In early June, Merriam-Webster announced its intention to update its entry on “racism.” The change was prompted by Kennedy Mitchum, a young woman frustrated that dictionaries usually don’t include a definition representative of the way “racism” is now used in certain circles, mostly academic and left-leaning, to name systems which produce disparities along racial lines – so-called “systemic racism.”
Merriam-Webster’s current entry on “racism” (as of August 7, 2020) gives three, related definitions:
D1. a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race
D2. (a) a doctrine or political program based on the assumption of racism and designed to execute its principles, (b) a political or social system founded on racism
D3. racial prejudice or discrimination
As Mitchum explains it, she suggested the change because, in online debates over systemic racism, “[p]eople were copy-and-pasting the definition to her in an attempt to prove racism could only exist if you believe your race to be superior to another,” as per D1. What’s needed is a definition showing that racism is “prejudice combined with social and institutional power… a system of advantage based on skin colour.” But wait: isn’t this basically what D2 already says? Indeed, Merriam-Webster’s editor-at-large, Peter Sokolowski, has stated that D2 “covers the sense that Ms. Mitchum was seeking,” and that the update will consist only in “mak[ing] its wording even more clear.” So, why couldn’t Mitchum simply lob D2 back at her interlocutors and claim vindication?
I haven’t seen a clear explanation from Mitchum, but another interview provides the following hint:
Mitchum said she takes issue with Merriam-Webster’s current definition only focusing on prejudice due to the color of a person’s skin as well as racial hierarchy. “There’s so much more systems at play,” she noted. “We can see it in health care … mass incarceration.”
Anyone familiar with the academic and professional literature on “systemic racism” in these domains can guess at what’s behind this statement. When critical social justice theorists talk about “racism,” they describe it as a matter of a social system’s being organized in such a way that it creates and perpetuates racial inequalities regardless of the conscious beliefs, attitudes, or intentions of those who inhabit the system. Although they also make much of purported unconscious biases in the propagation of racism, even in systems, their criterion for diagnosing systemic racism is entirely consequentialist: “disparate impact” along racial lines is its sole necessary and sufficient condition. For example, in White Fragility, Robin DiAngelo asserts that “[b]y definition, racism is a deeply embedded historical system of institutional power (24), “a system of unequal institutional power,” (125) “a network of norms and actions that consistently create advantage for whites and disadvantage for people of color,” (27–28), “a far-reaching system that no longer depends [as per D2] on the good [or bad] intentions of individual actors; it becomes the default of the society and is reproduced automatically,” (21) i.e., without conscious intent. Journalist Radley Balko’s gloss on “systemic racism” captures the idea perfectly:
Of particular concern to some on the right is the term “systemic racism,” often wrongly interpreted as an accusation that everyone in the system is racist. In fact, systemic racism means almost the opposite. It means that we have systems and institutions that produce racially disparate outcomes, regardless of the intentions of the people who work within them.
In light of such statements, D2 would seem to fall short by failing to make a clean separation between human psychology (beliefs, intentions, etc.) and the quasi-mechanistic, or “automatic,” operations of social systems. D2 speaks of systems “based on” or “founded on” racism in the psychological sense (D1), and “designed to execute its principles.” “Design” implies intent. But critical social justice ideology requires a clean break with human psychology – beliefs, motives and the like, are at most incidental to racism, and are therefore excluded from its definition. No one has made this clearer than Ibram X. Kendi, who claims that “’Institutional racism’ and ‘structural racism’ and ‘systemic racism’ are redundant. Racism itself is institutional, structural, and systemic,” and its defining mark is the production of “racial inequity.” (How to Be an Antiracist, 18) If Kendi is correct, then the problem with dictionary definitions of “racism” isn’t merely that D2 isn’t clearly separated from D1; it’s that D1 exists in the first place. If racism simpliciter is inherently systemic or structural, and if its defining feature is the production of inequalities along racial lines, then D1 itself is wrong – the relic of a benighted age, which ought to be pulled from the dictionary like a Confederate statue from its pedestal.
But whether Mitchum’s objective was to remove D1 or merely to revise D2 in a way that detaches it from D1, her mission hits a snag. As Merriam-Webster explains in a note appended to its current entry for “racism,” “[t]he lexicographer’s role is to explain how words are (or have been) actually used, not how some may feel that they should be used.” As it turns out, D1 and D2 in their current forms capture the actual use of “racism” by ordinary English speakers very well. While terms like “systemic racism” and “structural racism” have made inroads into the working vocabularies of many English speakers, they aren’t used with consistent meanings, and they are usually assimilated to D1 or D2 in ways that are inconsistent with critical social justice theory.
In recent weeks, several acquaintances – one a criminologist – pointed me to this harrowing report on the once overtly-racist culture of the Detroit Police force as an example of “systemic racism.” But it describes a system inhabited by overt racists (as per D1) and neither a system founded on racist views or designed to perpetuate them (as per D2), nor a system that perpetuates racial inequalities regardless of people’s intentions (as per DiAngelo and Kendi). Replace the bad actors with good ones, and the system would be transformed.
The same is true of the Walter MacMillian case, which forms the central narrative of Bryan Stevenson’s book-turned-movie, Just Mercy. MacMillian was wrongly convicted of murder and sentenced to death, but Stevenson eventually succeeded in having him exonerated. In reading (or watching) the story, one is struck by just how badly the deck is stacked against MacMillian and Stevenson – it’s as if “the whole system” is against them. Presumably this is why Warner Bros. allowed free streaming of the movie for the entire month of June “to educate viewers on systemic racism.” In a statement released on Twitter, they said:
Our film Just Mercy, based on the life work of civil rights attorney Bryan Stevenson, is one resource we can humbly offer to those who are interested in learning more about the systemic racism that plagues our society.
