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prase comments on Open Thread, August 16-31, 2012 - Less Wrong
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It is not the fact that the person has black friends that is supposed to count as evidence of their racism. It is the fact that they say that they have black friends in response to an accusation of racism. The response is the evidence, not the fact (if it is a fact) that the response is reporting. So what would be evidence against the racism hypothesis is not saying things like "I'm not racist; some of my best friends are black."
I'm not saying this is great evidence either, but it is not as obviously ridiculous as thinking that not having black friends is evidence against racism. I wouldn't be at all surprised if saying "Some of my best friends are black" is anticorrelated with actually having black best friends.
My honest response to "do you have black (indian/chinese/..) friends?" is something like "no idea, I don't usually notice hair, eye or skin color".
EDIT: wondering about the downvotes... does it sound non-believable or something?
That is a great signalling response, but honest? You really don't know whether your friend is black or white?
This may be strongly culture-dependent.
In some culture you can find many people of any skin color on your social level. In other culture, things may be completely different. In different cultures people will notice different facts, because those facts will bring different number of bits of information.
For example, if there is exactly one black person in otherwise white town, and it is a well-known person (especially well-known for something that is somehow related with them being black -- for example well-known as the billionaire prince from Nigeria), then obviously everyone remembers whether they have 1 black friend or 0 black friends in the town; and if they say otherwise, I would suspect hypocrisy.
Perhaps this all just shows that one should not blindly copy heuristics just because they worked in a different environment.
In my culture I can find people both straight and curly hair on every social level (and although I can't say for sure there is no hair texture to status correlation, I am not aware of any prejudices with respect to this), but it never occured to me that I could be ignorant about whether my friend has straight or curly hair. Maybe I use "friend" too restrictively.
You might be ignorant about whether some of your friends have naturally curly or straight hair.
Yes, I might, as well as I might be ignorant about whether Michael Jackson was naturally white or black. I wonder why you consider this particularly relevant.
Not unless their skin is coal-black, no. For example, I was surprised to learn that Condoleezza Rice was considered "black". Same with people of East Indian, Philippino or often even Chinese descent. Then again, I live in Vancouver, Canada, where race (however you want to define it) is basically a non-issue, so I don't notice stuff like that, unless pointed out to me. Probably my personal blind spot, of course. A friend of mine (I'm pretty sure she is white) often refers to her acquaintances by their ethnicity when talking about them ("that Yemeni dude"), and I just stare blankly.
Well, as we all know, race is a purely social construct with no underlying biological basis; unfortunately, LWers are known for their very poor socializing skills and understanding of social norms. So shminux, a LWer, doesn't know?
Not very surprising, actually!
I know race is a social construct, but no underlying biological basis? Isn't this Lewontin's fallacy?
No, as I understand it, Lewontin's fallacy is considered to be not the claim that there is no underlying basis, but that this is established by looking at raw percentages of between-group vs within-group variation.
Although I assume you aren't being serious, remember that shminux claimed that he doesn't notice hair, eye and skin colour. As far as I know, colour is not a purely social construct, althout if shminux were a continental philosopher, I could imagine him believing that it is.
C'mon, color is totally a social construct!
There really should be a phrase for socially constructed divisions or elaborations of a continuous empirical space.
"self-fulfilling distinctions"?