I agree with the author, to the point of stomp holler and cheer for having said it so well. Unfortunately I don't think even this brilliant articulation of the point will help when there's a bunch of people who seem to honestly disagree that "collective guilt is wrong."
“So suppose you wanted to construct such arguments. What would they be? Many people would start with something like, “Racism is wrong because it has been used to justify mass murder and slavery.” True enough. But…”
Where we go on to a what-about, the article could have ended here but it turns out the article was about something else entirely…
Being told you should feel guilty for being a particular race is as valid as being told you should be proud for it.
Moderates stepping into arguments about racism made by extremists (on both sides) might not realize how bigoted the idea of "racism" itself is. Those on the left argue that the "oppressing" race should feel guilty, not just that no one should feel pride in their race.
It's for people who think racism is wrong and want a reason to avoid being introspective about what they can do about living in and benefiting from a society built on racism.
Hmm, has anyone here met someone who espoused the argument "White people are inherently morally guilty due to racism"? I'm getting the sense that it might be mostly a strawman argument. Those I've actually talked to about anti-racism seem to fall into two camps; either white people (a very hard to define group of people, but mostly you know what I mean) aren't all racist, but they have benefited from past racism, so they hold extra power unjustly (though not due to a fault of their own); or they are "racist", but where "racist" is defined as prejudice + power, and we understand that many people are prejudiced due to societal and cultural messaging, so being "racist" doesn't mean you're individually guilty.
My employer brought in a Harvard University professor to preach at us for ~45 minutes about how the US is awful and White people should feel guilty just for living their lives. I have absolutely met these people and have to deal with them at work.
I have — eg, people who accuse me of having “White Privilege”, even though I grew up in Rainier Beach, Seattle and was one of ten White kids in a school of 600, where not only did I suffer from the same issues of gang culture and poverty, I had the “privilege” of being robbed and beaten for my race by the dominant ethnicity in the neighborhood.
The problem with “anti-racism” is that it’s racism: engaging in institutional discrimination against me, based on that statistical truth about a race I happen to belong to. The whole concept of “anti-racism” is (in practice) rich Whites excusing their privilege by engaging in “cleansing” racism against poor Whites.
Hmm, but saying that you have privilege is not the same thing as saying you've done something wrong or are guilty, right? Even if you were born into an overall advantage, it wouldn't mean you had done anything wrong.
Saying that due to my skin, regardless of my actual life and heritage, I have some “privilege” for which it’s okay to discriminate against me as an institution is the definition of institutional racism:
Racial bias + power.
I’m uninterested in your semantic game to justify that racism.
I think if you could be a little more specific about what institutions think it's okay to discriminate against you in particular, it would really help.
I think we are starting to get sick of even playing these gaslighting games. There isn’t a person alive who doesn’t know this whole game is bullshit and you’re trying to reinvent language to justify racism against whites, sexism against men, and so on for every category of persons who made it on the fair game hit list.
You’re not communicating with authenticity or decency, it’s just rhetoric all the way down. It’s at the breaking point where we all know you aren’t a good faith actor.
Let's say you had a company which only hires 9 people. You decide that your next hire will be of a specific race and gender and not other candidates need apply. Would that be discrimination?
This is a result of theirs and others' complete lack of understanding of what "privilege" means in the context. It is certainly a "both sides" kind of issue, where those with privilege think that their current standing is not commensurate with the having of privilege, as well as those who interpret it as these people need to give something up to make up for their leg up.
It is irrelevant insofar as it build expectations on the basis on your skin color. I do think that being white provides advantages even today, but it is an arbitrary criterion. Being born in the US offers vastly more privilege than being born in Afghanistan, even if you are white. So it is just another approach to frame a distribution debate between groups, which is not too conductive for any solutions and in the worst case is just an expression of real racism, which I start to assume that it is.
Growing up, I was formerly a member of a high demand religion, in an area where it had minor representation. I took a lot of flak for that as a kid -- targeted and environmental. Fights, physical abuse, verbal harassment, hostile work environment and more were common. I can empathize with your plight, having experienced it similarly.
That said, I have the "right" color of skin and didn't have nearly as much issue once I removed myself from the area I grew up in (and, later, contravened that religion by exiting and keeping my worldviews private).
