How to be racist in spite of yourself
Philosophy lessons from the case of Bret Weinstein
When a bachelor of philosophy from the Antilles refuses to apply for certification as a teacher on the ground of his color, I say that philosophy has never saved anyone. When someone else strives and strains to prove to me that black men are as intelligent as white men, I say that intelligence has never saved anyone; and that is true, for, if philosophy and intelligence are invoked to proclaim the equality of men, they have also been employed to justify the extermination of men.
~ Frantz Fanon, Peau Noire, Masques Blancs (Black Skin, White Masks) (1952)

For example, the other day, a white police officer walked into a store where I was buying some food and I remember feeling this powerful sense of wanting to flee, of feeling as if the rules and laws that are designed to govern our (white) society didn’t apply to me. I could move “too quickly,” placing my hand into my pocket to pay for my food, and my life would end just like that. The white police officer would explain how he felt “threatened” and had “reasonable” suspicion. And I would be dead.
~ George Yancy, interview NYT — The Stone (2016)
Bret Weinstein, a biology professor at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, this May (2017) was met with charges of being a racist and calls that he step down or be fired for suggesting that there is a difference between taking expressive action oneself and pressuring others to take expressive action on pain of humiliation or out of concern for their moral edification.
In the background is a tradition on the Evergreen campus, dating to the 1970s, allowing for students of color to skip a day of school to meet off campus for “A Day of Absence” as a way of “community building around identity and conversations about issues of difference…” The point is to impress on the Evergreen community appreciation for the fact that racial and ethnic injustice was and is very real and endemic — even in the already extraordinarily liberal social environment of this institution.
At issue in the student’s confrontation with Weinstein was not this tradition but an attempted modification of it. Weinstein had no quarrel with the tradition, rather he expressed ethical qualms with the new twist given it by some student activists. The idea was to reverse the ritual and strongly encourage white students, faculty, and staff to absent themselves from campus for a day as a way of heightening awareness, within the white community, of racism and attendant social injustice. Encouraged by their education, direct or indirect, in critical race theory, it appears the students had been led to believe that this was a perfectly natural and appropriate request, especially given the current wave of racism and social regression symptomatic of the Trumpian times. Awareness needed further heightening in light of recent acts of apparent racist treatment of People of Color (POC) by Evergreen campus police (and, of course, similar incidents across the nation).
In an email responding to Rashida Love, an administrative liaison to the students, Professor Weinstein seems to have implied that a moral line had been crossed by the student’s request. He registered a complaint about the invitation for whites to absent themselves from campus for a day:
There is a huge difference between a group or coalition deciding to voluntarily absent themselves from a shared space in order to highlight their vital and under-appreciated roles… and a group or coalition encouraging another group to go away. The first is a forceful call to consciousness…. The second is a show of force, and an act of oppression in and of itself.
Weinstein appears to have been a victim of a political climate in which it takes very little to be called a “racist.” Why is that?
The distinction Weinstein tried to make in his email to Love was that the first action — the visible group self-removal from a scene as, in part, an act of protest — was certainly understandable as an expression of the importance of keeping consciousness of real racial discrimination alive in a community; the second action, however — asking others, members of the racial group typically associated with an attitude of active and passive racism, i.e., white people, to absent themselves from the scene, the educational forum of the college — was a proposal to publicly shame people just because they are white. Although Weinstein did not put it this way, the implication was that if a white person did not honor the request, aspersions might be cast on their character. The request for whites to leave campus, of course, was “voluntary” in the same sense that you need not answer if I ask you if you have stopped abusing the people around you today. The point here is that whites, especially in this community and in this climate, might be thought to harbor racist thoughts if they did not participate in “a day of absence.” When Weinstein calmly tried to explain in person to the group of students of color who confronted him concerning this distinction or what exactly he meant by saying “there is a huge difference,” he was, in fact, called a “racist” and worse.
