Comment Replies: Human Rights, Racism, Politics, Islamophobia, Feminism

1. 

   @stiofanmacamhalghaidhau765

   November 22, 2025 at 3:57 pm

   the best way to understand 'race' is as equivalent to words like 'type' or 'class' or 'category' or 'kind'. doing so (which goes back to its original meaning in romance languages and how it entered the english language) allows us more easily appreciate both the broader usage as per Sheff, and also see how it got used first as a broad category term, then as a way to characterise certain categories 'lesser' based on physiological traits. essentially the same kind of thing has been done using some other general category words like 'class'

2. 

   @KarolaTea

   November 22, 2025 at 3:57 pm

   If some state has the right to employment in their law, then shouldn't that state also define who has to provide that employment? Like, if a state has in its law that you have a right to basic necessities, they'll usually define the provision of such by putting an agency in place that will pay people benefits. So I'd say just writing "right to employment" in the law and then not defining who has the duty to supply such employment… just seems like a poorly written/thought out law.

   I guess the difference between what we 'traditionally' understand as race and other stuff (sexuality, gender,…) might be inheritance? Like if people will call you a certain thing just because your parents were too, then that's race. Could be that that's linked to genetically passed down observable traits like skin colour, but doesn't have to be, seeing as Jewish people are often seen as Jewish by inheritance. Meanwhile things like sexuality are generally presumed to be limited to an individual and not passed down to children. IF people started treating sexuality as if it was inheritable, then yeah, it'd become a race.
   I guess in that vein class used to be a race, since it was seen as God-given, and if you were born to poor parents you are destined to be and stay poor yourself and even if you somehow make it to a higher position you will always stay a peasant. Wheras now the idea of it is more flexible (officially), you're encouraged to 'work your way up', and if you can successfully assimilate to another class then you are generally seen as that class. (Whether that's realistic or not is another question.)
   So it's still soverein power, managing an 'unruely group', by racialising them in dividing them from the rest of the population and claiming that this divide is inheritant.
   (iirc that was also one of the criticisms of 'transracial'. Race is inherited, you can't just switch it. Gender is not inherited, so yeah, being transgender is perfectly fine.)

3. 

   @VileVanGogh

   November 22, 2025 at 3:57 pm

   You did well here clearing up the confusions and misapplications of focus and fielding of questions! Considering the sensitive nature of the material it must have been tense.

4. 

   @Pfhorrest

   November 22, 2025 at 3:57 pm

   The whole "you can't be racist against white people" thing is a tempest in a teapot caused by those who insists that institutional racism is the only thing that counts as "racism". A non-white person can trivially discriminate against a white person, and racial discrimination is the simplest form of racism. A non-white person can even have power over a white person — a white person can work for a black boss, for example — who can just as trivially discriminate against him, bringing power dynamics into the equation as well. Just because there isn't institutionalized non-white power institutionally discriminating against white people doesn't mean that there isn't and can't be racism against white people, it means there isn't INSTITUTIONAL racism against white people. Feel free to argue that institutional racism is the only important kind worth talking seriously about, sure, but you do nothing but generate unnecessary confusion by insisting that the "institutional" qualifier is unnecessary, and simple racial discrimination on an individual level "isn't racism".

5. 

   @Pfhorrest

   November 22, 2025 at 3:57 pm

   Positive rigthts don't pose any problem for Hohfeldian analysis specifically. You do need to say who exactly has the duty that a positive claim entails, but you need to do that one way or another or else the claim is fairly meaningless. The Hohfeldian analysis, at worst, just points out that necessity: a claim consists in someone else's duty, so if you say someone has a positive claim to something, you're saying someone has a duty to provide that, so who exactly are you saying has that duty? That's not a problem for analyzing the right in Hohfeldian terms, it's just a question that needed answering anyway.

6. 

   @vathek5958

   November 22, 2025 at 3:57 pm

   Just FYI Rwanda was colonised first by Germany and later by Belgium after WW1 as a League of Nations mandate.

7. 

   @Boulder7685

   November 22, 2025 at 3:57 pm

   Love all the people forgetting that Sheth’s proposal doesn’t exclude race as a factor, and using that as the basis for denying it. Especially the people saying it’s used to say that racism towards whites can’t be called racism. It’s obvious what they’re doing when they mistake that part.

8. 

   @TJF588

   November 22, 2025 at 3:57 pm

   Re: racism against "whites": I think the question I'd like to see addressed, is whether a "race" formerly framed as that in power cannot be framed as unruly, whether in the power structure which they are currently or formerly framed as the empowered or whether in a separate structure either within or without the former. This all feels like it may fall into "theoretical" consideration, but I mean even something as local as a neighborhood or school (which, then, is likely set within a "white"-dominant structure, like the U.S.).

