Racism is wrong. Why the different reasons we believe it’s wrong matter.
Why is racism wrong?
It is, of course. But how many of us could really explain why we believe it is wrong, beyond “it just is”?
I was thinking about this last week, driving back to my law office after monitoring a national newspaper’s interview of a client. The reporter asked my client why a false accusation of racism made him so angry.
He gave a good answer; we’ll see if it’s included in the upcoming article. But it got me thinking: Why is racism so bad, that a person should react so strongly to being unjustly accused of it?
I would answer that it’s because, under the Christian tradition at the foundation of my moral framework, racism violates at least three of the traditional “cardinal” virtues: Prudence, Justice, and Charity.
Prudence, because racism is stupid. Regardless of what differences may exist between “racial” groups (the imprecision of “race” as a shorthand for describing anything useful about human populations is a long discussion for another day), there is always far more variation within any ethnic group than between any two. You can predict virtually nothing useful, with any useful degree of certainty, about a person, beyond his physical appearance, based solely on your impression of what “race” he belongs to.
Justice, because a person deserves — as a matter of justice — to be treated based on what he deserves, not based on what his ancestors were. Because a human being is first and foremost a human being, and her rights and moral worth flow from her humanity, not her ancestry.
And Charity, because racism reduces flesh-and-blood human beings to mere categories. One can’t love categories — abstractions — the way one loves human beings. Beyond that, racism is almost always hostile. Almost invariably, it involves unfavorable comparisons — “Race X is better than race Y.” At best, it yields patronizing contempt; at worst, open enmity. In practice, it operates as an artificial, unnecessary blockade to a person’s legitimate aspirations. Love and racism can’t coexist.
So yes: Racism is a particularly obnoxious species of human malice. Not the only one, by any means, but a bad one. And so an unjust accusation of it is likewise malicious — something a person should indeed be justly angered by.
But what if you don’t subscribe to a moral system based on the cardinal virtues (or something similar)? Is racism still wrong? Why?
First, I wonder if everyone means the same thing by that word “racism.” My definition is the classic Merriam-Webster dictionary definition: “a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race.”
As I’ve learned, though — that’s not the only definition around. I’ve seen racism defined (more or less explicitly) as “whatever yields (or is perceived to yield) negative outcomes to traditionally underprospering groups. (“They don’t say [racial slur] or [racial slur] anymore; they say ‘let’s cut taxes.’”) Actual race prejudice, or race hatred, isn’t required — in fact, people who operate using this concept of racism don’t seem particularly to mind prejudice or race hate provided it’s directed towards the “right” groups.
For example, in the recent, surrealistic spectacle of the whole country losing its mind debating whether a sixteen-year-old’s facial expression was a nervous smile or a “smirk,” whether the expression showed sufficient respect to a late-middle-aged Native American banging a drum in his face, and how this all was or wasn’t tied up with Larger Narratives about white supremacy, patriarchy, and heaven knows what else, I found myself exchanging views, on a friend’s Facebook page, with a very passionate “progressive” woman. (Quotation marks around “progressive” to be explained later.) To make a long story short, I noted that the Indian gentleman, Mr. Phillips, had changed his story significantly — from a first account where he was “surrounded,” while minding his own business, by a virtual lynch mob of red-hatted young men, to acknowledging that he had walked into them and not the other way around.
My interlocutor exploded: “Wait, your problem is the Native, and you know not the entire [bleeping] history of white men?”
This was after Mr. Phillips’ first account had been shown to be false, after he changed his story, and after the various press outlets who’d called for the “smirking” teenager’s head to be figuratively stuck on a pike were beginning their frantic walkback of their first knee-jerk reaction. That didn’t matter. What actually happened didn’t matter. People’s actual actions didn’t matter. All that mattered to her (and those — very numerous, in my experience, who think like her) was the identity of the parties. Oppressed Person right, Oppressor wrong, and by their ancestry ye shall know them. That’s all that matters. The modern “progressive” version of Vladimir Lenin’s distilling all moral questions down to “Who-whom?” Who is doing what to whom? If it’s our side getting hit, bad. If theirs, good.
As a friend’s friend wrote the other day, “Marxists only think along 1 axis: that of power ←> oppression. When you point out that there are more moral dimensions than that one (good/evil, justice/mercy, peace/strife, purity/corruption, etc.), and that the other dimensions aren’t reducible to that one: Does not compute.”
I don’t know if my interlocutor was an outright, conscious Marxist. Yet neo-Marxist concepts (courtesy of Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, and others) do seem to have woven themselves into contemporary Western thinking — usually, among people who have no idea as to their worldviews’ provenance, and indeed would probably laugh (ha ha McCarthy red scare booga booga!) at the very thought. And there she was, indeed, thinking along that one moral axis. It was literally impossible for her to conceive of Mr. Phillips as the “bad guy,” or even equally responsible for the confrontation. If (>lesspower) then (goodguy) (rage.exe).
That helps explain the astonishingly common “progressive” notion that it is literally impossible for “people of color” to be racist, or that racism against “dominant groups,” in my interlocutor’s words, “isn’t a thing.”
I’m willing to accept that race hate against a minority group can be, and has been, relatively more damaging (for historical, cultural and practical reasons) than race hate against majorities or relatively powerful groups. But “less bad” is still bad, no? I contend that there is only one reason to deny that race hate is race hate — and that is because, for whatever reason, you are anxious to indulge yourself in race hate, and rationalize it as righteous.
That strikes me as the opposite of progressive. It’s just one more expression of our heritage as tribal primates. For most of our species’ history, moral rules weren’t universal. We had one set that applied among our relatives and friends — and another set for everything and everyone else. Those outside the tribe, might as well not have been human, for all their registered into our distant ancestors’ moral framework.
The basic moral rules haven’t changed that much, as we’ve progressed. What’s changed is the circle of humans we recognize those rules apply to. Seeds were planted (“There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one”). We learned to sail and travelled far, and couldn’t help noticing the oddly-dressed people we got rich trading with seemed pretty human too. Starting just a few hundred years ago, we lit a philosophical fuse that burst into “all men are created equal,” and moved (mostly) steadily towards living out the true measure of that creed.
I put “progressive” in quotes, because the ink was barely dry on “all men are created equal,” when a bunch of German romantic philosophers — Herder, Fichte, the whole rotten proto-Nazi lot — started stampeding back towards the völkisch jungle. “Race matters,” they insisted. Universal moral truths and the brotherhood of man are quaint and crippling fantasies. Por la Raza todo, fuera la raza nada. More Germans applied the same method to economics, with class substituted for das Volk as the group entitled to pursue its interest by any means necessary. Intellectuals here in the colonies, with a bad case of Europe-envy, ate this scheiss up — many still do — even as its inventors marched it to its logical conclusion. It made for a nasty 20th century. Yet somehow, this attitude became the “progressive” conventional wisdom.
This isn’t progressive. It’s reactionary. It takes us back to the prehistoric savanna, where all we had to know about a quarrel was — which side is our tribe on?
We’ve aspired to more than that. Do we still aspire to it? Is race hate objectively, comprehensively evil — because it is fundamentally a sin against our basic humanity? Or is it just one more club for tribe to swing against tribe?