I completely acknowledge racial privilege can exist, and that I am a beneficiary of the setup as such, much like the dominant religions in my childhood hometown had religious privilege and the "good ole boys" network is built to serve their adherents locally.
It SUCKS to be the target of negative interaction, it sucks 100x worse for it to be environmental.
My take on the entire state of race relations is that the median person wants interruption of the "good ole boys" entrenchment. This does mean privilege gets reduced for some, which feels like persecution and evokes fear like we see from folks rallying against "CRT in schools" (though it's typically just general history being railed against).
Then we see disconnected takes like PG's "Heresy" recently, which takes the extremist positions on both ends of the horsehose as representative of the median.
I learned pretty early on that most people are fairly banal in what they want -- food to eat, roof overhead, available recreation, build a nest egg and something resembling a family. These things are at risk these days due to class division and economic uncertainty; people in the well-to-do side of things are perfectly happy to see the stress taken off themselves and projected into racial and ethnic divisions because they can afford something like security provisions.
Apologies for rambling, your comments just elicited a lot of things I don't think about all that often.
One note to readers who may end up seeing discourse like this online: a (very simplified) critical race theoretic version of this goes as follows:
1. All race is a social (and to some degree, legal) construct. There is more variation in genes / ability / class within a single racial class than there are between racial classes.
2. The "white" race is even a social construct by this definition.
3. Society attributes certain attributes to "whiteness" or "blackness" or "coloured" as a result of its construct.
From there you may hear someone say "we should fight against whiteness" or some such, like a game of telephone. Typically the actual intent is to fight against the construct that certain values are "white" vs. other traits being ascribed to "person of colour." In short: the social construct of "whiteness" as an act of supremacy is the problem, not the colour of one's skin.
I'm not sure I have ever seriously heard the argument "white people are inherently morally guilty due to racism" but I can see how this starts to blend over time. People taking the above argument and misrepresenting or misunderstanding it could quickly devolve into a game of telephone. It's a sensitive topic so it's important to handle it with precision in our language.
But yeah, I'm not sure I've seen any serious "anti-racist" folks actually claim being white is a sin, so much as perpetuating the construct of "whiteness" as some kind of intrinsic value is the real sin. Of course, CRT is a graduate-level field that requires some degree of legal expertise, so you would have to go digging for the steelman version of the argument.
There is no lack of very hard evidence that racism is wrong, but there is a lack of ways to convince certain groups of people that they are wrong and that they should change their ways. To add to that: there are quite a few politicians and political parties that actively push these buttons to drive the divisions that help them to stay in power.
I sometimes ask questions that broach social norms. If my questions do so below, I apologize in advance.
Right now, it appears that the US default on reparations is $0. I have wondered what amount would be considered just that the median person receiving reparations would be satisfied with.
Also, what is a justifiable time horizon for inclusion? Should reparations begin for all slaves and conquered groups ever by the nation in power? (In the US, looking @ blacks, Native Americans, the govt of Mexico, Chinese immigrants in the mid-1800s, and so on).
There are so many edge cases and competing philosophical justifications that the practical implementation seems very hard!
I don't think it is possible to put any hard figures on this. I'm from NL, and the wealth here is absolutely off the scale for a country which barely exists to begin with and which has, other than a bit of natural gas, no resources.
Of course the Dutch mantra is that we got here by hard work and trade, but the reality is that we got our headstart with piracy, slavery and colonies that we robbed blind and then when things didn't go our way tried to rule by genocide.
Needless to say that isn't a popular opinion and it isn't exactly part of the Dutch history curriculum in grade school, but it is the unvarnished truth. Does that motivate me to give what I've earned to others? No. Do I believe that we collectively should do everything we can to right this wrong? Yes, absolutely. So there is a substantial chunk of hypocrisy involved, I can't personally associate myself with any of this but I can easily see how collectively we've all benefited.
I'm on board for arguing that racism is bad because it's collective guilt (and, by extension, collective punishment).
What you find though is that most people aren't interested in ethical arguments. They're interested in preserving the power structures they have benefited and continue to benefit from. They see empowering another group as taking something away from their group. In the US in particular, fear is a huge motivator here. There's also a touch of projection: many fear some form of retribution from the newly-empowered group because, well, that's probably what they would do. It's kind of a self-report.
