In our society being a racist is unacceptable. Now, this statement may be scoffed at by those who think that we're deeply embedded in the systems of white supremacy and who are complicit in the destruction and annihilation of black and brown bodies that are being consumed by the white cis-normative heterosexist capitalist patriarchy, but how else is one to explain the swiftness with which the accused get cast to the flames?
In my previous post I had mentioned 'anti-white bigotry'. I had done so to comment on a feature of 'hoax hate crimes' as well as other incidents, such as the Covington Catholics kids' debacle and/or the Jussie Smollet nonsense, that have involved scapegoating of white persons based on a prejudicial view of white people as racists.
I'm not getting into those issues again, as I want to focus on the word 'racism' and how I think it has been re-defined in a power-play by black feminists, critical race theorists, and other progressive thinkers and disciplines to subordinate legitimate voices from the dominant culture to their language and ideology.
Up until rather recently, the meaning of 'racism' was a term with a familiar definition: 'prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against someone of a different race based on the belief that one's own race is superior'.
Central to the concept of racism, is the concept of 'race' which states that the larger human species can be divided into a number of smaller groups that are sufficiently distinct from one another: these are races.
'Race', then, is a concept that describes and divides humans into racial groups (such as above), racism is the belief that one's race is superior while others are inferior in some way or other, and a racist is a person who believes a race concept (such as above), holds that their race is superior to others and discriminates against members of other races based on that concept.
So what's the problem? This seems simple enough. Well, nowadays, this definition of racism has been exploded by myriad academic disciplines to encompass an array of loosely connected phenomenon. No longer is 'racism' discrimination against someone of a different race based on the belief that one's own race is superior, now 'racism' is an outgrowth of the functioning of social structures and one's position in them. This I'll call 'new racism', though it is colloquially known though the slogan of 'prejudice plus power'.
'New racism' spins the traditional definition of racism on its head. In it, 'racism' is thus defined as something like, 'the routine generation of norms and practices that confer material and/or cultural advantages on a dominant racial group whilst producing adverse outcomes for the mariginalised racial group(s)'. So, no longer is racism the prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against someone of a different race based on the belief that one's own race is superior, but rather it is racial and social superiority that is the result of prejudice, discrimination or antagonism suffered by racial minorities - belief need not be a part of it, and one need not willfully participate in the prejudice or antagonism.
From this perspective, while members of ethnic/racial minorities may be prejudiced against members of the dominant culture, as well as towards members of other races, they lack the political and economic power to actively oppress them, and therefore are not practicing 'racism'. (This fits right in with the current zeitgeist's obsession with 'punching up' vs. 'punching down'.)
One problem with this concept is the asymmetry: members of a disadvantaged racial group cannot be racist against member of a privileged racial group - or, in North America and Europe, we're told non-white people cannot be racist against white people. They can be prejudiced against white people, they may even discriminate against white people but since they do not hold a position of power and privilege in their society, they cannot be racist against white people since white people hold the position of power in society. This hardly seems fair and accurate since there are numerous examples of white people being victims of racist attacks - most infamous being the Chicago kidnapping and torture affair. There are also examples of inter-minority racism, and there is the phenomenon wherein minorities create intense racist attitudes and behaviours towards their oppressors in order to cope with their disadvantaged position. So, in short, though whites and non-whites alike have racial prejudices, and both may actively discriminate against members of other races based on these prejudices, it is the dominant position in society that is held by whites that automatically makes their prejudices racist. In fact, this story was spun by some right-wing pundits as being related to Black Lives Matter (BLM) - the social justice activist movement for reform and/or abolition of law enforcement and incarceration. By doing so, they enabled BLM activists and their representatives in the media to pivot away from the black people engaging in a clearly racist act, and to focus on the smear campaign against them. By taking BLM to be representative of all black people or to have these black people representative of BLM and smearing it without any credible evidence we were treated with articles arguing that black people, as a group, were the real victims of a handicapped white guy getting tortured by four black people. Total trash.
