Beyond the Shibboleth of “Racism”

Why racism should terrify white supremacists most of all

According to many liberals and their hallowed critical race theory, racism is everywhere, not just in overt acts of bigotry.

But in the context of political correctness, “racism” is only a shibboleth, a label to signal our virtue or a totem around which we dance. Let’s pause, then, for a moment and attempt to clarify what we’re supposed to be talking about when we level the charge of racism.

Concepts as Simplified Models

Racism is discrimination against individuals that begins with overgeneralizing about their presumed “racial” characteristics. The most extreme instance would be a snap judgment, say, that an African American stranger is violent, stupid, or otherwise deficient, a prejudice triggered just by having seen the person’s skin colour. Thus, the inference would be that anyone with dark skin is inferior in various ways; the book would be judged by a skewed reading of its cover, as it were.

Let’s compare that prejudice to the more seemingly innocent overgeneralization that all swans are white. This generalization was once part of the ordinary concept of swans, which led people to expect that if something’s a swan, it’s white. They were surprised, then, to find that there are black swans.

In fact, every single ordinary concept is a generalization that departs from complicated reality for the sake of understanding matters by simplifying them. The more exclusive a concept’s focus on its subject’s supposed essential nature or on the subject’s most useful or relevant features, the more misleading that concept would be as a model. Even the scientific concept ignores aspects of its subject matter, however rigorous the concept might be in modelling some of the features.

In so far as racism operates like all concepts or generalizations in being useful for certain purposes but perhaps also outdated, biased, and misleading in its attempted simplification, there is no special sin of racist thinking. If making racist judgments were grossly wrongheaded, so would be the reliance on any of our other concepts — unless the concept of race were so empty or fantastic as to be perverse. If all conceptual generalizations were confused, as indeed mystical Hindus, Zen Buddhists and the like contend, the very act of thinking would be a foolish, counterproductive vanity.

Take, for example, our ordinary concept of grass. We presume that grass is an ornament we use to prettify the earth. We care for our lawns the way we care for our hair. Yet we thereby ignore the information that’s central to the botanist’s more technical concept of grass, which is that grass is a plant, not raw material that’s mainly meant to benefit us, but a form of life. When we think of grass in our everyday fashion, we discriminate against the plants, because our ordinary concept distorts reality with a biased, human-centered idealization. We equate grass with our lawns.

To think is to generalize, and we typically adjust our generalizations to serve us one way or another. All concepts are partly unfaithful to their subject matter. If racial thinking is egregious, therefore, it can only be because of the racial concept’s greater degree of infidelity to its subject. That is, the “sin” of racial bias would consist in some mere degree of inaccuracy, and in the fact that the overgeneralization wouldn’t benefit humanity at the expense of nature, but only some people or “races” at the expense of others.

Race as Culture

At this point, the progressive wokester will rush to say, “Racism is especially dubious as an overgeneralization, because the notion of ‘race’ is no part of biology, contrary to Nazi and white supremacist pseudoscience. ‘Race’ is no longer an objective, scientifically respectable category.”

Let’s concede that point, which is that “race” has no interesting cognitive implications, given just the physical differences between various populations. On average, the brain structures and capacities of African Americans are the same as those of Asian, Hispanic, or Caucasian peoples.

Is that the final nail in racism’s coffin? Hardly, because the racist can happily switch to talking about culture instead of physical body traits. And the general deficiencies she’s troubled by might be due to sociological rather than to neurological or cognitive differences. Or perhaps the cultural character provides the environment in which different peoples are raised which may even indirectly cause some interesting cognitive differences between races, after all, besides the superficial ones.

This cultural interpretation of “race” would imply that people with different skin colours, for example, can be part of the same racial culture or sociological type. For example, there are Whites who wish they were African American, and there are African Americans who would prefer to be White and who therefore try to act White. Likewise, there are Whites who identify with Japanese culture, who “go native” and live in a Japanese manner. What would matter are the history and culture that socially condition our mentality, not the superficial appearance of our body type.

Racism or culturism would begin with the presumption that on average, “Blacks,” meaning anyone who identifies with Black culture, including some Whites, would think and behave differently than members of other cultures. For example, Black culture would be defined largely by African Americans’ experience of slavery, just as modern Japanese culture would be influenced by Japan’s ignominious defeat in WWII. Racism would stem from this concept of a population’s ethnicity or cultural character, rather than from the people’s cognitive characteristics that they’d allegedly have independent of their collective experience.

