Why are ghosts never racist?

Submitted ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world⁩ to ⁨nostupidquestions@lemmy.world⁩

For a creature that’s known for their fashion choices of wearing a white sheet, you’d think there would be more racist ghosts.

They come from a time when it was socially acceptable to be openly racist. Plus, if you go back about 1000 years or so, it was socially acceptable to just murder entire villages because your people didn’t like their people.

But anytime you see a ghost, it’s always like “oooOOOooooOOOO!! I HAVE UNFINISHED BUSINESS ON EARTH!!!”

Like, seriously??? Why would a ghost give a fuck if his finances weren’t paid before they died?

And, can we talk about ghostbusters for a second? That one judge was like “Oooh, those are the famous criminals that were brothers! I sent them to death row”

But meanwhile they look NOTHING like humans. But somehow he instantly recognizes them. Are we led to believe they looked like ghoulish monsters when they were alive?

And the librarian looks like a human corpse. So, still human, but, like, after her body has been dead a few weeks. Are we to believe she died, and then her spirit stayed inside her rotting corpse of a body and THEN became a ghost, and retained it’s final form?

Either way…never seen a racist ghost. Which I think has to be statistically impossible.

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Comments

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dukeofdummies@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨minutes⁩ ago
Mostly because when you’re writing a fictional story, you need to remove everything that isn’t necessary for the plot. Is your story about racism? Then your ghost being racist makes sense. Otherwise unless it’s a gag it slows down the plot.

If we wanna get REALLY picky though…

Most ghosts probably aren’t speaking modern English either. A LOT changes in 200 years, how much slang rose and fell in that time? How much did accents change?

The concept of time was massively different too. Keep in mind before trains visiting a state could be weeks not hours. Could explain why ghosts are so patient though.

There’s also just vast differences in priorities, imagine a life where water is a constant mental calculation like your battery life on a phone. If they’re old enough that was the norm.

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Kolanaki@pawb.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
How come they are always from some far-off time period? You’d think someone would have encountered a ghost of someone who died a week prior by now.

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- InEnduringGrowStrong@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  Ghost licensing is predatory.
  It’s easier to just wait until the ghost can be published in the public domain.
  Blame Disney.
  
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- SatansMaggotyCumFart@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  I’m just imagining some douche with a broccoli haircut wondering around looking for his cell phone and muttering no cap.
  
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  - Kolanaki@pawb.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    My new apartment is haunted. Every night around 3 am, I hear the ghastly wails of “we’re cooked, chat” and “lol I paid the ‘phantom’ tax! Get it?”
    
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- Mothra@mander.xyz ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  Maybe it takes time for the spirit to coalesce into our dimension, or maybe it takes them a very long time to travel all the way to heaven/hell/purgatory or wherever the heck they go through after dying and that explains the time gaps
  
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- Nemo@midwest.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  How do you know you haven’t?
  
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- MotoAsh@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  It’s like Dr Manhattan, it takes time to come back together as a cohesive entity.
  
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algorithmae@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
The ghost bartender in The Shining was racist

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tetris11@lemmy.ml ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
and what’s the deal with airplane food!?

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RBWells@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
They are not corporeal so why would they care what your body looks like? To them it is just some envelope holding you, right? Your soul I don’t think would have race, or sex, those are embodied things, skin tone being the most superficial of all.

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SatyrSack@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
Image

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- QueenMidna@lemmy.ca ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  Oh dip, Pillboi!
  
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  - showmeyourkizinti@startrek.website ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
    Oh Dip, Donky Doug!
    
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southsamurai@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
Well, I’m not going to play the “it depends on the writer” card.

But it kinda does apply, even among people conveying their real life experiences. And, to forestall arguments, it doesn’t matter if it is objectively real or not, assuming they aren’t lying, they’re relating their lived experience. Whether that is a delusion or hallucination is irrelevant to this matter.

See, if you start off with the assumption that ghosts either exist, or are a form of shared delusion, then some things can be taken from that.

First, that anyone seeing a ghost is a minority because seeing them isn’t a common occurrence. Second, that regardless of anything else, the first ghost seen isn’t random. Third, that if a ghost can communicate at all (which is not a part of all reports about ghosts), it has limited time to do so.

With those probabilities in mind, if you see a ghost, chances are that it is there for a reason, that you seeing it is for a reason, and that it has to use its time with you to achieve a very specific goal.

Why would the racist ghosts start off saying “now, I’m racist, but hear me out”?

It’s that simple. Unless a ghost is haunting only a given grouping of people, there’s no benefit to expressing their racism at all. If they are haunting a race, then there’s still no need to outright say it; they’re acting on their racism and don’t care if anyone understands their motivations.