But let's say you manage to convince people of the evils of collective guilt and punishment. Let's see if that extends to the treatment of Palestinians. Gaza is the world's largest open-air prison [1].
As an aside, this is really the point of the Republican censorship crusade against what it calls "critical race theory" because Republicans don't want people to be educated in system racism and collective punishment. That's no way to preserve a power structure.
It's also worth pointing out that a bunch of states have laws on the books that teachers cannot disparage Israel (eg [2]).
> They see empowering another group as taking something away from their group.
In some cases, it actually is. For example, NYC decided to phase out its gifted and talented program because it "segregated students". [1]
So now, because some students aren't equitably represented in the gifted and talented programs, we take away from the (probably) white and Asian students who would benefit.
The centerpiece for W's first term was the No Child Left Behind Act. Many described it as the No Child Gets Ahead Act..
I've heard of that partcular move by NYC and I'm not a fan. I imagine the net effect is that it will drive those with the means to put such children into private schools instead. If you're low-income you don't have this option. How does this benefit anyone?
The whole policy screams of a theoretical idea of not making kids feel bad.
> The centerpiece for W's first term was the No Child Left Behind Act. Many described it as the No Child Gets Ahead Act..
I think most people who look rationally at the NCLB Act can see it was an awful idea. If you have schools that are already struggling, the answer is not to take money away and make it _even more difficult_ to get their kids educated.
> I've heard of that partcular move by NYC and I'm not a fan. I imagine the net effect is that it will drive those with the means to put such children into private schools instead. If you're low-income you don't have this option. How does this benefit anyone?
You hit the nail on the head here, and what you've identified is that class is the much more pertinent issue.
Folks need to be vigilant with social justice initiatives right now. Some people care about making legitimate, meaningful change. Other people use racial justice as a cover to do stupid crap like they're doing in NYC.
I disagree on pretty much all these points. If you say a group needs to be advantaged compared to another, you are practicing collective guilt and don't build an argument against it. On the contrary.
Palestine has some problems that need to be addressed. They still teach their children to hate Jews. So keeping them segregated isn't really a choice someone made and your mentioning the middle eastern conflict is a bit suspect.
I’ve seen takes where expecting immigrants to integrate is considered racist.
Maybe I’m just a racist, but when a fellow Canadian with a heavy South Asian accent is calling me buddy and talking about going to the lake/the leafs suck, I feel good about my country.
Compare to the problems in the UK where you have no-go areas in certain cities (overblown but it happens) and generations that won’t even attempt to fit in to the dominant culture. That said, the UK is much more xenophobic than Canada wrt nationality.
Automatic indemnification of children is the tool that oppressors worldwide use to transfer wealth. It is limited but useful.
For instance, I can’t steal a million dollars and give it to my son and have him get away with it.
However, I could put Japanese Americans in internment camps, getting their homes when they don’t really want to sell and go live in a camp, and then if sufficient time passes and my kids have now inherited the home, they can keep it! Indemnity!
Personally, at some particular age, I intend to use this tool to juice my grandkids chances at life. When I’m old enough I should commit some crime that can be exploited in this manner. The problem is it isn’t scalable. I don’t want one house. I want many. But I have 40 years to figure it out.
This is a moralistic argument, and may be more or less convincing depending on personal values.
My argument against racism would be a practical one: racism is used to divide the working class against itself, it's another wedge issue just like gay marriage or abortion. It's necessary to combat this divisive rhetoric, because otherwise we won't have the strength to collectively resist the real evils.
I find this pretty poorly argued for a few reasons.
First, racism isn't necessarily about collective guilt. Racists can absolutely recognize that any particular person should not be lumped in with their entire race. See: "one of the good ones". One can say horribly racist things in terms of statistics while leaving open the possibility that they might not apply to any particular person.
Second, policies like affirmative action aren't about collective guilt either. The justification is not that white college applicants are evil and must be punished. Maybe there is some of that lurking beneath the surface, but I have never heard the argument in those terms from anyone worth listening to. The argument is that racism is so pervasive and so entrenched that avoiding bias requires adding bias in the other direction, not mere even-handedness.
There are parts of this idea that are good. I find that huge parts of our society are based around rewarding or punishing people for the actions of their family and peers (see: the whole class system). But this article in particular is flawed.