The Western Liberalist view
The moral intuition Weinstein was trying to give voice to goes something like this:
While it is true that it is perfectly defensible, both as an act of free expression and as a matter of justice, for one group to make a gesture at protest (in this case, leaving campus to make a point), it is another thing entirely to ask another group to engage in a similar gesture aimed at their own collective humiliation.
Why so? It is not a case of defensible free expression at all for me to ask you to do something that would, we both know, morally incriminate you. Note that it may well be a just thing for you to do the thing I ask of you. It may well be the case that you deserve the incrimination. These judgments may well be defensible. But this would have to be the conclusion of a moral argument separate from the expression: a positive argument for why you, as an individual, should be included in the class at which the incrimination is, even justifiably, targeted. Otherwise, the expression is merely an occasion for prejudicial profiling, and, as such, fails to have epistemic value, or has potentially negative eudaimonic value, and scarcely any dignitary value.
There isn’t always something wrong legally with abusive name calling or profiling, by the way — but there most certainly is so morally on most any account of ethics, and that is our focus here. The moral propriety of such judgments would have to be decided by applying evaluative principles to the personal histories of each individual addressed by the expression. The classical Western tradition of liberalism takes individuals as morally responsible for their own actions, not those of groups of individuals they happen to be members of.
Consider the consequences were that not the case: Because one Jewish banker was a liar and cheat, all Jews should be forced to wear a yellow star. Because one Mexican raped one white woman, all Mexicans are rapists. Because one black man shot five white policeman, all blacks should be refused gun ownership, even black policemen. Because one Muslim was a suicide bomber, all are configured as terrorist hazards. Because one Christian is stupid enough to believe the world was created six thousands years ago, all Christians are that stupid…
And if you think that replacing “one” with “many” fixes the validity of the inference, try it. Even if it were true, as it no doubt is, that many white people are indeed racist, it does not follow that any given white person, let alone, all of them are. (They may well all be but not because this inference is valid.)
“Not explicitly racist, perhaps. But implicitly they are,” we will be reminded by a faction of the progressive-minded. “Studies show,” however, that nearly everybody, in a position to be, is, in fact, implicitly racist — even human-trained robots. But implicit racism is still quite different from the kind of racism in play in the Weinstein case.
You either hold individuals responsible for their actions on a case by case basis, in which case you can’t punish them en masse. Or you lump them all together as jointly responsible, in which case you are classically prejudiced. I am not suggesting it can’t be the case that both — that they are responsible both individually and collectively, but if so, then the larger moral claim will require serious argument. Oh, and, yes, there is one…
The critical race theory view
Why are these young people calling Weinstein a “racist”? Looking into his background, I found nothing to support the claim — at least assuming the common, Western Liberalist notion of what a “racist” is. The post-confrontation video above clearly shows Weinstein to be towing the Enlightenment party line about racism: that it would be wonderful to see racism disappear, and so forth… Though tribalism is naturally selected for, reason will smooth over our evolutionary rough spots. He proceeds to give it a biological gloss.
However, it is likely the student’s calling out behavior, at least in this instance, is informed by an understanding of racism that is central to critical race theory according to which “racism” proper is distinguished from other morally reprehensible attributes such as “prejudice.” A black person in the United States cannot be a racist proper, we are told. A black person may well have prejudicial attitudes toward whites, but not “racist” ones. Racism, under this description, is a structural condition of one’s existence. One is a racist if one is ensconced in a culture in which black/POC people have been and still are oppressed or if one has or does benefit from that social structure.
Suppose you found stolen property and garner some advantage from it. You didn’t steal it, may not even know it was stolen. But your lot is eased by your current possession of it. All white people in the U.S. are racists in this more abstract but freighted sense.
Parsing the concept of racism, we make these distinctions:
- Active racism
- Passive racism
- Structural racism
Planting a noose in an African American museum or a burning cross on the lawn of black family or consciously discriminating against blacks in employment are examples of active racism. The act and intent are clear and unjust. These are cases of the explicit form.
