But then "personal responsibility" is really just a code phrase used to protect privilege and create fake moral justification for forcing people to live in poverty and endure oppression, and not actually meant to be a call for people to examine the consequences of their behavior and work to change their behavior in order to minimize harm to others, isn't it?
Having had many discussions about this type of thing before, I'll ask a new question. Your premise is that an "ism" is a reflection of uneven results on some identity line, and that each person needs to own their participation in creating these results. Therefore you conclude that individual intention is either (a) irrelevant, or (b) unexamined, and that therefore perceived motivation isn't useful compared to the final result.
My question: What if a person's individual attitude and even moral choices in a culture/society/noosphere is actually
not contributary to the uneven result? In other words, what if the system producing these results is not related to the individual self-awareness of the people in it? I'll try to give a couple of examples of this.
EXAMPLE
Culture A is highly motivated to succeed; we might call them ambitious, even greedy. Their children are taught that monetary success if everything.
Culture B is taught that enjoying quietness, being peaceful, and giving one's advantage away is the most important thing.
Premise: each of these cultures also has a racial divide between them; i.e. they developed in geographically differing areas without mixing.
We might well see in short order that people of racial group A end up much richer than those in racial group B, after having both begun mixing in the same geographical zone. Soon the wealth disparity becomes self-perpetuating.
Question: Is racial group A part of a "racist" system and need to check their privilege and acknowledge that each of them is contributing to racism?
EXAMPLE 2:
In a mining town there's work in a mine where conditions are very hot during work, but the best paying jobs are in the mine. Racial group A in town has a natural resistance to heat, whereas group B finds it difficult to tolerate those conditions. After some time group A has acquired financial dominance in town.
Do the members of group A need to check their privilege and acknowledge that they contribute to a racist system producing uneven results along racial lines? Does each individual need to note how he/she can modify their behavior in order to alleviate the racism inherent in the system, that they personally contribute to?
My questions are hopefully a way to examine the question of how you differentiate between an "ism" that is caused by human ignorance or uncaring about the harm they cause, versus results that would naturally emerge regardless of anyone's attitude.