That aside, from what I can tell, this 'new racism' can be applied to the behaviour of nation states and their criminal justice systems. It can be used to describe unconscious bias and overt acts of bigotry; gentrification is racist, and white flight, also. White people speaking for people of colour, as well as being silent may also be seen as racist, after all, 'white silence is violence', or so the placards tell us. Refusing loans via red-lining was racist, and giving out too many loans via sub-prime lending was also racist. Denying one's 'whiteness' or having any pride in it: both, racist. Even denying that one is a racist is, in fact, racist. These can all be construed as racist, but the one thing it cannot be applied to is any action made by a non-white person.
Now, one could say that this is a rather parochial understanding of what's being said by the advocates of new racism, after all, there are numerous countries that have no white people and exhibit their own forms of racial discrimination. White people are not needed for there to be racism. Surely there is truth to this, but this new racism is almost never used in these contexts. New racism is mobilised almost exclusively to describe disparate interactions between white people and non-white people: from genocide to colonialism to hiring practices to under-representation in sport to unconscious bias. It's racism all the way down.
Another problem is assignment: how does one become racist? If racism is 'prejudice plus power', then how much power is needed to make prejudices become racist? If we all have racial prejudices, but only some of us have the power required to transmogrify our prejudices into racism, then wouldn't the acquisition of more and more power by people of colour make them more and more likely to become racist? By adding 'power' to the 'prejudice plus power' equation, one would be making racists. But perhaps this is nothing to worry about, since such people wouldn’t be racists. They certainly wouldn’t think of themselves as racists, and any benefit they confer to their group wouldn’t be done at the expense of others. Such a thing certainly wouldn't happen intentionally... Ah, but forgive the sarcasm, and digression.
Additionally, is racism a choice? As stated previously, prejudice and power are individually necessary and jointly sufficient elements of racism, but power, as it is being spoken of in this context, isn't a matter of individual choice. White people don't choose to be born white; to be born into a system that apparently privileges them. To be charitable to the new racist thinkers: being born into privilege (power) is something that just happens. But this hardly makes any sense. A white guy, in Appalachia, who is suffering from a meth addiction is hardly in a position of power or privilege, and yet that person could very well be racist. Perhaps one could interrogate his drug supply and find that it is linked to the war on drugs or something...
To my mind, the racist-making property is vague at best, and strikes me as fairly occult. Like intersectionality - the so-called comprehensive theory of oppression that states that individuals exist in a social matrix wherein vectors of oppression and privilege intersect within individuals who contain numerous identities which, themselves, are products of and/or beneficiaries of those oppressive systems - in short, the theory that states that intersectional identities intersect - new racism operates in a realm of magic wherein thinking something tightly corresponds with consequences in the world. Hence their rabid focus on speech and beliefs.
Finally, I will close up with what I think is so dishonest about 'new racism': it's that the definition of racism has been switched from a more individualistic and intentional model to a institutional and abstract model without adequately shifting the connotation of 'racism'.
It is a manipulation to use a term like 'racism' or 'white supremacy' which is charged with visceral images of lynchings, eugenics, the Holocaust, the genocide of the indigenous North American tribes, cross burning, swastikas, police brutality, and all sorts of other sordid events when, in fact, one is talking about 'unconscious bias' and 'microaggressions'.
This, however, is what is being banked on by the users of the term; they're piggybacking on that long chain of racist acts and allowing them to colour the perception of the term. They're smuggling in the weight of past racism alongside the clarity of historical knowledge to make their claims have impact, and control conversation and behaviour.
So, it is not that people are more racist now than in previous years, but rather activists and progressive thinkers are weaponising the language of racism in order to effectively label opponents as 'racists'.
As stated at the outset: being a racist is unacceptable in our society. What better way to turn opponents into pariahs than to scapegoat them as racists?