9. 

   @paustecri

   November 22, 2025 at 3:57 pm

   A lot of these arguments could be easily avoided just by using less ambiguous wording.

   Saying "systemic racism against white people as a demographic isn't a thing in the west" is one thing. An argument can be made for that and even if someone disagreed at least all parties would be clear on what is and isn't being argued.

   Saying "you can't be racist against white people" is needlessly misleading because most people default to thinking of 'racist' as referring to the prejudicial actions and attitudes of individual people, and 'white people' as referring to individuals who are white. Phrasing it as " you can't" all but invites that interpretation.

   The latter reading is obviously nonsense because every individual has a sphere of power and influence, however limited, and within that sphere it's entirely possible for them to act in prejudiced or bigoted ways towards any demographic. Hence people jumping to the defensive.

   I have to admit I find it a little suspect how this confusion could be so easily avoided, and yet so many people seem to almost go out of their way not to avoid it.

10. 

    @FuzzLyricz

    November 22, 2025 at 3:57 pm

    Always so helpful!

11. 

    @blacktigerpaw1

    November 22, 2025 at 3:57 pm

    3:30 "You can't be racist to white people"

    You say this can only happen in 'some possible world', Olly, but this some possible world does exist. I am going to give you a few examples.

    In South Africa, after the fall of apartheid, the black majority (Xhosa and Zulu) would write songs about the white Boers. The songs go like this:

    "yesab’ amagwala (Cowards are scared)
    Dubula! dubula! dubula nge s’bhamu (Shoot, shoot, shoot them wit a gun)
    Dubul’ ibhunu (Shoot the boer)
    Dubula! dubula! dubula nge s’bhamu (Shoot, shoot, shoot them wit a gun)
    Mama, ndiyeke ndidubul’ ibhunu (Ma, let me shoot the Boer)
    Dubula! dubula! dubula nge s’bhamu (Shoot, shoot, shoot them wit a gun)
    Ziyareypa lezinja (These dogs rape)
    Dubula! dubula! dubula nge s’bhamu (Shoot, shoot, shoot them wit a gun)"

    There was also the Barbary slave trade, which sold slaves of the Caucasian stock. Ottoman traders would kidnap them from all over and sell them – the women as sex slaves, the men as warriors – as human chattel. The Irish, for example, were no more than indentured service, and there is evidence that, for every Irish slave, they were worth 5 cents while a black was worth 50.

    You quote from Sheth that whites being prejudiced against is impossible because they have always had a position of power, and bring up the Jews as an example. That's another argument altogether, but I'm going to focus on your obvious lack of knowledge of history, Olly, because, ironically, you are reading philosophy and laws and treatises written by white people.

    Then, you go on about discussions of racism always centre around 'white people's feelings' and that people of colour – which is ironically racist – are always the victims of systemic racism, and subtly imply that individuals such as yourself need to help. Especially so that as a white man you claim to be the voice of the oppressed – which is Buzzfeed level thinking, I might add.

    5:09 "Saying that white people can't be victims of racism is not the same as them being the only ones that are racist" – Olly, this is exactly the point you are making: Whites cannot be prejudiced against because they are the oppressors and have always had positions of power. What a self-contradiction!

    5:44 "I don't know much about Zimbabwe…I think a post-colonial historian would have something interesting to say" – So the blame is on the European powers for African brutality. Thank you, Olly. Post-colonial 'historians' make these race-based conclusions on the idea that blacks are fundamentally innocent. In the case of Rwanda, the Hutu and the Tutsi have historically committed genocide against each other before the Belgians even landed there (not the Dutch) and it seems this fact is inconveniently forgotten by your beloved post-colonial historians, who would only be using the stock argument of: Africans are violent because of white people. You are talking about a continent with over 4,000 ethnic groups. In the case of Zimbabwe, the rival tribes in the area had no civilization to speak of. The Rhodesians – which also included Indians – made Zimbabwe an exporter in coffee and other goods, to which it was called the 'Breadbasket of Africa'. Those racist whites made it so good for blacks to give them education and roads and now, under black rule, suffer famines and now beg for the whites to come back.

    Olly, this is easily researched, but you refused. You admit that Sheth's theories are geared towards a Liberal audience. This makes her work flawed, both to other audiences and to real-world data. As it was said, paraphrased, in the series Rome, courtesy of Octavian, "If you do not have the facts, you cannot have an argument."

    When people pointed out that your used of 'white people cannot be victims of racism', you doubled-down and said that you were just using Sheth's theories which are completely untenable in the case of imperialism and the partition of Africa.

