So, let’s consider two possible utterances as made by Lorde:
“I’m not like these people” (pointing to the royal family).
“I’m not like these people” (pointing to a group of largely black hip-hop artists).
Which of these utterances could not possibly be taken to be based on the race of the people she’s referring to? I might have to go to bed soon, so try to solve this without further hints.
“Royal family” and “hip-hop artists” are so strong definers in those possible utterances that I honestly skim over the “black” bit and see wealthy, conformed and old versus struggling, fighting and young. Both of them are stereotypes, so they’re both as bad as each other.
But, as Matt_W showed me just now, I may be a bit naïve. 
Or misinformed. Or ignorant. Depending on how charitable you feel.
I see what you did there.
Yes, I’ll grant you that by replacing the context of the song with a different context (possibly a visual scene in which we can observe whose skin colors match?), and replacing the lyrical content with a blanket denial of similarity between the singer and the people she’s referring to, you’ve proposed a situation in which one is more likely to be racist than the other. One that’s very, very different from what we were just talking about. Congratulations.
But notice that if we add in even just a little bit of the original context, and change the utterance to “I’m not as rich as these people”, the racial subtext evaporates.
Do you see why these analyses reading racism into the song come across as leap after leap of tortured logic? We started with a song that alternates between descriptions of the narrator’s poverty, references to certain displays of wealth in music, and assertions that the narrator and her peers are fine without that wealth because they have something else valuable. To get from there to “I’m not like these people”, you had to assume that race was the key factor in those displays of wealth (ignoring the two-thirds that have no connection to race whatsoever), then substitute race itself for wealth and forget everything else about the context in which those displays of wealth were brought up.
That’s a lot of snide presumption to wade through, but it sounds like maybe you were trying to say something like this: “Listing things that wealthy musicians do perpetuates harmful stereotypes, and is therefore a form of racism, but listing things that wealthy aristocrats do doesn’t perpetuate harmful stereotypes, and is therefore not a form of racism.” Is that about right?
“While I love a good critique of wealth accumulation and inequity, this song is not one; in fact, it is deeply racist.” = This song is racist.
“So why shit on black folks? Why shit on rappers? […] I’m gonna take a guess: racism.” = To me that seems like a pretty clear statement that it’s the artist’s racism, i.e. the artist is a racist, but if you have an alternate explanation for whose racism the author is referring to, I’m all ears.
“She apparently calls herself a feminist – let’s just hope her feminism gets a lot less racist as she develops as an artist.” = The artist’s beliefs are racist. Again, to me that doesn’t seem any different from asserting that the artist herself is racist – who else has racist beliefs? – but perhaps you have another explanation.
Coincidence is your word, not mine. My opinion is that the history of these terms is beside the point.
For example, I recently learned that “fiasco” literally means flask, and we call a screw-up a fiasco because when a glassblower messed up a potential masterpiece, they’d wrap it up to hide the flaws and sell it as a common bottle or flask. Interesting! However, this doesn’t mean that referring to something as a fiasco is demeaning to glassblowers (even shoddy ones). The etymology is fun to think about, but it has little effect on people’s use of the word.
This analogy would work better with the roles reversed: you show up to a lecture hall and hear someone explaining that gremlins are behind gravity. Some of what he’s saying makes sense, kind of, but it seems like he’s skipping over a few things you know about gravity that aren’t gremlin-related. You look up his other work, and it turns out he thinks gremlins are also behind magnetism, earthquakes, fibromyalgia, and the disappearance of flight MH370. You would hopefully conclude that he’s obsessed with gremlins and is cherry-picking evidence to fit his theory, and not that gremlins really are everywhere.
These accusations of sexism/racism/etc in cultural artifacts would be more convincing if they didn’t come over and over from the same critics who, oddly enough, just happen to detect sexism/racism/etc in nearly everything they come across, and just happen to hold the political belief that sexism/racism/etc permeates every aspect of our culture. Their beliefs precede and shape their interpretation of culture.
That is true, and I apologize for my tone and presumption. Fools rush in and all that.
The reason the analogy is structured this way is because it is you who is denying the entire body of evidence supplied by multiple disciplines. It is you who is countering all of this research by claiming that there is no basis in fact for any of the conclusions being made by scholars and critics for decades. The reason I used something basic like gravity is because you’re asserting that these pretty fundamental tenets established by years of work in the fields of sociology, gender studies, feminist theory, and so on are erroneous, and everyone is grasping at straws. That is one possibility. The other possibility is that you are some crackpot on a message board, and their research is sound. The anti-academic trend in a lot of popular culture today is responsible for similar views on things like evolution and climate change.
“Come from the same critics” I’m sorry, did you think this trend just happened when Tumblr showed up? Do you really think the idea of gender or class or race resulting in power imbalances was an idea a couple of nerds thought up in some basement to advance as a conspiracy to make everything look sexist/racist? I hate to break it to you, but this idea didn’t show up overnight, and simply because you’re completely ignorant of decades’ worth of work on the subject doesn’t mean that these ideas aren’t “convincing” to any reasonable observer.
vaporware, here was your original question:
Apparently I need to spell the answer out explicitly: No, because if Lorde had attacked the royal family it would be extraordinarily unlikely to express animus against white people in general BECAUSE LORDE HERSELF IS WHITE. Context matters. Can we please get beyond the “Hey rappers use the n-word all the time so why do people get mad when white people use it?” style of argument?
