To yesterday’s. Is racism a characteristic of the “right wing,” or the “left wing”?
[Update mid morning]
One of the biggest disappointments of my life to date is that Keith Olbermann has never designated me the Worst Person In The World. I’d love to be so honored before his dozens of viewers.
And I don’t know why. I’m sure that I’m at least as racist as Jay Nordlinger is.
[Update a few minutes later]
OK, the topic is drifting a little now, but Jonah (who has been so honored by KO) has some further thoughts:
I think it would be interesting to catalog all of the Worst Person in the World winners and see what percentage of them the average person A) likes more and B) would be more likely to trust babysitting their kids. My hunch is that Olbermann would rate pretty low on both scores.
Hey, I just realized, for a second there I forgot Olbermann is white. For what that’s worth.
Heh.
Define “racism”. Going by the dictionary definition racism exists all over the political spectrum. But few people go by the dictionary. The classic example is affirmative action. The “right wing” (correctly in my opinion) brands it as racist. The “left wing” brands opposition to it as racist.
The belief that one race is intrinsically inferior to another, and should be treated differently on that account.
Neither. A racist thinks that certain races either aren’t people at all or are lesser beings, therefore deserving of lesser rights, protections and benefits. That’s why you get racists and racial policies in both left and right movements. The unfavored races just “don’t count” politically.
Racism isn’t “right-wing”, but anti-racism is definitionally left-wing. Which, in the US, is why the right-wing is big on color-blindness, whereas the left-wing hates the practice of the principle with a passion. Policy which aims at actually deracializing public discourse is, perversely, an attack on a core element of the left-wing self-identity. How can you be demonstrably anti-racist without racists to stand against?
An anti-racial theoretical stance is always a marker for proper left-wing parties, though. Which is why fascism is a *heresy* of the left. They’ve apostatized against the universalist axiom, and this is the hurdle upon which Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism comes acropper, I think. Unless you want to argue along with Jonah that the American Progressive movement was likewise fascistic in its marriage of bigotry with left-wing ideology – Wilson was famously and virulently racist, and see all that stuff in LF about the eugenicists.
Unless you want to argue along with Jonah that the American Progressive movement was likewise fascistic in its marriage of bigotry with left-wing ideology
I’m perfectly happy to argue that, and do. There’s abundant historical evidence for it.
Is it racist to prefer one race over another when choosing a spouse?
The problem there is that he extends it into the New Deal successor regime, which was much less explicitly and overtly racist and eugenicist. I guess.
Fascism isn’t inherently racist. Mussolini and Franco had no problems with Jews or other races. Hitler’s “master race” fixation was his personal thing.
The American left of the era 1930 – 1950 wasn’t racist. In order to get the votes he needed, FDR had to sometimes compromise with racists. But for example the WPA was explicitly open to men of all races. Or consider the Tuskegee Airmen, an experiment forced on a reluctant Army Air Corps.
The belief that one race is intrinsically inferior to another, and should be treated differently on that account.
I am reminded of the following observation (I can’t remember who made it):
One third of Americans are certain blacks are inferior to whites.
One third of Americans suspect blacks may be inferior to whites.
One third of Americans are afraid that blacks may be inferior to whites.
Orthogonal.
Since culture rides along with genetic racial characteristics its hard to separate the issues. That is why people of African descent that come to America from elsewhere do much better than African Americans born here. A large set of the born here crowd have an anti education, anti traditional family culture that is destructive. So is it racist to to evaluate a culture as destructive?
We in the U.S. seem to have some long standing collective guilt about slavery. Yet I think globally we are probably one of the least racist cultures there are. The Asian cultures are clearly much more racist.
(My sons girl friend is a brilliant Korean girl, and her parents have basically disowned her because she has a white boyfriend.)
Are the European cultures racist? In the U.S. we have been a large melting pot and dealt with a lot of this. I think the Europeans conversely had a more homogenious culture for many years and are now dealing with the recent big influx.
Hmmm… no interest in racism in spousal selection. Let me try this another way. What if someone were to float the proposal that the US Gov take the official position that there are no races — that we’re all part of one big Human race — and that it would therefore not recognize any differences between people on account of race. What would the implications of that be on current policies and how would the left and right react?