Passive racism is more subtle. This may be the result of implicit bias where the agent is not aware of the prejudiced character of their acts or words, but could be made aware of it. And, as such, to the extent the lack of awareness is culpable, passive racism is arguably no less morally problematic than the active sort.
More sophisticated still is structural (sometimes also called “institutional”) racism. The idea here is that despite the full awareness and even active attempt to mitigate or reform both their attitude and behavior, the agent is compromised by their place, time, political and social environment, and the happenstance of their skin color or genetic inheritance. It doesn’t matter that a white person in America would wish away oppression of blacks. It doesn’t matter that a white person in America is actively working toward ending oppression toward blacks by personally and politically engaging in the struggle to change the system of oppression. Just being white in America is enough to be correctly labeled a racist of the structural kind. This is so because so much of the economic and political inheritance of Americans was purchased with the suffering of black people (and other POC). All white Americans share in the privilege that comes with just being white in America and all the advantages that come with it. The power structure in America was designed to benefit people like you if you are white.
So, in this last structural sense, Bret Weinstein — despite being a Bernie Sanders supporter, despite being a Jew, historically one of the most unjustly targeted groups in human history, despite his open and credible disavowal of racism of the first two kinds — remains a racist because he is working from within an essentially racist system. He demonstrated this by attempting to use the discourse of reason and dialectic which has from at least the time of Locke, Hume, and Kant to nearly all contemporary political philosophers been used to generate excuses and apologies for oppression.
That reason and dialectic have also been used to counter racism is true, but it doesn’t change the fact the infrastructure of Western thought developed as it did largely within a privileged mental space that did not come about but through the material benefits whose source was the suffering of oppressed peoples.
[Swapping “sexism” for “racism” in the parsing above also results in a viable typology though with a different dynamic… A future topic.]
Bret Weinstein is a racist, but…
Our concern being moral philosophy, however, we cannot stop with that observation. We need to probe the concept of structural racism a bit further. Race theory distinguishes between racism and prejudice. Presumably, both are bad, both morally reprehensible. Race theory, assuming it is not aestheticizing injustice, is trying to make a moral point. What is wrong should be righted. In making moral points about human beings, we have to admit there are degrees of wrongness in wrongful behavior. There is a difference between passively enjoying advantages that were ill-gotten by ancestors and actively getting them now by exploiting entrenched injustice. The logic of reparations does have its limits, however. Are African Americans today morally responsible for what their ancestors did before they were enslaved and brought to America? In one very real sense, yes. In another, more fruitful sense, we have to concoct a statute of moral limitations in the interest of expedience and survival and say no.
There is a time somewhere in the dim past before which all the genocides our ancestors must have perpetrated to insure we would be their — and not their victims’ — descendants that must be at least forgotten if never forgiven.
But a few centuries is too soon for forgetfulness — especially with daily reminders of what it is we are supposed to be forgetting. There are disadvantages to having institutional memories. Inherited responsibility is one. That’s why white people in America today are racist from birth: because precisely they were born and not the children of others — even those white people whose ancestors immigrated to the U.S. in post-slavery times because of opportunities made possible through the colonial oppression and marginalization of blacks and other POCs.
Entitlement and its limitations
Exactly how can someone whom I, personally, have not harmed — may even have benefited, have a claim to burden me with a moral or material obligation? Weinstein, to his credit, to the best of my knowledge did not express any doubts as to this possibility. But many observers, Fox News, for example, saw in the occasion an object lesson in reverse racism. Weinstein’s only crime, for which he was labeled a “racist,” it seems in the eyes of an indignant Tucker Carlson, was to suggest that we should not blame all white people for the sins of a few.
