Direct and Indirect wrote:
ayyyyyyy wrote:
I appreciate your actually thoughtful posting and not just attacking my mental health. Even if we don't 100% agree we can still talk about how the sentence structure was used in the context of the brojos/Gault always focusing on where black athletes who immigrated to the US were born. I just think is superfluous. How would the article read any differently if they just cut that stuff out. And now referring to those athletes as a stable didn't sit right with the websites history.
By all means, continue to throw personal insults but the brojos & their staff are all white men and they have zero training on race + gender. They fall flat all the time in those areas. It isn't too much to ask them to show some introspection. By labeling US athletes as Kenyan born they are the ones bringing race into it because they want us, their audience, to know that there is something different about them. Some of their insistence to do this rooted in racial biases (whether that was their intention or not, implicit bias is a thing).
I am trained in this field. There are two elements to the description that may be examined for potential legal transgressions.
Firstly, the use of the word ‘stable’. I have definitely read it on here being used to describe other groups of athletes coached by one coach, from more varied backgrounds. But I tend to agree with you that using the word to describe a group of athletes because of their race or ethnic background is directly discriminatory. It depends on whether the other descriptors sufficiently qualify so as to remove it from being racist in tone, or perhaps make it worse. If it refers to a group of athletes in one training group or coached by one group, I cannot agree that it is racist, even indirectly, because it is a term in common usage to refer to other athletes in similar training groups.
The second descriptor you complain of are the words ‘Kenyan born”. There is absolutely nothing wrong with referring to which country people are born in. We really do not want to discourage that. ‘Kenyan’ is not a dirty word and ‘Kenyan-born’ says nothing about nationality. We do not want to get to the stage where mentioning certain countries is automatically seen as derogatory. The words ‘Kenyan-born’ refer to a fact which is true and is not an offensive term in any way.
So then we go on to ask if the relating of the two words together creates something more offensive than the two descriptions taken singularly.
We must also ask if the description is superfluous, either in whole or on part, and whether that makes it racist.
I believe that you have subtly picked up on the latter. I cannot say whether you are correct or not as I am not a judge in a court. What I would say is that from my knowledge of the law, without any superfluous input from SJW ‘woke’ types, taking it by its intended meaning and not reading into it elements which are not there, I do not believe that it is.
We cannot be out in the situation of not being allowed to refer to athletes from a certain wth in background using descriptions commonly used to refer to other athletes. That in itself would be indirectly racist and really rather offensive. In your interpretation, we would be allowed to refer to Klosterhalfen, if she moved to Salazar, as ‘German born, from Salazar’s stable’, but not Sifan Hasan.
I think as well as being sensitive, you are actually holding certain prejudices yourself, particularly that you view being born outwith the US as in some way inferior to being born within it, and therefore unmentionable. You are so sensitive that any mention of a persin’s ethnic background or country of birth automatically triggers you to assume it is racist.
I cannot agree that someone’s (belonging such as yourself) prejudices and life experiences should inform the law so as to make it apply to some but not others. Law should be clear and interpreted so as to be straightforward, not to have a tortuous, varied application.
This was well done. I want to clarify that I do not think being born outside the US makes you inferior. I think it's a position people jump to (with knowledge or without -- think implicit bias again) when they see things written like this. I like the website is creating or cultivating this view. And, white folks, do generally have more favorable associations with white people. I think by the website insisting on doing this that they perpetuate that claim.