The Innate Racism of “Innate Beliefs”

Let’s stipulate that we’ll start and end with the most generous possible reading of this tweet, that Hillary Clinton meant to call out Donald Trump and Donald Trump alone for his particular racist beliefs. What’s still wrong with this tweet?

It should be obvious that the phrase “innate beliefs” doesn’t make sense here. Innate beliefs are things that you believe as a result of universal patterns in human psychological development, like “strangers are scary” and “three is more than two”. Racism is a learned belief system and a learned set of behaviors. If you believe that racism is innate, you believe that all people are innately racist until they are educated out of it. That is, to put it mildly, debatable. People do have innate beliefs that can be the basis for racism, but the concept of race is a relatively modern invention, not an artifact of human nature.

It’s easy to see why people might believe that racism is innate. Racism is, in fact, very common. In fact, many, if not most, racists believe that racism is innate. “It’s us versus them”.

To be fair, this tweet was probably written by a social media staffer who didn’t really understand the the meaning of “innate”. (I find it hard to believe that Hillary Clinton is personally sending out 2o-item Tweetstorms as she did on Monday). That’s not an excuse, since the Clinton campaign is festooned with highly educated senior staff who undoubtedly read every tweet and should know what words mean. Clinton herself is a lawyer who knows what it means to have something go out with her name attached. Not only that, she is a lawyer who (admirably) worked for the Children’s Defense Fund and (again admirably) has demonstrated a passion for children’s education throughout her working career — so she certainly knows the difference between innate and learned behaviors.

To believe in the innateness of racism privileges those who have educated themselves out of it, since it means that everyone else is racist by default. This, of course, is exactly why people object to being included in the “basket of deplorables.”