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chrischryse@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
It is pretty racist, why do they always refuse black sheets 🙄

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gwilikers@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
Isnt there an award winning book about ghosts and a plantation?

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Rivalarrival@lemmy.today ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

Either way…never seen a racist ghost. Which I think has to be statistically impossible.

Hetty Woodstone (“Ghosts”) hated the Irish.

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the_q@lemmy.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
I used to have a theory that ghosts weren’t spirits of the dead, but a momentary overlap of realities on loop at a certain place and what was seen was a glimpse of that reality. This only works of time is a singular experience happening all at once. I am not smart.

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Zwuzelmaus@feddit.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
Because alcohol has no gender.

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PlzGivHugs@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
I expect its mostly just because its unpleasant and taboo.

That said, they do show up occasionally in more adult-oriented movies. The Shining is an example that immediately comes to mind.

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VagueAnodyneComments@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
it’s because those were Henson workshop characters and they i think they tried pretty hard to make cool, PG-rated, kid friendly designs

anyway there are racist ghosts in the videogames, you bust Confederates

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splendoruranium@infosec.pub ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
Relevant Brennan Lee Mulligan sketch

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snek_boi@lemmy.ml ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
Ghosts are the creation of our minds. And it turns out that our minds are flawed machines. This was shown by someone and they won a Nobel Prize for it (Daniel Kahnemann). Turns out, that flawed machinery is precisely why ghosts aren’t racist.

When you think of something, you run a simplified simulation of the world. When you run these simulations, you don’t think about other things. For example, when people fantasize about achieving something, they usually run the simulation of having gotten the job and the money or having solved the tough problem. However, they usually don’t think about the path to achieving that goal. This is called the planning fallacy. It’s also called the Motivation Wave in Behavior Design.

Another example of these simplified simulations is the halo effect. The halo effect starts when you notice something good about someone. Maybe they’re attractive. Maybe they’re on your same team or political group or religion or whatever. The thing is that you end up building a good preconception of that person. You assume they’re kind and smart and many other positive things. Again, your mind is running a simplified simulation. Even if you notice bad stuff about the other person, you may ignore it because our mind is a flawed machine and it’s stuck with the idea that the other person is good.

So, how do simplified simulations lead to non-racist ghosts? Well, we all share an idea of what a ghost is. We tell each other ghost stories or we watch movies with ghosts in them. All of that feeds the simplified simulations we run when we think of ghosts. And we don’t include racism in those simulations.

This doesn’t mean that we can’t escape simplified simulations. This is a tough problem that many people have tried to solve in many different ways. These attempts have resulted in an arsenal of methods: psychological flexibility exercises, mental contrasting, pre-mortems, the Delphi method, red team blue team exercises, weak signal detection, etc. Notice that all of these tools try to transform our preconceptions.

Of course, a very simple way of transforming our preconceptions is to prove them wrong. I suppose in the case of non-racist ghosts, it’s a matter of creating racist ghosts. This project, however, brings up the old adage: just because you can doesn’t mean you should.

If you’re interested in simplified simulations, I recommend Lisa Feldman Barret’s books. You can also check out Daniel Kahnemann, Gary Klein, and Dave Snowden.

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Couldbealeotard@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
I think the joke of the ghost costume as a white sheet has been lost.

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PunnyName@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
The ones that would stick around would likely be very racist. Consider that you don’t even need to stay in earth, you can just travel the universe. Or just travel the world. You don’t have gravity to help you, but passing thru solid matter isn’t a problem either. You could check out the core, Iceland, Botswana, Jordan, Kentucky, whatever. So if they stay in Kentucky, they’re gonna be super racist. But evidently not…

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lordnikon@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
I like to think they observe and change with the times. Kind of grow in death.

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- Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  Imagine being a confederate soldier, and then watching the assasination of MLKjr. Seeing everything change over the coarse of 200 years. Remembering that the confederacy only lasted for 4 years.
  
  Then imagine seeing people in OHIO with a confederate flag. C’mon Ohio. You’re not the south. You share a border with Canada. You weren’t part of this. Why are you choosing to be trash?
  
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  - lordnikon@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    Also most racism is really a class issue. As in the upper class control and steal from the lower class and blame the other for the hardship the upper class caused. When your no longer havsa body or comporeal needs. All that stuff goes away.
    
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  - TranquilTurbulence@lemmy.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    Maybe the ghost eventually turns into a faceless violent poltergeist that just wants to injure and murder everyone. Watching 200 years of history wreck your dreams can be hard to deal with.
    
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- Zwuzelmaus@feddit.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  
  Kind of grow in death.
  
  Death is when nothing grows or changes anymore.
  
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