What would the implications of that be on current policies and how would the left and right react?
It would wipe out affirmative action, and the racialist left would go ballistic.
The belief that one race is intrinsically inferior to another, and should be treated differently on that account.
I don’t think that’s correct. I believe that in the arena of track and field, white men are intrinsically inferior to black, and I therefore fully expect the US Olympic coach to spend more time trying to appeal to black men than white to join his team. That’s what will bring home the gold. I also suspect (the evidence is more complex) that Asian men are intrinsically more intelligent than whites, and whites better than blacks, using the conventional definition of “intelligence” i.e. avoiding complications like “street smarts” or “emotional intelligence” or what have you.
All of these suspicions are reasonable, and perhaps in simple cases inarguable in the face of empirical evidence. Indeed, the concept that the only measurable difference between the races is skin pigmentation, height, and other nonessentials is scientifically and logically ludicrous, right up there with the proposition that the only difference between men and women is the curvature of their surface metric at various points. Give me a break. WIthout doubt, some races are better (if only slightly) at some things than others. How could it be otherwise? If some individuals are better at some things than others, and some families (e.g. the Bachs at music, the Curies at science), how could these differences perfectly vanish when it comes to entire races? Absurd.
You could argue that where it becomes racism is when you argue ludicrously that some races are better than others at everything. But that’s silly, because, really, no one ever argues that — they just argue that some races (e.g. their own) are better at everything that matters, and that’s actually more or less just what, in multiculi circles, if you’re not white, is called “ethnic pride.”
I would say there’s nothing wrong with having instincts and hunches and prejudices about different races, particularly when they’re based on observed statistical fact. Indeed, to try to be otherwise is to attempt the impossible and self-defeating. Prejudice — prejudging — is useful, a quick way to size up the probabillities before you have any data. Where you become racist, however, is when you continue to apply those generalizations and prejudices to an individual in the face of contrary evidence.
That is, if I think black men generally do poorer in college than white, this in itself is not madness or evil. Indeed, it can’t be, since it largely conforms to statistical fact, and if we start denying objective reality we might as well become Daily Kos loonies and entirely unhinge our minds.
But suppose I met a black man, and I talked to him, and he conversed informedly and originally on quantum chromodynamics, and mentioned his PhD from Berkeley — if suppose I then started thinking (or saying) I don’t believe you went to Berkeley. You’re black. And I wonder who taught you to parrot all this stuff. How much trouble was it to memorize? Yes, now I’m a racist, because I persist in my original prejudgement even in the face of contrary evidence. At that point, I am clearly in the grip of irrationality, and I am clearly doing damage to the social intercourse between us. I’m a racist idiot.
I admit the problem as a social issue is far more complex, because an unholy percentage of us never actually move beyond our purely theoretical prejudgments and collect and analyze the actual data of individual behaviour. For many, if not most of us, the data don’t matter. They’re not collected, not analyzed, they knock at the doors of perception and nobody’s home, and such intelligence as rattles around in the brain is put to use rationalizing the evidence into the framework of the prejudice. They voted for Brown because they’re angry, and they voted for me because they were angry, so it must be that Brown voters will turn out for me in 2012. Sweet!
But that’s not a good argument, by me, with replacing such irrationality with another equally irrational irrationality. Better to train our youth more rigorously in the skills of dispassionate empirical reasoning.
I believe that in the arena of track and field, white men are intrinsically inferior to black, and I therefore fully expect the US Olympic coach to spend more time trying to appeal to black men than white to join his team.
I don’t. That is, I don’t believe that any black man will be better at T&F than any white man. It may be that black people on average are better at that, but there aren’t any social policies that would logically follow from that, because we still have to treat people as individuals. Racism means judging and treating someone differently for no other reason than their race, and ignoring other factors which, as you point out, is irrational.
the racialist left would go ballistic.
That’s pretty much what I think, too. Further, I think the right would be mostly okay with it, which would seem to answer the original question this way: racism, at least in the political sense of the word, in America today, is almost entirely a phenomenon of the left. This is not to say that individuals can’t harbor personal racist sentiments regardless of their politics or religion, but that racism as a political philosophy is embraced by the left and not so much by the right.
