Comment by tacitusarc
12 days ago
There is a large amount of academic literature claiming racial groups are purely ethnocultural, and in that light it is ridiculous to claim a soap dispenser is racially biased.
12 days ago
There is a large amount of academic literature claiming racial groups are purely ethnocultural, and in that light it is ridiculous to claim a soap dispenser is racially biased.
The US has its own special meaning of "race", "racial group" and similar – but, since societal groups are what society thinks they are, this means that "racial groups" in the US are (in large part) defined by things like skin colouration. In that context, claiming that the soap dispenser is "racially biased" is a perfectly good description.
If you perform a root-cause analysis (a soap dispenser doesn't exist a vacuum), you will discover "racial bias" in the structures and institutions that designed and created the soap dispenser. Metonymically, therefore, it's even more accurate to claim that the soap dispenser is "racially biased".
(Author's note: I continue to reject the US's conception of "race". Please do not understand this comment as legitimising it in any way.)
Say you're making a soap dispenser. It doesn't work for some people. You don't really care or notice because they're members of racial groups that you actively dislike or maybe just don't really care about.
Couldn't the soap dispenser still be an instrument of racial bias, even if this racial group is an ethnocultural distinction?