>For the most part, though, “racism” is a doctrine we ascribe to others in order to damn and ostracize them.
No, racism is the belief that another race is inferior. It isn't ascribed to hurt people, it's ascribed when someone makes a racist statement, in order to maintain community standards of behavior. Just like we ascribe pedophilia to someone who has sexual relations with children.
Modern ("scientific" [1]) racism was born out of a misinterpretation of Darwinism. Under such interpretation there's no concept of "punishment" or "guilt", so saying that "racism is wrong because collective guilt is wrong" will not dissuade any bona fide "scientific" racist.
The term "scientific racism" is very unfortunate, because it is all but scientific (i.e., it is basically entirely disproven by our modern knowledge about human genetics). Hence my use of the double quotes.
This argument only works against a particular type of racism that is rather antiquated. People exploring racism contemporarily focus on presumed-heritable characteristics such as intellectual potential or "capacity" for violence and crime. Moral arguments are harder to land in modern societies, but utilitarian ones can stick on just a few statistically-insignificant quantifiers – to the purpose of racists and anti-racists alike.
Racism is a form or subset of bigotry. I view bigotry as bad - elevating one subgroup at the expense of another or it’s reverse. It’s a group property as well as an individual’s property. Different treatment based on colour, religion, language, …, is “bad” unless you’re in the top group. It’s really always bad, but you have to see past the groupthink to see it.
I’m white, which is bad. But both sides of my family come from non-dominant European groups, which is good. The Irish portion was discriminated against in the 1800’s, which is bad. Depending on when they actually came to the us, they might have fought for the North in the civil war, which is good. So how do I parse my actual goodness/badness based on the current tv scores?
Nobody I’m aware of can change the past. We all can change the future and even aspects of the present if we give a shit and try to change. It requires seeing others as people, rather than “them”.
If you look closely you'll notice that this isn't how extremists (on both sides) use the word. Racism to them means something closer to oppression (similar to the Marxist idea of class oppression.) The idea itself, the way it's used by extremists, is bigoted.
I wish the moderates arguing in good faith against bigotry would stop using it. It has an ugly genocidal history going back to the bolshevik revolution and the Holodomor that followed.
I don't understand your comment. What is the context for "using it" in your second paragraph? Also, could you elaborate on how you see racism as being closer to oppression?
I'm so confused why the author thinks this is ironclad. I don't see why racism necessarily has anything to do with collective guilt or how it comes out of a desire to extract reparations for a wrong someone else has done.
Racism can have many impulses and origins behind it, from using a race as a careless and convenient boogeyman against which to unite a community against, to a natural fear of the unfamiliar and foreign by a monocultural society. These do not involve seeking reparations for a past injustice.
I disagree, maybe you can provide something more concise. It also contains critique of current approaches against racism that should be discussed as they seem to worsen the situation. Your response makes the impression that this critique did resonate.
48 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 106 ms ] threadWhere we go on to a what-about, the article could have ended here but it turns out the article was about something else entirely…
Moderates stepping into arguments about racism made by extremists (on both sides) might not realize how bigoted the idea of "racism" itself is. Those on the left argue that the "oppressing" race should feel guilty, not just that no one should feel pride in their race.
The problem with “anti-racism” is that it’s racism: engaging in institutional discrimination against me, based on that statistical truth about a race I happen to belong to. The whole concept of “anti-racism” is (in practice) rich Whites excusing their privilege by engaging in “cleansing” racism against poor Whites.
Racial bias + power.
I’m uninterested in your semantic game to justify that racism.
You’re not communicating with authenticity or decency, it’s just rhetoric all the way down. It’s at the breaking point where we all know you aren’t a good faith actor.
That said, I have the "right" color of skin and didn't have nearly as much issue once I removed myself from the area I grew up in (and, later, contravened that religion by exiting and keeping my worldviews private).
I completely acknowledge racial privilege can exist, and that I am a beneficiary of the setup as such, much like the dominant religions in my childhood hometown had religious privilege and the "good ole boys" network is built to serve their adherents locally.
It SUCKS to be the target of negative interaction, it sucks 100x worse for it to be environmental.