But we do not have to stray far from basic assumptions shared by the defenders of rights to property and privilege to find a reason why it is possible to inherit moral responsibility in the same way we may inherit material wealth. Libertarian philosopher Robert Nozick famously offered a theory of entitlement based on very basic western assumptions about how the rights to material good may pass from one hand or one generation to another. There are only a very limited number of ways in which I may acquire the rights to property/power. To paraphrase Nozick:
i. The rights are earned through my effort.
ii. The rights are gifted to me.
In a just world, these two exhaust the possibilities. But noting that this is not such a world, Nozick allowed for one other way:
iii. The rights are restored to me — having once the rights and having lost them through injustice and the occasion to recover them presented itself.
Thus, I am the legitimate rights holder over what my parents left to me, as they were over what their parents left to them. I did not earn these rights myself through expenditure of my bodily fluids (e.g., blood, sweat, or tears, as Locke intimated). They were given to me, no doubt with the intention that I benefit from them, and no doubt, in the hope that I would continue the tradition and gradually improve the lot of my descendants and those connected to them — in-laws, extended family, friends, their society, their culture, etc. I am what I am and have what I have and am able to do what I do very largely because of those who came before me. And, if I am privileged, it is because of the effort and generosity of my ancestors, and their good fortune to have escaped grave injustice and calamity. Nobody robbed them, nobody enslaved them, and nobody slaughtered them.
Now suppose some of my ancestors did, themselves, engage in robbery, enslavement, and slaughter. Go back far enough and you will find such ancestors. Ask any historian or evolutionary biologist. You and your genes persist because others and theirs do not. You are because you stem from people who took advantage of others whenever they correctly calculated they could get away with it. It’s called “natural selection.” Historians call it, well, “history.” It wasn’t because they were nice people.
Suppose I, and those identified as being like me, are not privileged vis-à-vis a larger more powerful class. Does this more privileged class owe me and those like me? Nozick’s third principle, called the principle of rectification, strongly suggests yes.
Thus we can see a way of buttressing at least one insight of critical race theory without needing to completely abandon the basic intuition that only those who directly benefit from the suffering of others are responsible for making amends. Moral obligation, no less than money, is heritable.
(I have deliberately tried to show how easy it is to extract the heritability of moral obligation from a classical libertarian view of responsibility and rights. No Frankfurtian Marxism required.)
But we can’t be held responsible for every evil ever done by anyone who ever shared our heritage? How far can we go with the idea of rectification? There are statutes of limitation on most crimes.
Legal limitations, yes. There are practical and epistemological problems with blaming everything on Adam and Eve. But I have never heard of such constraints on moral theories. Recall, this is not a just world. There is something both evolutionarily and metaethically resonant in the idea of original sin. God, we might say, may be posited as the theoretically first object of blame.
What to do about it?
Forget structural moral responsibility for a moment… I have to assume something like the following is what motivates consequentialist theories of ethics. The repellent idea that we are somehow responsible for all the past evil actions that led to enjoying our lives to the extent we enjoy them, dump it! Look forward, the consequentialist must be thinking, make the future a better place, have dreams, not recurring nightmares stemming from distant genetic trauma. Drop this old guilt thing! Onward, they must be concluding…
Along comes the race theorist who won’t let us forget. Ok, let’s grant the race theorist their point. That structural racism is real and significant. Still, it seems, to achieve the ends that the race theorist must have in order to be concerned about this at all — that is, somehow, some way to minify if not eliminate racism — the theorist is going to have to get subtle enough to titrate responsibility judiciously, to say that someone like Bret Weinstein and many others like him, though structural racists, are not bad people, maybe even better than most because they are only structural racist and not also passive and active ones, too.
“Cut the man some slack. He’s trying much harder than most to help you guys get to the other side of injustice. Yes, he’s a racist like nearly every one who is white. But…”
Is being prejudiced worse than being racist?
