you and yours. It is that I think you are incapable of rising up against your prejudice in any fundamentally meaningful way. I want you to consider something.
Fear of those things that you do not understand is a integral part of the human condition. And that cold fact has a brother: We can't truly understand anyone, not even ourselves. Each of us is different in principal than the person who sits beside you in class, occupies the house next door, or the cubicle right next to you. And each and every one of those fine people have prejudice in their hearts, if not spewing out of their mouths or displayed on their fucking t-shirts.
Its the way our brains work. Not in some airy-fairy psycho-babble sort of way either, but at a mechanical level, down at the level of the neurons and the neuroglia that encases them. Our brain cells our racists too, each and every one of the ten billion or so of them. We are sorting, categorizing, stereotyping animals. It is what we do, the way we are wired. Anybody who claims different is a liar or a fool or simply doesn't know any better.
Computer scientists have begun to use models of neural networks to develop parallel processing computer thingies. The advantage is that, through some alchemy that involves a kind of higher math that I've repeatedly proven myself incapable of, these computer modeled neural networks can learn. You run the network through what task you wish it to accomplish and when the results suck you correct the errors and run the task again and correct the errors again. Eventually these networks learn to do the thing you fervently wish it would.
They did this with a program whose purpose in the universe was to identify and recognize pictures of faces. This is what how it worked: They got a set of a thousand or so pictures most were faces but some were not. they came up with a scheme of dividing this pictures into Cartesian zones and then they 'trained' a neural network to sort faces from non faces and then to identify/match like faces in a particular set. In short the machine could recognize people. Now get this: they did this with several sets of faces (a black set, a white set and an Asian set I believe). They trained the system separately on each of the sets of faces and when it got really good at recognizing faces in a particular set they tried it out on one of the other sets. The program having been really good at say recognizing white faces in various poses and expressions and knowing that this face was a girl's face and that these tow pictures were both jane or jill or whatever, really sucked when it tried the same feat with black or Asian faces . . those faces of ethnic backgrounds other then the one it was trained on pretty much all looked alike to the computer. They all looked alike. Sound familiar?
This of course proves exactly nothing. It was a extremely simple test with an extremely simple neural network by comparison with the feats that a real brain and a real neural network can do. But it does seem instructive or at least evocative to me.
So I think we're all a bunch of racists, but I'm not resgined to the fact, no not at all. Just like every other human failing I think it is our task in the universe to fight against these animalistic tendencies to rise above the pettiness that we are born with. to become more like God, more like rock stars to become closer to some universal concept of human. Or sometihng like that
That's right. I'm a racist. I do, have, and will have sometimes violent and often dismissive impulses about random strangers that are different from me. These impulses are borne of fear of others, fear of that which I don't understand, and hatred for those that don't honor me ( or whom I feel don't honor me) and mine. I have used the word 'nigger' in anger and meant it (OK, not as an adult) I have looked askance at the way people dress and talk. I often imitate and parody foreign accents for the amusement of those around me. I suspect ( if I don't think about it too much) that my particular culture is superior, by which I mean better, more noble, more advanced, and more grounded in goodness then your culture, oh gentle reader. I'm pretty sure (again, if I don't think about it too much) that people who don't speak English well are not as smart as me. I have knowingly and unknowingly helped people who resemble me (or whom I can relate to better) to the detriment of those who look different from me. I'm a racist and a classist and a sexist and an age-ist.
But before you sneer at me, before you discount me and my views as purient and vile. Before you warn your children to stay away from me, advise your dog to bite me, and your cat to pee in my shoes, there is something I'd like to tell you: I bet you're a racist too. And a classist and an age-ist and a host of other kinds of 'ists' that I'm not prepared to rattle off this afternoon.
Now, the clever introspective ones among you are nodding, likely mumbling half in shame and half in dogged acceptance of the human condition, "yes, yes, Capo, I'm a racist too' while the less introspective among you are saying, shouting maybe even, "No, No capo, I'm not a racist. I love red and yellow black and white people equally. " But before you tell me some of your best friends are the other and discuss you fondness for 'ethnic food' and 'African art' or 'Norse mythology' or whatever element of the other you have chosen to embrace I should tell you that your pleas will fall on largely deaf ears. It is not that I won't trust your sincerity or that I won't believe you like/love these things that are different from you and yours. It is that I think you are incapable of rising up against your prejudice in any fundamentally meaningful way. I want you to consider something.
Fear of those things that you do not understand is a integral part of the human condition. And that cold fact has a brother: We can't truly understand anyone, not even ourselves. Each of us is different in principal than the person who sits beside you in class, occupies the house next door, or the cubicle right next to you. And each and every one of those fine people have prejudice in their hearts, if not spewing out of their mouths or displayed on their fucking t-shirts.
Its the way our brains work. Not in some airy-fairy psycho-babble sort of way either, but at a mechanical level, down at the level of the neurons and the neuroglia that encases them. Our brain cells our racists too, each and every one of the ten billion or so of them. We are sorting, categorizing, stereotyping animals. It is what we do, the way we are wired. Anybody who claims different is a liar or a fool or simply doesn't know any better.
Computer scientists have begun to use models of neural networks to develop parallel processing computer thingies. The advantage is that, through some alchemy that involves a kind of higher math that I've repeatedly proven myself incapable of, these computer modeled neural networks can learn. You run the network through what task you wish it to accomplish and when the results suck you correct the errors and run the task again and correct the errors again. Eventually these networks learn to do the thing you fervently wish it would.
They did this with a program whose purpose in the universe was to identify and recognize pictures of faces. This is what how it worked: They got a set of a thousand or so pictures most were faces but some were not. they came up with a scheme of dividing this pictures into Cartesian zones and then they 'trained' a neural network to sort faces from non faces and then to identify/match like faces in a particular set. In short the machine could recognize people. Now get this: they did this with several sets of faces (a black set, a white set and an Asian set I believe). They trained the system separately on each of the sets of faces and when it got really good at recognizing faces in a particular set they tried it out on one of the other sets. The program having been really good at say recognizing white faces in various poses and expressions and knowing that this face was a girl's face and that these tow pictures were both jane or jill or whatever, really sucked when it tried the same feat with black or Asian faces . . those faces of ethnic backgrounds other then the one it was trained on pretty much all looked alike to the computer. They all looked alike. Sound familiar?
This of course proves exactly nothing. It was a extremely simple test with an extremely simple neural network by comparison with the feats that a real brain and a real neural network can do. But it does seem instructive or at least evocative to me.
So I think we're all a bunch of racists, but I'm not resgined to the fact, no not at all. Just like every other human failing I think it is our task in the universe to fight against these animalistic tendencies to rise above the pettiness that we are born with. to become more like God, more like rock stars to become closer to some universal concept of human. Or sometihng like that
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