In my previous post I had mentioned 'anti-white bigotry'. I had done so to comment on a feature of 'hoax hate crimes' as well as other incidents, such as the Covington Catholics kids' debacle and/or the Jussie Smollet nonsense, that have involved scapegoating of white persons based on a prejudicial view of white people as racists.
I'm not getting into those issues again, as I want to focus on the word 'racism' and how I think it has been re-defined in a power-play by black feminists, critical race theorists, and other progressive thinkers and disciplines to subordinate legitimate voices from the dominant culture to their language and ideology.
Up until rather recently, the meaning of 'racism' was a term with a familiar definition: 'prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against someone of a different race based on the belief that one's own race is superior'.
Central to the concept of racism, is the concept of 'race' which states that the larger human species can be divided into a number of smaller groups that are sufficiently distinct from one another: these are races.
Our race concept typically involves several criteria and is something like the following:
Races reflect (i) some type of biological foundation which generates discrete groupings wherein all and only all members of the group share a set of biological characteristics. This biological foundation is (ii) inherited from generation to generation, and (iii) it generates phenotypic expressions such as skin colour, hair, eye shape, et cetera. The characteristics generated by this biological foundation are (iv) identifiable by observers such that an individual can be identified with their racial grouping, and (v) this racial grouping has a genealogy can be traced to a race's geographical origin (Africa, Asia, Europe, or the Americas).
'Race', then, is a concept that describes and divides humans into racial groups (such as above), racism is the belief that one's race is superior while others are inferior in some way or other, and a racist is a person who believes a race concept (such as above), holds that their race is superior to others and discriminates against members of other races based on that concept.
So what's the problem? This seems simple enough. Well, nowadays, this definition of racism has been exploded by myriad academic disciplines to encompass an array of loosely connected phenomenon. No longer is 'racism' discrimination against someone of a different race based on the belief that one's own race is superior, now 'racism' is an outgrowth of the functioning of social structures and one's position in them. This I'll call 'new racism', though it is colloquially known though the slogan of 'prejudice plus power'.
'New racism' spins the traditional definition of racism on its head. In it, 'racism' is thus defined as something like, 'the routine generation of norms and practices that confer material and/or cultural advantages on a dominant racial group whilst producing adverse outcomes for the mariginalised racial group(s)'. So, no longer is racism the prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against someone of a different race based on the belief that one's own race is superior, but rather it is racial and social superiority that is the result of prejudice, discrimination or antagonism suffered by racial minorities - belief need not be a part of it, and one need not willfully participate in the prejudice or antagonism.
From this perspective, while members of ethnic/racial minorities may be prejudiced against members of the dominant culture, as well as towards members of other races, they lack the political and economic power to actively oppress them, and therefore are not practicing 'racism'. (This fits right in with the current zeitgeist's obsession with 'punching up' vs. 'punching down'.)
One problem with this concept is the asymmetry: members of a disadvantaged racial group cannot be racist against member of a privileged racial group - or, in North America and Europe, we're told non-white people cannot be racist against white people. They can be prejudiced against white people, they may even discriminate against white people but since they do not hold a position of power and privilege in their society, they cannot be racist against white people since white people hold the position of power in society. This hardly seems fair and accurate since there are numerous examples of white people being victims of racist attacks - most infamous being the Chicago kidnapping and torture affair. There are also examples of inter-minority racism, and there is the phenomenon wherein minorities create intense racist attitudes and behaviours towards their oppressors in order to cope with their disadvantaged position. So, in short, though whites and non-whites alike have racial prejudices, and both may actively discriminate against members of other races based on these prejudices, it is the dominant position in society that is held by whites that automatically makes their prejudices racist. In fact, this story was spun by some right-wing pundits as being related to Black Lives Matter (BLM) - the social justice activist movement for reform and/or abolition of law enforcement and incarceration. By doing so, they enabled BLM activists and their representatives in the media to pivot away from the black people engaging in a clearly racist act, and to focus on the smear campaign against them. By taking BLM to be representative of all black people or to have these black people representative of BLM and smearing it without any credible evidence we were treated with articles arguing that black people, as a group, were the real victims of a handicapped white guy getting tortured by four black people. Total trash.
