On racism

I wrote a blog post on the concept of race, and I promised to write another one on racism. Here it is, long overdue.

Racism is easier to recognize in the flesh than to define. We know it when we see it, but its boundaries are hard to draw. Today it seems to be one of society’s master concepts – partly because it is so contested. On the one hand, we have the Guardian talking about microaggressions and unconscious bias. On the other hand, serious people are writing books defending white ethnic identity, and asking how much to concede to the popular backlash against immigration. Perhaps thinking about the concept of racism can throw light on this process.

The idea of racism is woven from three different strands:

A.    The history of colonialism, the encounter of white Europeans with other peoples, the ideas they developed about them; the development of European empires and the influence of Darwinism. In this aspect racism is white people’s superiority complex.
B.    Racism can simply mean the belief that races are different – usually, biologically different – in some non-trivial way.
C.    Racism can be defined by a set of attitudes and behaviours which range from hatred, aggression and genocide, through prejudice and discrimination, down to simply having different mental associations about different races, perhaps without conscious thought.

The power of the racism concept lay in putting these three things together. It developed after the Second World War. The Nazis came out of a background of A; explicitly held B; and implemented C in its most evil form, by targeting minorities for murder. Racism was a shorthand for the whole complex. Intellectuals in the US recognized that all of A-C extended beyond Nazi Germany; they found a home, too, in America, especially in the segregated South. This background strengthened the emerging civil rights movement in the 1960s. Since then, as the rest of the world has got richer relative to Europe, America, and other countries of mostly white people; and as immigration to those countries has made them more diverse; anti-racism has continued to be the left wing’s  strongest moral suit, as well as a guarantee of being on the right side of history.

A, B and C do not always go together. My post on race argued that B and C are separate issues. A and C are separate, too. Hutus murdering Tutsis, violence against Zimbabwean immigrants in South African townships, or the Burmese assault on the Rohingya make it clear that non-white people can murder outgroups with as much enthusisasm as white people. You can rescue the association if you say that by definition, only whites can be racist. Some people have tried to make this argument. But it is just implausible. What the Burmese army has done to the Rohingya looks like a duck and quacks like a duck (and after her Nobel Prize, Aung San Suu Kyi drinks milkshake like a duck). If we don’t call it racism, we will just need to invent a new word for evil behaviour to ethnic outgroups.

For that matter, there need not be a link between A and B. In some sense, clearly, race is a concept which develops in 19th century European science and thought. But the broader idea of differentiating and categorizing people based on their tribe or where they come from may simply be part of human mental furniture. The Ancient Greeks called outsiders barbaroi – barbarians – supposedly meaning people who, since they couldn’t speak Greek, simply bleated nonsense like sheep. (Of course, really, the Greeks understood perfectly well that other languages existed.) Many human groups simply refer to themselves as “people”.

As time moves on, and the eras of first European, then American global dominance fade and recede, the spotlight is focusing more on C. Correspondingly, antiracism will become less about dismantling entrenched power structures, because so many of them have indeed been dismantled. Instead, antiracism will focus on individual behaviours and attitudes, on C – and it will become more top-down. (You can avoid this conclusion, so long as capitalism continues to exist, if you argue that capitalism itself is the ultimate power structure and is also inherently racist. I don’t find that plausible, and it will become less plausible as many non-European nations get rich.) The confusion between A and C lets people in authority think of themselves as freedom fighters, whilst in fact they are regulating and monitoring the behaviour of less powerful others.

Indeed this is happening. A cornerstone of modern racism is the idea of unconscious bias, motivated by a powerful psychological experiment called the Implicit Association Test or IAT. You can take this test at implicit.harvard.edu. The IAT uses reaction times to measure how strongly we associate different concepts. This is a test you can’t fool just because you want to sound, or even be, non-racist. It has been a huge hit, generating reams of controversy, an industry promising to improve your unconscious bias, and several competing metaanalyses. It has even entered Artificial Intelligence as a yardstick for judging how computers can learn certain kinds of prejudice. Today, psychology provides a dominant interpretation of racism, as it does for so many other concepts.

A second strand of thought looks at how we talk and think about outgroups. The keyword is “the Other”, which has now been verbed: people think of outsiders as Other, and they “other” them in the ways they talk about them.

Through these spectacles, racism is mundane and pervasive. Everyone does it a little bit.
And it is within ourselves: as George Orwell says, it is a noxious plant that we must diligently weed out from our minds.

This is a powerful, intuitive perspective. Haven’t we all felt afraid of outsiders? Don’t we all try to quell or overcome our prejudices? But it depends crucially on the claim that these mundane behaviours are indeed related to more serious forms of prejudice – say, discriminating against job applicants.

For the IAT, there is some evidence that this may be true, but not really enough to be persuasive. At best, the jury is still out on whether “everyday” implicit bias links to the important differences in outcomes that we see between ethnic groups.

Similarly, while we know that hate speech can help propel genocide – for example, hate radio helped do so in Rwanda – we cannot be so sure about the effect of everyday ways that people talk about other ethnic groups. Indeed, the very idea of “othering” has unclear boundaries. Does it include using the word “they” to describe an outgroup?

If these kinds of pervasive behaviour are not actually linked to real discrimination, then I foresee a problem in describing them as racism.

We all have two sides in us. One side wants to seek out and experience new things. Another side prefers what is safe and familiar. Different people have these sides to different degrees; they are captured by Openness, one of the Big Five dimensions of human personality. These two sides may even be rooted in biology – in how animals resolve the conflict between approach and avoidance, for example. In a big, multicultural society, openness is good to have: it correlates with intelligence and income, for example.

But we all also have the other side; we want to stick with what we know. And this too has a positive aspect: it coincides with what we appreciate more deeply. It is the sense of home. Familiar environments are not just emotionally satisfying. They also enable deeper communication. It is wrong to think that because somebody is from my own culture, I have nothing to learn from them. In fact, shared culture enables deeper communication. At the most basic level, we need some shared language to communicate at all. Beyond that, shared cultural reference points act as a shorthand. I spend much of my time speaking global English – “Globish” – with academic colleagues from all over the world. But when I talk to somebody who shares elements of my own culture – the English middle class – I can communicate in a different way. Calling a politician’s wife Lady Macbeth, for instance, carries a set of implications that would take paragraphs to spell out explicitly.

In fact, these two sides are complementary. Openness lets us appreciate and learn from other people’s languages, customs and cultures. Those languages and customs are different from our own, because they developed separately, over many centuries, among people who preferentially interacted with others like themselves.

It is not a good idea to lump the human preference for familiarity and safety, with the inhuman extremes of race hatred. We all have that tendency. Some have it more than others. Those who have it more tend to do less well in modern society; to stay near home and family rather than moving to opportunity. They are the “somewheres”, in David Goodhart’s phrase. Modern anti-racist discourse, with its very broad definition of its object, risks treating these people as primitive beings who are unable to appreciate diversity, or worse still, as incipient fascists. That is unjust. It is also politically unwise, because it is may push people into the arms of genuine racists – who at least, from their point of view, show them some respect.

Next, a post about sexism... hopefully within the year.