Now that critical theorists have done us the favor of neatly separating the concepts of racism and prejudice, let’s talk about prejudice. Black and POC people can certainly be that, all agree. Being prejudiced is perfectly understandable, even admirable sometimes. Once bitten, twice shy. Having had a bad experience with people with your features, what kind of fool wouldn’t think twice to deal with one like you again. A slightly euphemistic term for it is “profiling,” and yes, sorry to say, it has survival value. I am pre-judging you merely because of your resemblance to another who caused me grief. Is prejudice morally justifiable? No. It’s sloppy thinking, no matter its utility. But humanly understandable? Absolutely.
Any moral theory worth its salt requires much more of you than knee-jerk reactions. Morality demands you spare no effort to get to the truth in your judgements about people. You are to distrust your instincts, you are always to give the benefit of the doubt, and if you don’t have doubts, you are supposed to generate them. Morality requires that you trust yourself the least of all. It requires that before you judge others you judge yourself and you do it mercilessly.
Once bitten, stay bitten, if that’s what it takes to avoid misjudging others.
Anything less — though all-too-human — is immoral. You must be mistaking prudence, utility, or even survival for morality to think otherwise. Ethics is not the same as living “the good life,” a fulfilled, happy, or even full life. Even your survival is not, by itself, an ethical goal. Your happiness, if it’s morally excusable, is only contingently instrumental, not essential, to moral ends.
So prejudice is always bad. If prejudice were a structural bad, it would not be one you could do much about all by yourself. But it’s not. You don’t need others or their institutions to put a dent in it. If there is a structure to it, the structure is not social or political but psychological. Prejudice is bad. Is it a worse thing than structural racism? I think so. You can, at the very least, go through the motions of not being prejudiced. But nothing you can do in your lifetime can save you from being a structural racist. Ought does not imply can.
The moral is: don’t be the kind of racist you can do something about, and for sure don’t be prejudiced.
Structural racism is something we can do something about. It is a socioeconomic and political problem. It is ultimately a moral problem, too, but because it is the consequence of collective action, its immediate remedy is socioeconomic and political. That is the message of critical race theory. It is possible to do something together about structural racism. We might start by redesigning our institutions from scratch.
As hard as that is, it’s still easy in comparison to the moral problem. That is forever. This is because the luxury of attending to such moral niceties as individual responsibility for one’s — and only one’s — actions is a privilege of the privileged. It would be so nice if we would do more than pay lip service to humanistic goals. But even just being able to pay lip service to them is itself a privilege. Only then can we lament not living up to that standard. As for the others, those not yet sufficiently privileged to partake in the hypocrisy, they may live and die and never enjoy losing sleep over such sins. Lucky they… for now.
I am a racist
…because I am a Mexican-American, a product of the literal rape, exploitation, and decimation of one half of my ancestors by the other half, the European half. And because I have availed myself of the inherited privileges of not being a more pure non-European. Was all this ancient human iniquity my fault?
Yes. I am a result of it. My very existence must own it.
The other half of me — the victimized part — is prejudiced. Understandably. Immorally.
Notes on philosophical complicity
Critical Race theory not to be confused with African or African-American philosophy
Race theory is largely an internal critique of Western traditions in philosophy. It has its origin, like Liberalism, no less in Western European thought — in the philosophies of the Frankfurt School, to be more precise. It is not identical with actual African or African-American philosophies. Racism is what happened and happens at the intersection of these cultures. Critical Race theory might be seen as a European-inspired reaction to European colonial history. The philosophies of Africa and those of Africans subjected to the colonial and American experience are formidable topics all their own. We hope to address these at some point.
Empiricism, rationalism and racism
Several commentators on the the subject have pointed out that empiricism is especially liable to evolving racist attitudes — more so than, say, rationalism. It’s one thing to quote what philosophers say explicitly and another to see how racism might integrate into their philosophy. The integration is easier with empiricism. Since this method of knowledge acquisition is inherently piecemeal, it strictly fosters tentative conclusions. But given human impatience, these opinions rarely remain duly qualified. Instead, the fact that all the swans I have seen have been white segues to the conclusion, facilely averred as final, that “all swans are white.” Philosophers, despite their training, are scarcely immune to the psychological slope of induction.