    Racism exists in all people, of all ethnicities, in all corners of the globe. Sephardic Jews and Eastern European Jews are not liked by the Ashkenazim. The Chinese do not like the Tibetans or the ethnic Uyghurs that live as a minority in their nation. The Russian Slavs do not like Chechens or Tatars. The Poles do not like the Russians. The Hungarians do not like Russians. The Estonians don't like Russians. The English don't like the Scots (of which group you belong to, Olly) and countless more. In South Africa, Joseph Mandela, a Xhosa, was hated by Jacob Zuma, a Zulu. Why? Because the Xhose were one of the millions displaced by the Zulus by Shaka Zulu's Great Scattering, which killed upwards of 3 million people. But you are far more focused, as are these post-colonialist historians, on, say, King Leopold's alleged killing of 30 million Congolese, an untenable and unprovable number.

    Post-colonialist history ironically shows that Africans are unable to think or work for themselves without the burden of racism. Many blacks became successful, and in the case of South Africa, world-class doctors. The racism they suffered was not from intolerable whites (many explorers actually befriended African tribes and lamented European nations for not doing anything to help their suffering) – but from each other.

    This is what this sort of philosophy does: it's post-modern philosophy. If I am to use Aristotelian philosophy, or any of the Greek methods of using real-world examples to formulate a probably theory, it is that the philosophy you are using is based on who wins the Oppression Olympics. It is this:

    – All history can be explained through the power of white people disempowering people of colour.
    – Post-colonialist history and African aggression is explained because of white racism.
    – There is no racism against white people, as they are in positions of power always.

    Well, then. I suppose the South African farm murders, the Barbary slave trade, or those taken in Arab slave trades do not count as we must pay for a practice we alone abolished and which every single ethnic group has practiced in history.

    One last thing: 'Islamophobia' doesn't exist. There's no such thing as Christianophobia or Hinduphobia, and it's not a phobia when they are actively trying to impose their culture in yours. Would this be because of underlying hatred over the Crusades, Olly?

    You cannot explain modern failures based on past hatred. If this were so, you would still hate the English for basically throwing you out the door, and Britain would hate Scandinavia for all its raids and massacres it committed on British lands. But we don't hold that guilt, do we?

    Facts make the argument, Olly. Not some uninformed opinion masked by philosophy. Why don't you read Credo Mutwa, and African, who tells you the dark side of his people? Or would that not be favourabel, as he is not white and you only focus on white philosophers? Oh the irony.

12. 

    @notbadsince97

    November 22, 2025 at 3:57 pm

    It's nice to know a large portion of the ppl that watched these video's lack the power of seperating words with a different temporary definition, with the sole purpose of understanding the ideas/train of though within the set context and not that of the dictionary…just wonderful

13. 

    @JosephGubbels

    November 22, 2025 at 3:58 pm

    "Black institution being explicitly and obviously racist against whites? Must be white peoples' fault!" The mental gymnastics it takes to maintain your race-as-class ideology is ridiculous.

14. 

    @GravityFromAbove

    November 22, 2025 at 3:58 pm

    Every philosophy student I've ever met seems to share one major trait. They tend to defer to other philosophers, rather than speak their own ideas. I understand. The more reading you do the more humility you must feel. And yet there comes a point at which I say get out behind the shield. (I actually shocked a pair of philosophy majors once in New York City who said to me in surprised tones "You actually have your own ideas.")

    In these recent ideas about race and power, and they are quite recent, you defer to Sheth, who in turn seems to be basing her work on Foucault. And while you obviously find her thought compelling, everything falls apart as soon as you ask the question so the "Who is Sheth to be such an authority?" And if one has already interrogated Foucault and found him seriously deficient Sheth then falls apart.

    So I am left here with the intellectual justification for the new politically correct ideologies, which indeed pretty much have grabbed the ring of power on the merry-go-round in the Western world. And so we seem to be finding new definitions of oppression by the formerly oppressed… And yet maybe they aren't so new. (See communism.)

    I do appreciate the fact that you are attempting to answer questions though. Keep it up. I'd just like to hear the results of your own wrestling with ideas. I don't mind the quotations though.

15. 

    @Nnnn88888

    November 22, 2025 at 3:58 pm

    Wait racism is judging people based on their race, not the individual person. A black person can judge a white person based on their race, just as much as a white person can judge a black person by their race.

16. 

    @Pandaemoni

    November 22, 2025 at 3:58 pm

    The "Dutch" occupation of Rwanda? While some of them speak Dutch, it was the Belgians that controlled Rwanda, not our friends from the Netherlands. You are dutchist. <kidding>

17. 

    @ThePaddy1122

    November 22, 2025 at 3:58 pm

    People who state that you can be racist against white people (because the dictionary defines it in such a way that it appears to allow this) are often the same people who say that feminism isn't just "equality of the sexes" because of how it is used. I'm not saying you have to accept the position that you can't be racist to those in power, but it seems to me to be intellectually dishonest to say that the dictionary definition strictly applies to one concept (racism) but not to another (feminism).

