What is racism?

[Recursion]

Poll question: What is racism?

I remember this debate from the 1990's. Curious where the GDP crowd stands.

[merwin]

1. If you stop and think about it, everyone is racist in one way or another.

It's human nature/survival instinct to look at a person and make instinctive judgments about them. This includes our built-in racial profiling that we all do, like it or not.

I'm not saying we should act upon it, but it is something that instinctively happens, especially when put in an uncomfortable or unfamiliar situation.

[Recursion]

2. That's the question

It is not universally accepted that racism is simply a set of prejudiced views. I have listed two other suggestions that I have heard: one that it is prejudiced views combined with the impunity to act on them, and one that it is not even a characteristic of an individual but rather a power relationship in society.

[aasleka]

3. I would hope that we have reached a point where we can gain insight to

judgement by something other than race or features.

[merwin]

17. As much as you want your intellect to trump your instinct, many times it doesn't.

And that's not a problem we can solve. What we can solve is whether or not to act upon those instincts.

[Joe Chi Minh]

7. That is true. It must be a tribal instinct, and as you intimate, has to be dealt with

by the individual, although also, where necessary, sanctioned by law.

On the one hand, we have the problem of human malice, and I believe, contrary to received opinion, this has generally manifested itself to a greater extent, and more malevolently, among the monied people of the middle and upper classes.

Since, economic immigrants tend to be poorer and settle in our own poorer and more densely populated, urban areas, the problem of the indigenous population retaining their sense of personal/national identity arises. Unfortunately, it is often compounded by a religious/cultural component which defines distinctive mindsets and value systems, and the kind of racism which this latter component leads to becomes more and more pronounced, the closer the respective populations become in terms of their numbers, because a mutual struggle for supremacy kicks in, and the mutual antagonism increases. I never understood the racism against the West Indians in the UK, as they did not come from the West Indies in large numbers, and moreover shared the same Christian values as ourselves, if somewhat more purposefully. Another factor, of course, which compounds our tendency towards racism is of course the economic threat often posed by immigrants, but our Godless but pretentious governments hide behind a spurious morality, to get cheap labour, at the expense of their compatriots.

Brutish, it may be, but in principle racism is a natural characteristic of our fallen human nature. This weakness of human nature is something understood by the Christian Church, and one of its most fundamental axioms is that "grace builds upon nature" (which, of course, is not to say that race crimes should not be swiftly and severely punished. They indeed should. It's more sensible than the atheist precept that you can be good just by saying to yourself, "I want to be good, so I will be from this moment on". We struggle to become better people by repeated acts of the will - and we face moral choices all the time. Fr de Caussade's Sacrament of the Present Moment comes in here. It is better to put a piece of paper in the waste-paper basket if it is the approporiate thing to do at that moment, than to give yourself to be burnt at the stake when it is not.

[Chisox08]

4. We were talking about racism in my Social Psychology class last week.

The definition of racism according to my Professor is a hatred of a person or group of people against another based on race. But the group with the hatred must have power or dominance over the other race. With out that power all you have is prejudice.

[Joe Chi Minh]

8. It's a matter of semantics. Many would consider racial prejudice to

be racist. Perhaps your Social Psychology was referring to the currently received definitions in his field, although, in the end, it's the people who define language, not professors or other specialist luminaries, as the Academie Francaise is always finding out, to its disappointment.

[OPERATIONMINDCRIME]

16. Well, Tell Your Professor He's Wrong.

For one thing, racism does not in any way have to be related to hate. Sometimes racism can present itself just as thinking one is superior to another, but without any hatred whatsoever, almost as if that which is the victim is almost a pet, or an animal. There's no hatred there, just an ignorant perception that they simply don't carry with them as much value as the race doing the discriminating.

In addition, it is completely ridiculous to demand that one need be in dominance over the victim race in order to be classified as engaging in racism. In fact, that in and of itself is a racist point of view since it assigns everyone in that race into one overall group.

I hope in the future you find yourself having brighter professors.

[Two Americas]

5. nothing to do with personal preferences

It trivializes and completely misrepresents the issue of racism to reduce it to merely being a matter of personal likes and dislikes.

"I don't care whether or not someone likes me, so long as they do not have the power to harm me."

Also, saying that racism is "human nature" and somehow inevitable is a way to avoid the subject and deny the reality of racism.

[Joe Chi Minh]

10. On the contrary. Recognising that human nature is very prone to badness,

is a necessary condition for dealing with it, in whatever form our propensity for badnesss takes. In that regard, it's like the necessity for alcoholics to recognise that they have a problem, a major problem.

[Two Americas]

13. an old argument

This argument was used to defend slavery in the 1850's. Making social injustice into a matter of individual people being good or bad renders all political analysis and social progress impossible.

The injustice of slavery would not have been eliminated by making the slave masters better people, yet there were many in the 1850's who argued that way - the argument was that there were "bad" slaves - so therefore we should not "romanticize" them because they were no better than anyone else - and there were "good" masters so we should no "demonize" all of them. "If we could all just be better people then we wouldn't have these social problems" was the thinking. Of course it is easy to see now that this argument was a disingenuous way to argue in favor of slavery without the speaker being held to account for that position.

This is what cripples the left and makes social progress impossible. Everything is made into a quasi-spiritual individualized search for self-actualization. The idea is that by changing oneself, somehow society is magically changed. That self-improvement approach belongs in the realm, of religion, not politics, and strongly reinforces the right wing plan of dividing and conquering us by turning us all into atomized disconnected obedient individuals, and discouraging and demoralizing us.