Two more points: Yeah, it makes a difference that when she reaches for examples of what rich people do she comes up with a bunch of hip-hop stereotypes. When someone comes up with a bunch of stereotypes of Jewish bankers it’s often pretty antisemitic even though those particular people also happen to be richer than them (and me). And the “well only four of these twelve are racial stereotypes,” besides being dubious, is beside the point. If someone called me a big-nosed Torah-reading greedy East Coast effete ivory-tower metrosexual heartless snobby selfish wine-drinking asshole, I wouldn’t go “Well only about four of those twelve insults are Jewish stereotypes so on balance that wasn’t an anti-semitic insult.” (A bunch of those aren’t true, either.)
(That’s an example of a general form of argument, by the way. Nothing in Lorde’s song is as explicit as “Torah-reading.”)
And on the subject of whether racism, for one, is pervasive in our society: Did you see that Megyn Kelly said on Fox News that racist e-mails like the ones in the Ferguson PD are sent at almost every corporation in America? Wow!
I think a reason to lampoon or satirize something is to point at something without being too direct. I’ve heard that it’s a truism in comedy that if the audience laughs – even if the comedian is being offensive – then that’s permission to continue. A satire or comedy has to walk a razor’s edge, because once it crosses over the line of cruelty – it isn’t funny. I think the Lorde song is a satire that’s pointing out how Hip Hop and Rap have degenerated into these stereotypes. A lot of the original rappers and innovators have come out against these stereotypes – and have said this wasn’t the original intent of rap, and it’s going the wrong way. Also, she is satirizing music through music – the topic is… topical. 
I don’t know if a satire about bankers would be a hit song, or as catchy, but to each their own.
In other news, some IF games were released but no one was much bothered by this.
As the Sokal affair showed, those “years of work” don’t add up to much when they take place in an echo chamber where ideas flourish based on their political appeal instead of by being tested against reality.
Of course not, it’s been growing for a long time. I don’t mean it’s literally been the same individuals making this criticism for all those decades; the movement picks up new members who follow in the old ones’ footsteps.
You’re saying you can’t tell whether or not a song is racist without knowing the skin color of the person singing it? Fascinating.
So by that logic, if a black artist had a similar song that listed displays of wealth by the royal family, you’d consider that racist, but only once you confirmed that they were black.
This all seems very absurd.
Quite.
Hey, remember up there when context mattered?
Let’s look at a few ways the context of your hypothetical is utterly different from that of the song:
David, your blatant voiceforreasonism is incredibly inoffensive, but I take issue with it, anyway. In fact, bringing the discussion back to IF is blatant ificism. Please don’t clean up your act.
I apologise most profusely. I was on my way to an IF forum and came here by mistake.
No problem. If it happens again, though, I’m going to take it to the highest court, and to the fullest letter of the law – which happens to be a “w”.
I’d never heard about the Lorde song.
I just read up a little bit on it.
And I’m like, what? Racist? The most racist thing she does in that song is call out black rappers the stereotype they themselves perpetuate. I don’t even see an issue with “calling out wealth” as much as calling out an ostentation that, seriously, is part of the whole image of that musical style.
(not that I think the lyrics are all that great, but that’s ok - it’s not my sort of music, and I don’t have to like it or find it fantastically written for the purposes of this discussion)
The worst thing about the song is that she’s distancing herself from something. That’s normal about a lot of songs and can have loads of reasons - jumping onto “racism” seems a bit of a tenuous link for me, to borrow vaprware’s ongoing image.
Maybe this sort of thing isn’t for me. Maybe I’m too naïve. Maybe I’m seeing innocence and goodwill everywhere. And I always thought I was cynical.
(I’m going to reread the whole Lorde bit of the discussion that’s been already had here. Now that I know what I’m reading maybe I’ll understand it all a bit better)
Now it’s time to get clinical. ?
Well, after reading it all over again, the only thing I can think about the Lorde song is that I can totally believe the girl picked up the wealth indicators that she knew about. I find it completely plausible that she knew more, and more personally, about the hip-hop display of wealth than any alternative, especially as it’s the reality closest to her.
I don’t even see ill-will. It’s not “I don’t want to be like those people” meaning “those people are shit”. It’s more like, as I see it, “that’s not who I am or who I want to be”. “Those people are shit” are not the only reason for someone not to want to be like them.
EDIT - You know, I think this is a swell discussion, I really enjoy seeing people talk so intelligently about these tricky things, but after a certain point it may have degenerated into “this is racist” “no it isn’t” “yes it is” “no it isn’t and neither is this”, and that’s a little less palatable…
Per a member’s request I’ve moved the Pratchett posts to a new topic, https://intfiction.org/t/terry-pratchett/8203/1 . I’ll consider requests for a change of the new topic’s rather mundane title in that thread. 
Many thanks!
Agreed 100%.
Well, at least I now know who was responsible for the unnecessary warning I got for having a non-existent sockpuppet account. May I ask that the next time, you only report breaches of the ToS and not speech you simply happen to dislike? Censorship like that is what enabled the Great Firewalls of China and the UK.