18. 

    @Terryn2bob

    November 22, 2025 at 3:58 pm

    wouldn't it be better to ignore race?

19. 

    @IrontMesdent

    November 22, 2025 at 3:58 pm

    Olly, I think the main problem here is that not everyone agrees with the definition Sheth gave about Sovereign power. For an instance, what happens if a Caucasian is being bullied by a group of Asians because he/she's white in a school where the majority of people are people of colors? The Asians cannot be racist toward the Caucasian because the Caucasian is in power in the country. So… what should we call it?

    Personnally, I think that, in this case, the Asians can be racist even though they are not in "power" of the municipality/State/Province/country. They have power because they have the numbers and that their actions their "mistake" is not major enough to be punished by the higher echelons of power. The president won't go to that school, arrest the Asians and put them in jail. Neither will the state police or municipality. The only one that could interfere would be the director of the school and sometimes, directors let some conflicts like these slide under the radar. If the higher echelons of power are not taking actions against the perpetrators, Could we say that the Bullies are in charge and have power? I think we could say that it is true until someone else in higher echelons of power intervenes.

20. 

    @BreakinBoog

    November 22, 2025 at 3:58 pm

    While I agree that racism is typically used to the benefit of white people, aren't there massive historic cases where this isn't necessarily true? Take, for example, the case of the Ottoman Turks and their occupation of the Balkans. Most folks would consider the typically brown or olive-skinned Turks to be middle-eastern, or at the very least west-asian, considering their origins in the steppes. They colonized the olive-skinned (typically considered white) Greeks and Slavs of the Balkans and enmity still exists between the two groups today because of their former roles of colonized and colonizer. Isn't this an instance in which racism wasn't necessarily colorist, and in which folks we would consider white assumed the role of the oppressed rather than the oppressors?

    And what of white-on-white racism, such as that experienced by Slavs from the Germans and Austrians during the late 1800s and the first half of the 1900s, or on the part of the Irish from their British oppressors since the Norman conquests?

21. 

    @KRIGBERT

    November 22, 2025 at 3:58 pm

    Please do an episode or five on discursive democracy.

22. 

    @TheJenx1

    November 22, 2025 at 3:58 pm

    I have a rather stupid question that is related to this entire discussion – what the fuck is a "white person"? No, I'm serious.

    Here's some context for you – I am Bulgarian. My mother and father are both Bulgarian as well, and I was born in Bulgaria and I still reside in this country. I have dark brown hair, hazel eyes (the most common colors in the Bulgarian ethnic group) and I have fairly pale skin, due to my work requiring me to sit indoors in front of a computer. So here's the question – am I "white"?

    If yes – why? If no – why? Being of Eastern European descent (and about as far East as you can go before people stop calling it Europe) I will be considered in some countries in Europe to be either a second-class citizen or, if you go back a few decades, a subhuman species that needs to be exterminated from the world.

    So again – what's a white person? Am I white? If so, why the fuck should I feel any obligation, any guilt or any responsibility for the acts of the English, Portuguese and Spanish colonial powers and their treatment of native populations from centuries ago, and the resulting culture of discrimination that has arisen from it.

    And if I'm not "white", then what am I by your definition? Could it be possible that the situation is not as cut and dry as you appear to think it is by repeatedly accepting Sheths' ideas.

    Cheers!

23. 

    @Shogero

    November 22, 2025 at 3:58 pm

    Painting psychoanalysis with a Marxist brush.

24. 

    @dford192

    November 22, 2025 at 3:58 pm

    As a recently identifying trans person I am really excited about your gender identity video.

    Thank you for all of your work. 🙂

25. 

    @MaxwellLeftington

    November 22, 2025 at 3:58 pm

    Going to request a treatment of Marxism until I get it, Olly. Still love you.

26. 

    @notyourlod

    November 22, 2025 at 3:58 pm

    So I get the idea that race is a social construct. Many people widely consider a wide group of people Asian for example because of how they look and exclude Indians from that group even though India is geographically part of Asia. What I'm not so sure about is who goes about defining each "race". I mean I think people are just as likely to group or categorize themselves as they are to do that for other people, and on just as superficial terms. How does personal identity play into this? Does it even matter who started defining a group by its "Blackness", "Whiteness" or "Asian-ness"? I still believe we need to distinguish between systemic and individual racism. Conversations about both can be meaningful and productive.

27. 

    @dirty_diver

    November 22, 2025 at 3:58 pm

    I think what people are confused about is how we deal with institutionalised/systematic oppression that creates inequality as society at large and individuals being generally discriminated against for what ever the reason that doesn't fit into the larger issue.

Comments are closed.