Talk:I'm not prejudiced, but...

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A sort of similar phrase starting:

  • "I used to an atheist, but ..."

always sounds suspicious to me.--BobSpring is sprung! 19:26, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

89% of the time someone says they are a "former atheist" they're lying. [1]— Sincerely, Neveruse / Talk / Block 19:42, 23 April 2010 (UTC)
88.2% of statistics are made up on the spot.[2]
Strangely, exactly 13.825% of people who say: "I used to an atheist, but now I believe in talking snakes." have cereal for breakfast.--BobSpring is sprung! 21:32, 23 April 2010 (UTC)
I used to have cereal for breakfast, now I eat babies. Totnesmartin (talk) 10:46, 24 April 2010 (UTC)

Surely there's a legitimate use for these kinds of phrases somewhere? 76.106.251.87 (talk) 23:27, 25 April 2013 (UTC)

Unlikely (use/mention distinctions notwithstanding). Unless what follows is a non sequitur (I'm not racist but these chips taste great) then you're immediately setting yourself up to contradict yourself. If the statement using this prefix was in any way, shape or form a valid proposition or remotely sensible, there would be no need for such a qualifier prefixed to it. If you weren't racist, prejudiced, homophobic etc., you'd just simply demonstrate it by not making a statement that was racist, prejudiced, homophobic etc.
There's a slight validity in, say, the "I am not a lawyer" (IANAL) phrase people use, but that's an honest disclaimer not to take their advice without question, rather than trying to deflect people's judgement and inferences about an opinion. Scarlet A.pnggnostic 00:42, 29 April 2013 (UTC)
I have a proposal. It's not exactly a straight example, but it isn't quite non-sequitur. The sentence is of the form "I'm not <prejudice against group>, but I am a <member of group associated with (either factually or stereotypically) prejudice>." The thought here is that revealing your affiliation in the presence of a certain group could cause issues if it isn't handled delicately. Some examples would be: "I'm not prejudice against religious people, but I am an atheist." "I don't have a problem with politicians, but I am an anarchist." "I'm not prejudice against anyone, but I am a member of the KKK." As we speak, I'm trying to come up with a situation where that last one could be true. 76.106.251.87 (talk) 18:17, 17 May 2013 (UTC)
"I'm not against eating junk food, but junk food is really unhealthy and you should try not to eat too much of it." So yeah, there's a legitimate use, but you really have to be saying something non-contradictory as the follow-up. There's often some sort of implicit qualifier attached. For example, the unspoken implicit bit after "I'm not eating junk food" that is making it non-contradictory here is "per se" or "now and again" or "entirely", etc.. As long as you have that easily understandable implicit qualifier attached, you're usually safe. Nullahnung (talk) 10:29, 26 August 2013 (UTC)

[edit] References

  1. G. Pavlik, "Eastern Orthodox Christianity in Asia", Pravda, Mar 4, 1992
  2. Vic Reeves

[edit] Suggestion for rename

Since "No offence, but..." also falls into this category, should we have a better name for it? K61824Ed Poor types in Chinese? 07:12, 25 October 2010 (UTC)

There's a slight difference in what someone would say after it. "No offence" usually means they're going to criticise". "Not prejudiced..." is usually preparing for blatant racism. "No offence" may be a more general case, might be worth a redirect or separate article. Scarlet A.pngnarchist 13:09, 25 October 2010 (UTC)
Both "I'm not prejudiced, but..." and "No offense, but..." are actually both specific versions of "Yes, but..."
"Yes, but..." refers to a defensive tactic where you throw out a token bit of agreement or "concession" to be diplomatic, but then proceed to argue in a way that completely ignores the point conceded. People generally don't realize that they are doing this, because the point they "concede" is one that they think does not relate to their main argument. "I'm not prejudiced, but..." concedes "I think prejudice is bad.", and "No offense, but..." concedes "I don't want you to be offended." Neither point is much of a concession, but people feel like they are being more reasonable after saying these things.
The goal of such a tactic is to sound like you appreciate your opponent's position while giving it no serious thought at all. I think that the reason we have an article specifically for this case is that it seems to be really common in political discourse, and really easily called out. --Quantheory (talk) 19:43, 25 October 2010 (UTC)
The relationship with "yes, but" and "no offence" should be mentioned in the article, but the "I'm not racist/sexist/homophobic" variants are common enough to be the main focus of the article. ωεαşεζόίďWeaselly.jpgMethinks it is a Weasel 10:34, 26 August 2013 (UTC)
"Yes, but ..." is a good and valid way to deal with an opponent who failed to grasp what's important, though. "We're gonna die, our water just ran out!" "Yes, but we're almost at the oasis." The meaning here being "You are right, but so what?"
This is the intended usage of "Yes, but ...".
In a similar vein there's also an intended and completely legitimate usage for "I'm not prejudiced, but...". You can say "I'm not prejudiced, but all things considered, I feel like we don't stand a chance against these guys." (having done all the research possible on the factors to victory, the person determined that they most likely aren't gonna win this match)
So you see, just because people are bad at arguing (we already knew this), that doesn't mean these sentence openings themselves can't be used validly.
I feel like we shouldn't be so generalizing with these things. Nullahnung (talk) 10:55, 26 August 2013 (UTC)
That's not a phrase anyone is likely to use in real life, & hinges on a rather archaic use of the word "prejudice". WeaseloidWeaselly.jpgMethinks it is a Weasel 11:01, 26 August 2013 (UTC)
I dunno, I don't think it's that unlikely. It's basically in the same vein as "I'm not racist, but all these Asian basketball teams are gonna lose horribly in this tournament. The track record speaks for itself."
Also, "I'm not gay, but if I was, I'd be asking you out!" or "I'm not gay, but damn you're sexy." is actually a pretty likely way to compliment people you're comfortable with. Nullahnung (talk) 11:13, 26 August 2013 (UTC)
Also, "I'm not sexist, but the German women's football team would probably lose against their male counterpart. They just don't play on the same level yet."
And: "I'm not homophobic, but you're gonna have to go to the gay club without me. I'm just not in the mood right now."
All valid and likely uses of these sentence openings. I would argue that these sentence openings suffer a lot of abuse by morons, not that they are bad in themselves. Nullahnung (talk) 11:34, 26 August 2013 (UTC)
I think the general pattern is that it's, from a logical perspective, a completely nothingsaying opening: if it precedes something racist, it falls into what this article is describing, if something non-racist then it's redundant and may indicate the speaker's fear of being misunderstood as racist, and if it's something that could be seen as racist or not depending on the qualifier, usually this doesn't really suffice as a qualifier as people don't often find it convincing (especially after reading this article lol). — Unsigned, by: 93.223.22.195 / talk / contribs 18:28, 3 November 2014‎ (UTC)
The article is talking about how the phrase is typically used, not the possibilities of how it could be used --Drowninginlimbo (talk) 21:23, 3 November 2014 (UTC)

[edit] Potential Image For Page

I came across this lovely piece by clicking on a link from an Atlas Shrugged-bashing blog post. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BcxwhGdIMAAoKgd.jpg 76.106.251.87 (talk) 23:31, 1 January 2014 (UTC)

Who is it by & what is the copyright status? WěǎšěǐǒǐďWeaselly.jpgMethinks it is a Weasel 23:46, 1 January 2014 (UTC)
I Google-searched the image for a source. I'll leave out the boring bits where I went through nine pages of results and chain-clicked "source" links (linking to the guy that told you it is -not- a source, people). I eventually found what appears to be the original version of the image. I can't find the actual image on her site, but there's a lot to dig through. 76.106.251.87 (talk) 15:28, 2 January 2014 (UTC)
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