Yet this culturism would be tied to the racist snap judgment of superficial traits like our skin colour, because even though Whites can be part of Black culture, for example, on average the enthusiasts of that culture would have dark skin.

Our implicit, innate racial biases, studied by cognitive psychologists, mean that we’re like the birds of a feather that flock together, and the populations that “flock together” tend to have shared historical experience, so they further bond in their communities to cope with that experience. We may even resist welcoming outsides into our way of life, to protect our culture’s purity. Many languages and cultures have derogatory words for outsiders, such as “barbarian,” “pagan,” “kafir,” “gaijin,” “gringo,” and “cracker.” Thus, some cultures and ethnicities are incidentally associated with certain physical racial characteristics.

The Open Question of Cultural Superiority

Could generalizations about culture justify “racial” discrimination? Sure they could if certain cultures were deplorable. And indeed, a culture is just the kind of thing that could be evaluated as good or bad, whereas skin colour or hair type is just a physical fact. Skin colour has as much inherent worth as the colour of water, which is to say none. But cultures are complex ideological systems that direct our behaviour, and plainly there are cultural differences. These make for “culture shock” when you find yourself “lost in translation” in a foreign land. Culture includes religion, politics, and history which are all eminently subject to moral, pragmatic, and aesthetic evaluation.

However, whether one culture is superior to another wouldn’t be so easy to determine. For example, white supremacists take European and postcolonial American cultures to be precious, because they set the course for what we consider to be early modern progress. But these same cultures are driving us to the catastrophes of rank consumerism, global warming, the destruction of the biosphere, and the sixth mass extinction. Moreover, assessments of culture would be largely subjective and matters of taste.

Still, if ethnic prejudice is at the root of racial discrimination, the attempt to demonize racism as an unpardonable sin comes across as an obfuscation, as a way of maintaining the pretense that all cultures are equally great. This is, indeed, the postmodern relativistic outlook. We liberals assume we should tolerate all cultures and thus all peoples rather than dare to project a dastardly metanarrative to gain the upper hand in a covert power dynamic. Rather than attempting to dominate others with ideologies, we believe we should allow each culture to follow its natural course.

Alas, this very liberalism, with its emphasis on individual liberties is arguably in the vanguard of the world’s most disastrous culture, contrary to white supremacists. The First World White people’s culture of respect for everyone’s differences and of the refusal to judge or to take a stand is at the heart of consumerism which is wrecking the planet. We presume that civility dictates that we shouldn’t judge others — or, implicitly, corporations or economic classes (such as the one percenters). We should just work hard and consume mindlessly like infantile drudges. This babyish aversion to judgment spills over into woke propaganda and hyperfeminine paeans to overprotective self-help therapies and to the blessings of unconditional love.

Superficially, who could argue with any of those uplifting values? But look past the smokescreen and you’ll find so much pacification and neutralization of the educated folks who should be at the forefront of rebelling against our out-of-control, plutocratic, military-industrial-entertainment complexes. Indeed, we should be condemning some cultures or “races” — especially ours! We should be discriminating against individuals who subscribe to the wrong race/culture/ethnicity, namely against consumers like us whose preoccupations with commercialism and with vapid, spoiled celebrities have rotted our brains with trivia and cheap optimism about our expected high-tech future.

To be clear, my point here isn’t to provide any excuse for white supremacy or to exacerbate the troubles of downtrodden peoples like African Americans. It goes without saying that racist crimes like lynching or more subtle subjugations are wrong, but those crimes would be wrong independent of the racism.

Instead, my point is that the mindlessness of the liberal ban on “racism” is lame. Demonizing a concept or a generalization is bound to backfire if the concept is rooted in the purpose of cognition, which is to simplify data.

The real question of racism isn’t about the cognitive strategy of forming generalizations or mental models, but about the philosophical matter of whether some histories and cultures are better than others. Once we shift to that more tenable discussion, we’ll likely find that the first culture that should be on the racist’s chopping block is the Christian, Western, egoistic “Caucasian” one with its pyrrhic political, economic, and technoscientific victories.