My take on the entire state of race relations is that the median person wants interruption of the "good ole boys" entrenchment. This does mean privilege gets reduced for some, which feels like persecution and evokes fear like we see from folks rallying against "CRT in schools" (though it's typically just general history being railed against).
Then we see disconnected takes like PG's "Heresy" recently, which takes the extremist positions on both ends of the horsehose as representative of the median.
I learned pretty early on that most people are fairly banal in what they want -- food to eat, roof overhead, available recreation, build a nest egg and something resembling a family. These things are at risk these days due to class division and economic uncertainty; people in the well-to-do side of things are perfectly happy to see the stress taken off themselves and projected into racial and ethnic divisions because they can afford something like security provisions.
Apologies for rambling, your comments just elicited a lot of things I don't think about all that often.
1. All race is a social (and to some degree, legal) construct. There is more variation in genes / ability / class within a single racial class than there are between racial classes.
2. The "white" race is even a social construct by this definition.
3. Society attributes certain attributes to "whiteness" or "blackness" or "coloured" as a result of its construct.
From there you may hear someone say "we should fight against whiteness" or some such, like a game of telephone. Typically the actual intent is to fight against the construct that certain values are "white" vs. other traits being ascribed to "person of colour." In short: the social construct of "whiteness" as an act of supremacy is the problem, not the colour of one's skin.
I'm not sure I have ever seriously heard the argument "white people are inherently morally guilty due to racism" but I can see how this starts to blend over time. People taking the above argument and misrepresenting or misunderstanding it could quickly devolve into a game of telephone. It's a sensitive topic so it's important to handle it with precision in our language.
But yeah, I'm not sure I've seen any serious "anti-racist" folks actually claim being white is a sin, so much as perpetuating the construct of "whiteness" as some kind of intrinsic value is the real sin. Of course, CRT is a graduate-level field that requires some degree of legal expertise, so you would have to go digging for the steelman version of the argument.
Right now, it appears that the US default on reparations is $0. I have wondered what amount would be considered just that the median person receiving reparations would be satisfied with.
Also, what is a justifiable time horizon for inclusion? Should reparations begin for all slaves and conquered groups ever by the nation in power? (In the US, looking @ blacks, Native Americans, the govt of Mexico, Chinese immigrants in the mid-1800s, and so on).
There are so many edge cases and competing philosophical justifications that the practical implementation seems very hard!
Of course the Dutch mantra is that we got here by hard work and trade, but the reality is that we got our headstart with piracy, slavery and colonies that we robbed blind and then when things didn't go our way tried to rule by genocide.
Needless to say that isn't a popular opinion and it isn't exactly part of the Dutch history curriculum in grade school, but it is the unvarnished truth. Does that motivate me to give what I've earned to others? No. Do I believe that we collectively should do everything we can to right this wrong? Yes, absolutely. So there is a substantial chunk of hypocrisy involved, I can't personally associate myself with any of this but I can easily see how collectively we've all benefited.
What you find though is that most people aren't interested in ethical arguments. They're interested in preserving the power structures they have benefited and continue to benefit from. They see empowering another group as taking something away from their group. In the US in particular, fear is a huge motivator here. There's also a touch of projection: many fear some form of retribution from the newly-empowered group because, well, that's probably what they would do. It's kind of a self-report.
But let's say you manage to convince people of the evils of collective guilt and punishment. Let's see if that extends to the treatment of Palestinians. Gaza is the world's largest open-air prison [1].
As an aside, this is really the point of the Republican censorship crusade against what it calls "critical race theory" because Republicans don't want people to be educated in system racism and collective punishment. That's no way to preserve a power structure.
It's also worth pointing out that a bunch of states have laws on the books that teachers cannot disparage Israel (eg [2]).
[1]: https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/02/israels-apart...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-BDS_laws
In some cases, it actually is. For example, NYC decided to phase out its gifted and talented program because it "segregated students". [1]
So now, because some students aren't equitably represented in the gifted and talented programs, we take away from the (probably) white and Asian students who would benefit.
[1]: https://www.cnn.com/2021/10/08/us/new-york-gifted-and-talent...
I've heard of that partcular move by NYC and I'm not a fan. I imagine the net effect is that it will drive those with the means to put such children into private schools instead. If you're low-income you don't have this option. How does this benefit anyone?