Yet, ironically, it’s the right that labors under the shadow of constant accusations of racism. By successfully championing a pro-black racism, which is to say an anti-white racism (but that’s another story), the left has moved the bar with regard to what is and is not racism. Today, to be for racial nuetrality, and hence against pro-black measures like affirmative action, preferences in college admissions, in home loans, etc., is broadly seen as racist, not because it hurts blacks in any way, but because it fails to correctly favor them.
And that’s the true moral of the story. In the left’s world view, blacks are a favored race because of their history of victimization. So favoring blacks isn’t racism, it’s not favoring them that is.
I don’t credit the Democratic party with the same pathos, however. For them it’s strictly business: blacks are an important constituency and Dems take care of their own.
I would say there’s nothing wrong with having instincts and hunches and prejudices about different races… Where you become racist, however, is when you continue to apply those generalizations and prejudices to an individual in the face of contrary evidence.
I think I might see racism becoming an issue a bit sooner than you do. You seem to be asserting a kind of guilty-until-proven-innocent approach to assessing just how a close a person is to the “norm” for their race. Consider two people with equal knowledge of the characteristics of a race, and who would never do as you describe, hold on to a racially based view of a person in the face of contrary evidence. Where they differ is that Person A, before they meet someone, assumes that someone’s race has a strong effect on who they are as a person, whereas Person B thinks it has much less of an effect. Isn’t A more of a racist than B even though neither meet your criteria?
I agree that it is perfectly valid to talk about differences in races. We can take a scientific approach to such a study, collate large databases of attributes of people of various races, analyze them statistically, and come up with results that can be justifiably asserted as fact. But the real question is how do you apply those results to individuals? For me, this is the crux of racism. What do you believe about human beings? Are we limited to being meager variations of our racial imprint, or do we possess the capacity for transcendent individualism?
And if you believe the latter, as I do, then how should you treat people?
Chauvinism, defined as support for one’s own race right or wrong, is a conservative characteristic.
Discrimination based on IQ will (currently) have the same effect as racism. This is the freedom of association to which libertarians adhere.
I think that both conservatives and libertarians would have to agree to be racist against the populations historically subject to racism. They would make exceptions to those who had proven their loyalty (to conservatives) and their competence (to libertarians) but some 80% of, say, the black population would still not qualify.
The REAL question to ask is whether racism is worse than the alternative. This alternative being South Africa today, en route to Venezuela and Zimbabwe today.
Personally I am putting my hopes in neuroscience and information science and genomics, toward artificial means to boost the IQs of the minority populations. Otherwise Mugabe awaits.
BTW, Rand’s definition: “The belief that one race is intrinsically inferior to another, and should be treated differently on that account.” – the first is the scientific method as applied to psychology, and the second follows from the same legal ethic which does not punish a 12 year old criminal in the same way as one punishes his twin at 24.
…the first is the scientific method as applied to psychology…
Really?
Fascinating…
…the second follows from the same legal ethic which does not punish a 12 year old criminal in the same way as one punishes his twin at 24.
So you’re making a moral and legal equivalence between one’s race, and one’s physiological development and chronological age?
Again, fascinating…
You know, unlike the Left, I don’t like to call people such a name, but by George, I think you’re a racist.
Rosetta set the stage for all racists in 2008, long before anyone openly took part in the “the left calls us racists” schtick that the racist left try to label us with.
Visit H2 (Thehostages.wordpress.com) it’s in one of the tabs.
It’s BRILLIANT! and I suggest you don’t miss big boob friday.
“Neither. A racist thinks that certain races either aren’t people at all or are lesser beings, therefore deserving of lesser rights, protections and benefits.”
Ha! You’re not authentic enough in your racism to make judgments that aren’t colored by your lack of otherness. Only a true racist can define racism and anyone else that tries is an inauthentic poseur.
By George, I think our host has fallen back on cant and name-calling rather than subjecting these propositions to a test on whether they are true or not.
“You are a POOR scientist, Dr Venkman.”