Why is racism wrong?

[CapnAwesome]

Whenever I go to an atheist forum, I see a lot of good sense in atheist arguments contrary to religion. But I often see a lot of unexamined positions, unquestioned assumptions, and inferior reasoning from atheists in the areas of the forum where "other" topics are acceptable for discussion.

I've recently been examining racist arguments without taking the attitude that there just must be something factually incorrect about them. I've noticed a few things about them.

First, racists often rely far more extensively on empirically derived facts than their opponents do. That is, racists don't "just make it up" and then rantingly insist upon their narrative. Instead, they do quite a bit of research before they write.

Second, racists are usually more fair in their conclusions and in their presentations than they are usually credited for being.

Third, the opponents of racism, whom I'll call "egalitarians," are usually the ones who sound as if they were defending some sort of preconceived quasi-religious orthodoxy. Strip away their pejoratives, or ignore them, and judge the racist viewpoint in the light of its own merits, and racism seems at times to be rather convincing.

Has anyone here ever actually followed a racist vs. egalitarian debate closely? Especially one in which neither side held the privilege of writing rules of permitted speech conveniently in its own favor and then using their censorship/banning powers as means of seeming to win.

I've observed tons of those arguments and nothing that you said is true. The racists are not convincing, don't use good research, and certainly don't back up their arguments very well. The research I've seen mostly quotes a bunch of biased sources that normally go in a circle. I think a lot of their debate opponents don't cite a bunch of research or really care because they don't want to give any credence to a bunch of racist crap. The best reason to not be a racist is that but by chance you could be a member of another race. How would you like to be treated like shit because of happenstance?