This longer tweet was made in response to Gamepro5’s article “Modern day Racism.”
The issue we have in today’s society isn’t racism, its racial prejudice, or pre-conceived opinions formed on people by a specific factor like their skin color.
I’m quite sure what you’ve described is racism? According to Google, racism is “prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against someone of a different race based on the belief that one’s own race is superior” (emphasis added by me).
The human brain likes to simplify things to categories them nicely, but unfortunately, that doesn’t work for classing other humans.
Humans finding patterns is a tactic that has aided us in evolution; by finding patterns in the appearance of plants and correlating them together, for example, one can identify which are edible and which aren’t. Unfortunately, this also works well enough for races because race is often tied with culture, which determines one’s behaviour, so their observable patterns are common enough that we develop generalizations for them.
We shouldn’t be surprised if neural networks forms similar prejudices because that’s what they’re supposed to do: find patterns in data.
All it takes is to see one person that doesn’t fit the stereotype for your brain to reconstruct that stereotype.
Not necessarily; I personally may simply regard them as an exception, and if these “exceptions” become common enough, I may not even notice this shift until this is explicitly pointed out to me.
For example, I use hair shortness to quickly determine if someone I meet is male, though this would be further refined as I get to know them; boys with long hair I still regard as exceptions.
In my opinion, in a few years, like when our generation will be the eldest, racial prejudice will be 100% gone,
Our generation will be the eldest in around perhaps 50 years; that is not a few years.
Also, with one significant figure in 100%, that number can be anywhere from at least exactly 50%. /s
Racial prejudice is inevitable; even if it is simply regarded as skin colour or the style of our last name, we will still find patterns when we group people by those attributes. There are already stereotypes for hair colour and height; for example, some believe many tall people play basketball.
Instead of thickening the divide, why not ignore race in particular and just conform with the culture of where you are currently living and just get along with the people around you,
Conforming to a culture is a terrible idea; why should we give up our own traditions when we move to a new area? We should instead retain our original cultures while embracing the new ones.