That aside, from what I can tell, this 'new racism' can be applied to the behaviour of nation states and their criminal justice systems. It can be used to describe unconscious bias and overt acts of bigotry; gentrification is racist, and white flight, also. White people speaking for people of colour, as well as being silent may also be seen as racist, after all, 'white silence is violence', or so the placards tell us. Refusing loans via red-lining was racist, and giving out too many loans via sub-prime lending was also racist. Denying one's 'whiteness' or having any pride in it: both, racist. Even denying that one is a racist is, in fact, racist. These can all be construed as racist, but the one thing it cannot be applied to is any action made by a non-white person.
Now, one could say that this is a rather parochial understanding of what's being said by the advocates of new racism, after all, there are numerous countries that have no white people and exhibit their own forms of racial discrimination. White people are not needed for there to be racism. Surely there is truth to this, but this new racism is almost never used in these contexts. New racism is mobilised almost exclusively to describe disparate interactions between white people and non-white people: from genocide to colonialism to hiring practices to under-representation in sport to unconscious bias. It's racism all the way down.
Another problem is assignment: how does one become racist? If racism is 'prejudice plus power', then how much power is needed to make prejudices become racist? If we all have racial prejudices, but only some of us have the power required to transmogrify our prejudices into racism, then wouldn't the acquisition of more and more power by people of colour make them more and more likely to become racist? By adding 'power' to the 'prejudice plus power' equation, one would be making racists. But perhaps this is nothing to worry about, since such people wouldn’t be racists. They certainly wouldn’t think of themselves as racists, and any benefit they confer to their group wouldn’t be done at the expense of others. Such a thing certainly wouldn't happen intentionally... Ah, but forgive the sarcasm, and digression.
Additionally, is racism a choice? As stated previously, prejudice and power are individually necessary and jointly sufficient elements of racism, but power, as it is being spoken of in this context, isn't a matter of individual choice. White people don't choose to be born white; to be born into a system that apparently privileges them. To be charitable to the new racist thinkers: being born into privilege (power) is something that just happens. But this hardly makes any sense. A white guy, in Appalachia, who is suffering from a meth addiction is hardly in a position of power or privilege, and yet that person could very well be racist. Perhaps one could interrogate his drug supply and find that it is linked to the war on drugs or something...
To my mind, the racist-making property is vague at best, and strikes me as fairly occult. Like intersectionality - the so-called comprehensive theory of oppression that states that individuals exist in a social matrix wherein vectors of oppression and privilege intersect within individuals who contain numerous identities which, themselves, are products of and/or beneficiaries of those oppressive systems - in short, the theory that states that intersectional identities intersect - new racism operates in a realm of magic wherein thinking something tightly corresponds with consequences in the world. Hence their rabid focus on speech and beliefs.
Finally, I will close up with what I think is so dishonest about 'new racism': it's that the definition of racism has been switched from a more individualistic and intentional model to a institutional and abstract model without adequately shifting the connotation of 'racism'.
It is a manipulation to use a term like 'racism' or 'white supremacy' which is charged with visceral images of lynchings, eugenics, the Holocaust, the genocide of the indigenous North American tribes, cross burning, swastikas, police brutality, and all sorts of other sordid events when, in fact, one is talking about 'unconscious bias' and 'microaggressions'.
This, however, is what is being banked on by the users of the term; they're piggybacking on that long chain of racist acts and allowing them to colour the perception of the term. They're smuggling in the weight of past racism alongside the clarity of historical knowledge to make their claims have impact, and control conversation and behaviour.
So, it is not that people are more racist now than in previous years, but rather activists and progressive thinkers are weaponising the language of racism in order to effectively label opponents as 'racists'.
As stated at the outset: being a racist is unacceptable in our society. What better way to turn opponents into pariahs than to scapegoat them as racists?
No comments:
Post a Comment