No Stupid Questions

The ghost bartender in The Shining was racist

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.

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.

It is pretty racist, why do they always refuse black sheets 🙄

Isnt there an award winning book about ghosts and a plantation?

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.

and what's the deal with airplane food!?

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.

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

Hetty Woodstone ("Ghosts") hated the Irish.

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.

Because alcohol has no gender.

I expect its mostly just because its unpleasant and taboo. People don't want to write nor watch that.

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

Relevant Brennan Lee Mulligan sketch

I like to think they observe and change with the times. Kind of grow in death.

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...

I think the joke of the ghost costume as a white sheet has been lost.

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). If we understand our flawed minds, we understand why ghosts aren’t racist.

When you think of something, you run a simplified simulation of it. 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.