Sometimes, though, their ideas get the better of them. Kant, like Hume, also said racist things. But his moral philosophy does not rest easy with the notion behind the attitude. Whatever may be said about Kant, Kantianism is not compatible with racism. Rather Kantianism lends itself to the race-blind premise that rational autonomy is the full and complete justification for the respect due moral agents. There is simply no place for racism (along with many other features of our animality) to get a purchase within this picture of the moral scene. Kantians may not have the complete picture of morality correct but they do have some explaining to do if they are racists.
Will it get worse before it gets better? (It will get better, won’t it?)
Mark this year: 2045. That’s when the U.S. Census Bureau predicts non-Hispanic whites will become an ethnic minority. Racism may get worse in fearful anticipation of the event. Whether it gets better afterwards will depend on two things:
1. how mixed people will be, and
2. how disinclined POC will feel about meting out revenge on their former oppressors.
Miscegenation has no history of making racism go away, but it does make it less boring. The disinclination, on the other hand, might be fostered by resisting racism as much as human perversion will allow in advance. Thus we can scry the outlines of a prudential motive — a species of consequentialist argument — for preempting some of the conditions for it. “If we could fuck away white supremacy, wouldn’t it be gone by now?” writes Lauren Michele Jackson (noting that cream-colored babies are all the rage at the moment). Alternatively, we might make concerted efforts that express the aspiration for, if not accomplish, racism’s minification. It might help. Consequentialism is empirical. That means we have to wait and see.

A notable exception
Jacques Derrida stands out among recent internationally famous philosophers for having had a life-long sensitivity to and concern for the vagaries of ethnic and racial conflict. Racism is a recurrent theme in his writings and activism. His committed support for ending apartheid in South Africa as well as his effort to undermine wherever possible the conceptual detritus of colonialism is unmatched by any other major philosopher. He was instrumental in validating efforts at establishing Philosophia Africana the first academic journal on the subject. Once referring to himself as an “uprooted” African, Derrida, of Sephardic Jewish ancestry born in Algiers, surrounded by Muslims as well as racist and anti-Semitic Frenchmen, was in a singular position to contemplate the philosophical problems of cultural identity. He viewed himself growing up in Algiers as “a little black and very Arab Jew.”
Notes on Plato’s thought that democracy is the second worst form of government
On the Left’s problems
Bari Weiss, writing about the Weinstein incident, in a New York Times article suggested it was a case of “the left… turning on the left.” But I don’t think so. I think the conventional left has just been too sloppy for too long in trying to inculcate truly progressive values to generations of marginalized young people, all the while engaged in a lot of talk and no action addressing the socio-economic conditions that actually drive racism and other forms of xenophobia. (The conventional right has been equally complicit, certainly. But, to their credit, they never teased us with expectations to the contrary.)
Connecting the dots
By “conventional left,” I mean the establishment left — the left of most major democratic politicians in recent decades. I don’t mean Bernie Sanders and I don’t mean Weinstein — who, yes, is a Sanders supporter, a Jew (hence not unacquainted with being a target of hate) and as leftward as American liberals come. I mean the “left” that has thought that a regimen of supportive words — various forms of socio-, psycho- and econ-babble — would make things better, convincing these students that “sensitivity training” for white faculty and staff combined with token structural resource allocations (e.g., more liaisons, counselors, cultural centers, and diversity awareness, etc.) are major parts of the solution to racial injustice. Alas, real reform does not come so cheaply.
Wonder where the current upsurge in racism, nationalism, and xenophobia comes from?
