If I’m going to be a racist – and yer damn rights I am! – I want to establish my bona fides. This is going to take some work. So bear with me.
To start, full disclosure: Back in the day – I think it was grade eight – I was taught that there are only four races: negroid (black), caucasian (white), mongloid (yellow), and Australian bushman. (Yes, I checked, Home Depot does have a sample chip with that name.) But even if this wasn’t outdated, it would still be too course-grained for what we need here. Still, for a moment let’s put aside that after millennia of conquest and assimilation, there’s no one left who isn’t at least a halfbreed, and then a halfbreed of halfbreeds, and so on.
Anyhow, assuming I’m white, and that I’m not self-loathing, to be a racist can I just hate one of the other three? Or do I have to hate all three of them? And even if only one, can’t I discriminate before I discriminate? That is, East Asians are all mongloid, but I find signs in Chinatown to be gaudy and tacky, whereas Japanese gardens are tasteful and gentle on the soul. If I hate Jews and Arabs, both of whom are caucasian, do I have to hate them equality?
Okay, so there are lots of races. And to qualify I only need to hate one. But before I fess up, I want to do a little nit-picking. I do so not for myself, but for all of us. Us racists, that is. Because we don’t hate every member of the particular race we hate. There’s always one black or yellow or Australian bushwoman we find irresistibly fetching.
Moreover we all hate at least one member of the race, including our own, that we don’t hate. I’m Jewish, but I absolutely loathe Netanyahu. So for me to be a racist, your race needn’t be the sine qua non of my hating you. It need only be a contributing factor. If I were antisemitic I’d hate you because you diddled me on that stereo, and because “You’re a fucking kike!”
This is important. Race is never a stand-alone hate-inducing category. That doesn’t make it any the less racism. But that it’s not stand-alone directs our attention to what might be standing with it. In the case just cited, it’s that you diddled me. Other people have diddled me. So why does it matter that you’re also “a fucking kike”? It’s because, at least in my mind, there’s a pattern of Jewish diddling. Without the pattern, be it Jews who ‘Jew me down’, or those damn Injuns never turning up for work the morning after payday, or Hutterite women coming into town on Thursdays to shoplift, these various prejudices would make no sense.
That these stereotypes are sometimes – perhaps most of the time – ill-informed is irrelevant. A mistake is not stupidity. If it were then everyone who thought the sun circles the earth was stupid. So my racism, though arguably ill-informed, is no more stupid than geocentrism.
Too quick. Some people think that now that we are informed, persisting in one’s geocentrism is stupid. These are the same people who think global warming denial or vaccine skepticism is stupid, because any reasonable person should know what they know. Of course the same can be said of the filioque. Any right-believing Christian knows that the Holy Spirit proceedeth from the Father and the Son rather than from the Father alone. I guess they have to put aside that the word ‘Orthodox’, which just means right-believing, is what those Christians call themselves who deny the filioque.
To be fair, some people think that global warming, vaccine safety, and heliocentricity, about which there can be no dispute, and issues of metaphysics and ethics, about which there can, fall into two very different epistemic categories. The former are empirical, the latter … What? A priori? So no, that distinction won’t hold. Prejudice is not a swear word. Pre-judging – I’m looking at the sky, is it going to rain or not – is the product of induction. Inducing is what humans have to do to survive. Another word for induction is stereotyping. For most of our history if we didn’t stereotype the person approaching us we’d be dead.
The people I don’t want to rent my house to because they’re likely to trash it aren’t of a particular race. They’re of a particular class. Not the class that does trash the accommodation it rents. That would be circular and unhelpful. Rather the class more likely to do so. So I have to go by tells. A tattoo is a tell. So is race.
I could be wrong a) in the case of this particular would-be renter. Turns out she’s a black tattooed Ph.D. student. I could be wrong about b) blacks being more likely to be members of the suspect class. I just made a hasty generalisation. Or I could be wrong about c) members of the class in question being more likely to trash the accommodations they rent. Another hasty generalisation. But each of these would be mistakes. Mistakes are subject to epistemic assessment. But we’ve already granted that epistemic mistakes in themselves are neither stupid nor subject to moral assessment.
What is subject to moral assessment, it seems – otherwise there’d be no accusation of racism to begin with – is my acting on the inductive inferences I’ve made, in this case by not renting to her. But was it morally wrong because a) I should have ignored that she was black, b) that I should have ignored my belief, mistaken or not, that blacks are more likely to be members of the suspect class, or c) I should have ignored my belief, mistaken or not, that members of the class in question are more likely to trash the accommodations they rent? In other words, if having the race-based belief I have is exculpatory, then the fault must lie in acting on that race-based belief.
But note that I said this belief could be mistaken or not. So if acting on a certain race-based belief, notwithstanding it’s true, is blameworthy, then the truth or falseness of the belief is morally irrelevant. But if it’s morally irrelevant, why bother evaluating the inductions that gave rise to it? Why not just say, as Gilbert and Sullivan said about “the flowers that bloom in the spring, tra la”, that the facts “have nothing to do with the cases, tra la!”?
What follows from this is that it’s not racism if I don’t act on it, and it’s neither stupid nor a moral failing if I do. Hardly the conclusion the anti-racist can accept if she’s to sustain her high dudgeon. So what fallback dudgeon is left to her?
That racism is hurtful. It’s hurtful, as MLK put it, to be judged on the basis of the colour of your skin rather than the quality of your character. But if that’s the argument it proves too much. Even though all my friends could, I couldn’t test for my drivers license because I wasn’t yet sixteen. That was hurtful. Therefore I should have been allowed to test. So yes, not to hurt you is a reason not to insult you. But it’s not a reason to rent to you. Or hire you. Or to ask you out on a date. Or not to say no if you ask me out.
It turns out I was wrong. If I’d asked you out we’d have fallen in love. Or it turns out you’d have been the perfect renter. Life’s full of shoulda-coulda-woulda’s. So let’s pass a law against missed opportunities.
Well, that’s exactly what we have done. If the inductive facts back up the prejudice we ratify it. Hence my not being able to test until I was sixteen. But if it doesn’t – or if we need to pretend it doesn’t – the law replaces my poor judgment with a more informed one. Hence I can’t refuse to rent to her just because she’s black. Or decline to hire him because he’s native. Or profile her because she’s Hutterite.
Well, if it doesn’t it doesn’t. But why would we need to pretend it does when it doesn’t? Because the alternative is to ratify a racially divided society. And that, we’ve collectively decided, would cost us more than the occasional suboptimal rental or hire.
Of course that cost is not borne equality among us. That’s why only some people bridle about bearing the cost of an anti-discrimination law. So even if, as I’ve shown, racism itself isn’t a moral failing, what about that bridling? Is it a moral failing not to be willing to absorb a loss for what may arguably be ‘the common good’?
That’s an interesting question. But a much broader one than I’m addressing here. Here I only want to establish that a) I am a racist, b) that we all are – or, if we’re not we should be – and c) in being racists there’s nothing we need apologise for.
Am I suggesting anything radical here? I am not. Unless, that is, it’s radical to think about the meaning of the words we use, and to rethink the moral assessments of those words once their meanings have been demuddled.
Elsewhere in this blog I’ve urged this rethinking with respect to rape, genocide, colonialism, and a few more unrethinkables. This is not an entirely thankless task. Though I wouldn’t know it from the number of thanks I get.
Categories: Everything You Wanted to Know About What's Going On in the World But Were Afraid to Ask, Social and Political Philosophy
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