I'm not sure I get the point of this article. On the teacher example, of course we discriminate based on skill, no one's disputing that. I could not find a deeper point than discriminate by legitimate metrics but not by skin color, race, etc which is fairly obvious.
The point of the article is that using outrage and shame culture to resolve discrimination can be just as bad as acts of discrimination themselves. The act of shaming a person can make you feel you have done your 'good deed for the day', and allow you to unconsciously commit your own biases against others. The article suggests that instead of shaming or attacking biases we observe in others, we should reflect on ourselves first, and fix our own misdeeds and mistakes.
The entire article could be summarized from a verse in the (NKJV) Bible:
Why do you look at the speck in your brother's eye, but fail to notice the beam in your own eye?
Because my brother is actually being a racist, which is a beam in his eye, whereas I am calling him out for being a racist, which, if we accept that there's something wrong with "outrage and shame culture" (which, tbh, I mostly see used interchangeably with "PC" as a catchall putdown by people upset that they can't just talk shit about minorities and women without consequence like they used to be able to do in the good ol' days), is a speck in my eye.
Is that really what you got from the article? I feel like the author makes a pretty valid point: everyone pattern-matches people at first impression. If you decide to climb on a tower of moral virtue because you think you've consciously decided to stop pattern-matching on the basis of race/gender and thus don't introspect about your (many) other subconscious biases, you're really not doing anyone a favor.
I was specifically responding to the idea, suggested by Afforess, that "using outrage and shame culture to resolve discrimination can be just as bad as acts of discrimination themselves", which is ridiculous, and which the second paragraph of the article at least somewhat seems to imply.
Obviously, if someone claims they've defeated the biases that everyone falls prey to constantly, they are almost certainly incorrect. But, at least in my experience, I've never seen that; I've seen a lot of people who are cognizant of the studies suggesting everyone's prone to bias who then try to consciously counteract that, I've seen a lot of people reject those studies and their conclusions entirely and claim they and many others can make judgments that are not prone to those biases, and I've seen a lot of people who don't know what studies you're talking about. I haven't seen anybody saying "Everyone is prone to these biases except me," much less the epidemic the article suggests.
You can literally go on twitter and find somebody spewing racist shit every second of every day. You cannot do the same with "people claiming that everyone is implicitly biased except for them".
You can literally go on Facebook and find somebody spewing "you're racist". They may or may not think "I'm racist too, but I handle it better." For some reason they usually are careful not to say anything pointing to that direction. We can't know that those people think.
That racist stuff on twitter could be just humor and nothing more. We don't know how those people think either.
The point of the article was "hey people, you might be biased in this way." Now what's wrong with saying that aloud?
" On the other hand, Ziring says, the Snowden leaks have sparked other students' interest. "[They say], 'I actually know some of what you do now, and that's really cool and I want to come do that," he says."