The whole policy screams of a theoretical idea of not making kids feel bad.
I think most people who look rationally at the NCLB Act can see it was an awful idea. If you have schools that are already struggling, the answer is not to take money away and make it _even more difficult_ to get their kids educated.
> I've heard of that partcular move by NYC and I'm not a fan. I imagine the net effect is that it will drive those with the means to put such children into private schools instead. If you're low-income you don't have this option. How does this benefit anyone?
You hit the nail on the head here, and what you've identified is that class is the much more pertinent issue.
Folks need to be vigilant with social justice initiatives right now. Some people care about making legitimate, meaningful change. Other people use racial justice as a cover to do stupid crap like they're doing in NYC.
Palestine has some problems that need to be addressed. They still teach their children to hate Jews. So keeping them segregated isn't really a choice someone made and your mentioning the middle eastern conflict is a bit suspect.
Maybe I’m just a racist, but when a fellow Canadian with a heavy South Asian accent is calling me buddy and talking about going to the lake/the leafs suck, I feel good about my country.
Compare to the problems in the UK where you have no-go areas in certain cities (overblown but it happens) and generations that won’t even attempt to fit in to the dominant culture. That said, the UK is much more xenophobic than Canada wrt nationality.
For instance, I can’t steal a million dollars and give it to my son and have him get away with it.
However, I could put Japanese Americans in internment camps, getting their homes when they don’t really want to sell and go live in a camp, and then if sufficient time passes and my kids have now inherited the home, they can keep it! Indemnity!
Personally, at some particular age, I intend to use this tool to juice my grandkids chances at life. When I’m old enough I should commit some crime that can be exploited in this manner. The problem is it isn’t scalable. I don’t want one house. I want many. But I have 40 years to figure it out.
Fig. B: In the past, most whites were racist.
Ah, I can see why you're a NYT bestseller.
My argument against racism would be a practical one: racism is used to divide the working class against itself, it's another wedge issue just like gay marriage or abortion. It's necessary to combat this divisive rhetoric, because otherwise we won't have the strength to collectively resist the real evils.
First, racism isn't necessarily about collective guilt. Racists can absolutely recognize that any particular person should not be lumped in with their entire race. See: "one of the good ones". One can say horribly racist things in terms of statistics while leaving open the possibility that they might not apply to any particular person.
Second, policies like affirmative action aren't about collective guilt either. The justification is not that white college applicants are evil and must be punished. Maybe there is some of that lurking beneath the surface, but I have never heard the argument in those terms from anyone worth listening to. The argument is that racism is so pervasive and so entrenched that avoiding bias requires adding bias in the other direction, not mere even-handedness.
There are parts of this idea that are good. I find that huge parts of our society are based around rewarding or punishing people for the actions of their family and peers (see: the whole class system). But this article in particular is flawed.
No, racism is the belief that another race is inferior. It isn't ascribed to hurt people, it's ascribed when someone makes a racist statement, in order to maintain community standards of behavior. Just like we ascribe pedophilia to someone who has sexual relations with children.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism
The term "scientific racism" is very unfortunate, because it is all but scientific (i.e., it is basically entirely disproven by our modern knowledge about human genetics). Hence my use of the double quotes.
I’m white, which is bad. But both sides of my family come from non-dominant European groups, which is good. The Irish portion was discriminated against in the 1800’s, which is bad. Depending on when they actually came to the us, they might have fought for the North in the civil war, which is good. So how do I parse my actual goodness/badness based on the current tv scores?
Nobody I’m aware of can change the past. We all can change the future and even aspects of the present if we give a shit and try to change. It requires seeing others as people, rather than “them”.
If you look closely you'll notice that this isn't how extremists (on both sides) use the word. Racism to them means something closer to oppression (similar to the Marxist idea of class oppression.) The idea itself, the way it's used by extremists, is bigoted.
I wish the moderates arguing in good faith against bigotry would stop using it. It has an ugly genocidal history going back to the bolshevik revolution and the Holodomor that followed.
Racism can have many impulses and origins behind it, from using a race as a careless and convenient boogeyman against which to unite a community against, to a natural fear of the unfamiliar and foreign by a monocultural society. These do not involve seeking reparations for a past injustice.