This may come, though it shouldn’t, as a surprise to many, but the conventional left has also ignored a not-so-small portion of the white population of the country: the white, non-hispanic, non-college-educated class that once held blue-collar but well-paid jobs and led relatively dignified lives and are now experiencing historic mortality rates. As a class, it’s their kids who once had a chance to go to college and become “centrists,” that is, invested in the system of power distribution more or less as it is. The point is not that these people are as disadvantaged as blacks and many POC, it is that they may have good reason to think they are because they are comparing themselves to their more urban, more educated, ever more wealthy white, but socially, economically and — now politically — distant cousins who are doing quite well and have and are separating themselves even further, materially, at alarming rates. This disaffected class is white and comprised of losers. And, as a class, it’s growing! How did that happen? Downward — absolute or relative — mobility is supposed to happen only to blacks and POCs with defective work ethics, right? Skyrocketing rates of alcohol and drug addiction, and suicide has ravaged this vulnerable class of white folks in recent decades, shocking economists at its speed. Somebody — political psychology should teach us — needs to take responsibility for this. Somebody whom you can spot at a distance is not like you. Someone darker, different, and foreign-looking.
Wonder how Trump got elected?
There’s a well rehearsed historical/cultural motif, call it Pirate Jenny Syndrome, in which the victim of oppression seeks revenge no matter the consequences to self, when anger and despair reach a pitch so fevered that harm to oneself cannot outweigh the pleasure of seeing your enemy come to ruin, when the beauty of the rubble of it all is worth having even one’s breath taken away… Trump is America’s death wish. And the centrists — comprised of the mainstream right and conventional left — are responsible.
Who else? Who else has been holding the reigns for the past several decades?
Resources
Philosophy and race
Radio interview with Robert Pollie, “George Yancy: Philosophizing While Black,” The 7th Avenue Project: Thinking Persons’ Radio (November 22, 2015). Several philosophical white guys and a token black one join forces to discuss: “Philosophy and Race (DuBois, Martin Luther King, Cornel West),” podcast (episode 52) at Partiallyexaminedlife.com. See also George Yancy’s “Dear White America” and Brad Evans’ interview of Yancy, “The Perils of Being a Black Philosopher.” NYT, The Stone. (April 2016). From Yancy’s Letter:
This letter is a gift for you. Bear in mind, though, that some gifts can be heavy to bear. You don’t have to accept it; there is no obligation. I give it freely, believing that many of you will throw the gift back in my face, saying that I wrongly accuse you, that I am too sensitive, that I’m a race hustler, and that I blame white people (you) for everything….
I can see your anger. I can see that this letter is being misunderstood. This letter is not asking you to feel bad about yourself, to wallow in guilt. That is too easy. I’m asking for you to tarry, to linger, with the ways in which you perpetuate a racist society, the ways in which you are racist. I’m now daring you to face a racist history which, paraphrasing Baldwin, has placed you where you are and that has formed your own racism. Again, in the spirit of Baldwin, I am asking you to enter into battle with your white self. I’m asking that you open yourself up; to speak to, to admit to, the racist poison that is inside of you.
Again, take a deep breath. Don’t tell me about how many black friends you have. Don’t tell me that you are married to someone of color. Don’t tell me that you voted for Obama. Don’t tell me that I’m the racist. Don’t tell me that you don’t see color. Don’t tell me that I’m blaming whites for everything. To do so is to hide yet again. You may have never used the N-word in your life, you may hate the K.K.K., but that does not mean that you don’t harbor racism and benefit from racism. After all, you are part of a system that allows you to walk into stores where you are not followed, where you get to go for a bank loan and your skin does not count against you, where you don’t need to engage in “the talk” that black people and people of color must tell their children when they are confronted by white police officers.
Contemporary philosophers on race — what were they thinking???
Olivia Goldhill, “Philosophers published a “Black Lives Matter” series written entirely by white professors,” Qz.com (May 27, 1917). See also, “Black Lives Matter: An Open Letter to the Editors of the Journal of Political Philosophy; or How Black Scholarship Matters, Too” politicalphilosopher.net.