Many liberals are using this as an excuse to be self-centered and unsympathetic to the suffering all around them and that blocks any and all possibility of collective political action. We are precluded from even discussing collective political action when every discussion is transformed into an exercise in self-actualization.

There is far more evidence that social injustice is making people "bad" then there is that "bad" people are causing social problems. In the realm of politics we attack social problems with collective political action, not with self-improvement regimens.

It is highly reactionary and a right wing message to blame the people for their own misery, and to turn our collective suffering into an individualized problem of improving oneself.

[Joe Chi Minh]

14. Oh, if you think that's what I was trying to express, you couldn't be further

from the truth. I agree with you 100% on the subject. It's why despite the madness of social liberalism/licence, economically, I'm a Socialist. People have to be able to survive with a modicum of dignity, before a concern for spiritual edification can figure as a factor. I'm 100% on the side of Castro and Chavez, for instance; and highly critical of the execrable witness of my own church, the Roman Catholic Church, in this regard, historically, and am all too well aware of its shameful complacency with regard, precisely, to slavery. It was the non-denominational churches that drove and led the abolition movement.

And, as you mention, such precepts as "grace building upon nature", true and important though they are, and giving excessive precedence to "personal spirituality" over justice in terms of a meaningful structural economic reforming of societies, constituted the foundations of the mockery of religion observed by the scribes and the Pharisees, and elicited Christ's numerous extremely vehement diatribes against them.

"There is far more evidence that social injustice is making people "bad" then there is that "bad" people are causing social problems. In the realm of politics we attack social problems with collective political action, not with self-improvement regimens.

It is highly reactionary and a right wing message to blame the people for their own misery, and to turn our collective suffering into an individualized problem of improving oneself."

That is precisely what I go on about all the time, here and elsewhere. However, post-WWII, the fact is that, in the UK, the historically predatory culture of the old, Christian one-nation Tories was attenuated to an extent by a real Christian faith, albeit still distorted somewhat by an excessive fondness for money and status. Now, under Blair and Brown, we have discovered that with encouragement from the new, wholly barbaric far right, and a confidence that they are more subtle than the latter, we are nevertheless finding they are essentially the same low-lifes as them. Worse, they have some intelligence.

However, as I always point out, the post-war, Labour Government was as full of rogues and vagabonds as you could find anywhere, but because of the nature of Socialism, they were forced to, at least, pay tribute to the second Commandment. It was their only front, but it nevertheless served us, the people, well. Better hypocrisy, vice paying tribute to virtue, than virtue simply being despised as it is by all our political parties now. They were to a large extent kept honest, in terms of the welfare state they created.

Today, New Labour doesn't feel the need for much of a front at all, it is as corporatist as the Tories. It's great trick is to have the media ignore the existence of the poor and suffering majority, whenever its talking heads or distinguished guests have talked about how wealthy, indeed, how much better off the country was now under their aegis - while the country is in tatters at every level, in very sphere. It is not as if they downplayed their significance. No. They don't even acknowledge their existence. It is the literal truth that the only success they have had, has, in reality, been the only one they ever wanted, their own personal self-enrichment and self-aggrandisement. By sucking up to Big Business and its moguls. And now the country is about to reap the whirlwind.

Even today, Reees Mogg in the Mail was boasting about how he had predicted the rise in the value of gold in 2002 and held forth as if he had never, instead of always, been a fervent apologist for the far right! The very snakes-in-suits who have brought about this incipient depression.

[Two Americas]

18. thanks

That's good then. I wasn't sure what you were saying. Didn't realize you were in the UK, which I do think changes somewhat the way we discuss the issue of race and also the roles played by the various churches in politics.

[canis_lupus]

6. The problem with defining racism ...

... or any of the other "isms," for that matter, is that there are multiple definitions.

I think everyone here would that segregation, lynching, and other acts are racist. But those actions are tied up in an historical context. For many whites, racism is seen as something in the past that occasionally crops up in the words and actions of extremists like the KKK.

Blacks can see the ongoing legacy of racism on a daily basis. For instance, the whites who cross a street to avoid a group of blacks believe they are just being "cautious" while the blacks see it as a form of hatred, rejection and fear and label it "racist." Meanwhile, the white person is usually oblivious to his actions being seen as racists and may very well see himself as a progressive who opposes racism.

The same applies to any minority group trying to negotiate its way through the dominant culture. Women can see sexism much more clearly than men. Nativist groups think they are "protecting the borders," but to Latinos these groups have a racist agenda. Gays and lesbians label conservative religious groups as homophobic while the groups may believe they are simply following God's will.

The problem with racism is not simply to oppose the obvious "isms," but to educate people on thousands of little ways we demonstrate prejudice and practice discrimination.

[Joe Chi Minh]

9. Interesting points. the Babel business!

[Milo_Bloom]

11. All of the Above

[Spazito]

12. One of your choices enables the other, imo...

That is:

A set of personal views based on racial prejudice


which, when espoused by the majority, becomes


A society-wide structure of power and intimidation

[OPERATIONMINDCRIME]

15. To Me It's Simple: It's Anytime Someone Isn't Treated As A Direct Equal Based On Their Race.

Not sure there's anything other than that, really.

[XemaSab]

19. I think the size of the society matters

If you have a company with 10 black guys and a white guy, the white guy can experience genuine racism.

PS This is something I have personally experienced, so think about it before you respond.