History of philosophers on race
Julie K. Ward, “The Roots Of Modern Racism: Early Modern Philosophers On Race”.
On the dim prospect of racism disappearing in non-evolutionary, i.e., historical time
Ta-Nehisi Coates, “My President Was Black: A history of the first African American White House — and of what came next”. The Atlantic (January/February 2017). Coates considers the question: Was Obama really black? Don’t trust your eyes. You can be the “right” color and still not escape racist disquiet, so inveterate the notion. Ta-Nehisi Coates on His Barack Obama Article “My President Was Black” interview with Seth Myers.
Racism everywhere?
Mike LaBossiere, “Is Everyone a Little Bit Racist?” blog.talkingphilosophy.com (January 19, 2015).
“Gingerism”: a nasty “-ism” for every trait
Nick Bramhill, “Discrimination against redheads very real, says author.” Irishcentral.com, (March 20, 2017) Large groups of people will always require smaller bulliable groups. It’s helpful to have an external trait to latch onto but sometimes the mere rumor of one is sufficient. Consider Antisemitism… Jews come in all colors, races, and nationalities but somehow just being Jewish doesn’t escape being their chief problem. Then, when it’s hard to tell from the outside, there are always inner (invisible) traits: Catholic v. Protestant Irish, Hebrew v. Arab Semites, Tutsi v. Hutu Rwandans, Union v. Confederate Americans… And what about imported racism? Chinese racism? Mexican racism?… Immigrants have been known to be especially anti-immigrant. Even blacks are anti-black (Clarence Thomas, Bill Cosby, Ben Carson). Jews have a long illustrious history of taking themselves to task (Karl Kraus, Otto Weininger, Ludwig Wittgenstein)… All features of humans are potential bugs. Hell, some Norwegians have even turned against empty-bus-seats! (Far be it from me to suggest that all ethnic, racial, or religious self-criticism is ethically pernicious. Not all of it is selbsthas or self-hatred or the result of psychological damage, as some therapeutically-minded have been known to suggest. Some of it may very well be at the cutting edge of moral progress. No one is or ought to be in a better position to point out your failings than you… a possible future topic.)
Profiling: is it a form of legitimate prejudice?
David Edmonds’ podcast interview with Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen on profiling. “When airport security choose to stop young males of Middle East appearance rather than old white women travelling with their grandkids, that seems both rational and at the same time offensive. Profiling, particularly racial profiling, is hugely contentious. But Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen says it is both necessary and pervasive. And only some kinds of profiling are objectionable.” Philosophy247.org.
Implicit Bias: a bias it is within your power to do something about all by yourself
Chris Mooney, “Across America, whites are biased and they don’t even know it,” WashingtonPost.com (December 8, 2014). Tom Stafford, “This map shows what white Europeans associate with race — and it makes for uncomfortable reading” theconversation.com (May 2, 2017, Updated July 18, 2017). David Edmonds’ BBC Analysis podcast on “Implicit Bias.” You, as an individual, just might be able to do something about implicit bias… Structural bias? That’s hard.
Racism, free expression, and art — which is worse: racism or censorship? “Should White Artists Paint the Body of Emmett Till?” PhilosophyTalk.com. “A painting by a white woman artist of Emmett Till, a black teenager killed by white men for looking at a white woman, has been described as racist and exploitative.” “The painting must go.” Quoted from: “black artists urge the whitney biennial to remove painting of murdered black teenager emmett till” i-d.vice.com, Felix Petty. (21 March 2017). A response: “Censorship, Not the Painting, Must Go: On Dana Schutz’s Image of Emmett Till: Presuming that calls for censorship and destruction constitute a legitimate response to perceived injustice leads us down a very dark path.” Hyperallergic.com, Coco Fusco (March 27, 2017)… Update on the story of Emmett Till.
A more fully annotated version of this essay is available here.