But here again we have a case in which the intentions of specific people made all the difference to the way the system malfunctioned: the intentions of the witnesses who gave false testimony against MacMillian, of the police who coerced them to do so, and of the district attorney who withheld exculpatory evidence. It’s unclear just how far these acts were motivated by overt (D1) racism, and just how far they were motivated by other factors, like the prosecutor’s desire to win – an unfortunate byproduct of our adversarial approach to law. Regardless, the injustice exemplified in the MacMillian case is not “systemic racism” in the sense explained by DiAngelo or Kendi. Replace the bad actors with good ones, and McMillian would never have been convicted. The problem was with individual people, not “the system.”
In fact, confusion about the meaning of “systemic racism” is so widespread that Kendi seems to have given up on it, preferring to speak of “racist policies” instead of “racist systems.” For Kendi, a “racist policy” is “any measure,” including “written and unwritten laws, rules, procedures, processes, regulations, and guidelines that govern people,” “that produces or sustains racial inequity between racial groups.” (How to Be an Antiracist, 18). And why does he prefer this term? Here’s his explanation:
Racist policies have been described by other terms: “institutional racism,” “structural racism,” and “systemic racism,” for instance. But those are vaguer terms than “racist policy.” When I use them I find myself having to immediately explain what they mean. (How to Be an Antiracist, 18)
But this is wrong. The term “systemic racism” is not vague at all. Its stipulated meaning is perfectly clear. The problem is that it’s such a departure from the ordinary meaning of “racism” that people who haven’t gone through a process of re-education as part of their academic training spontaneously misunderstand the term in a way that assimilates it to D2, and by extension to D1.
In a recent piece in The Atlantic, linguist John McWhorter diagnoses the difficulty in getting ordinary English speakers to embrace the meaning that critical social-justice theorists attach to “racism.” Amusingly, he calls this “racism 3.0” to mark its advance beyond definitions like D1 and D2, which he calls “racism 1.0” and “racism 2.0,” respectively. As McWhorter explains, the historical progression from racism 1.0/D1 to racism 2.0/D2 was uncontroversial because the latter is readily perceived as a natural extension of the former. But not so with the move from racism 2.0 to 3.0. “The 3.0 usage implies that calling racial disparities ‘racism’ is natural because it is indisputable that racial disparities stem from bias-infused barriers.” But the role of racial bias (racism 1.0/D1) in the etiology of these disparities is rarely indisputable. McWhorter himself has disputed the role of racial bias in generating a disparity central to the case for systemic racism in policing: the fact “that black people are killed [by police] at a rate disproportionate to their percentage of the population.” Like Adolph Reed, McWhorter argues that an objective look at the data reveals that poverty, not race, is the key to understanding patterns of police violence. Others, like Heather MacDonald have argued that the key is not poverty but the prevalence of violent crime in the black community.
As McWhorter notes, this type of disagreement obstructs the ‘”pathway toward society-wide consensus” around racism 3.0. And it does so precisely because most English speakers are unwilling to extend the concept of “racism” to phenomena in which racism 1.0 plays no active role, particularly in the present. “It is especially challenging to that consensus,” he observes, “that some of the barriers in question, even if founded in racism 1.0 and 2.0, were in the past rather than the present,” because people often “resist a definition of racism that encompasses the actions and attitudes of people now long gone.” But this is precisely why critical social-justice theorists want to sever the connection to the attitudes and actions of people: it would be much easier to make the charge of “racism” stick if the sole criterion for making it was disparate impact in the present. It is essentially the same strategy at work in the choice to define “racial microaggressions” as including both intentional and unintentional slights, as captured in Robin DiAngelo’s mantra “think impact, not intention.” Intention is hard to prove, and genuine racists (1.0 style) can hide their malign intent behind ambiguities of language and behavior. Making intent irrelevant allows one to sidestep that problem, and to level the damning charge of “racism” on supposedly clearer and more objective behaviorist and consequentialist grounds.
The frustration behind this strategy is understandable. It would be a great boon to people of goodwill to be able to prevent people of ill-will from concealing their villainous motives. But declaring intention irrelevant to racism is not the right move. Racism 3.0 involves a huge departure from common usage, and one that results in consuming the innocent along with the guilty. No wonder it gets pushback from many speakers of ordinary English – the very fact that prompted Mitchum to write Merriam-Webster in the first place.
Given these facts, it is astonishing that McWhorter’s comments appear in a piece arguing in favor of bringing the dictionary definition closer to racism 3.0. “The Dictionary Definition of Racism Has to Change,” he says, “not because of ideological pressures emanating from “the great Awokening,” but because “sociopolitics drew the usage of the word racism beyond the dictionary definition long ago.” As a result, he claims, “legions of people, especially educated ones,” now use the term in a new way, i.e., racism 3.0. But this overestimates the extent to which racism 3.0 has infiltrated ordinary discourse. As McWhorter notes, racism 3.0 “is a tenet of much social science “ and “[i]t is a usage of racism that one often acquires in college classes in the social sciences.” The fact is that, until the recent proliferation of anti-racist reading lists and the related buying (and, I presume, reading) frenzy, this was just about the only way one could acquire this use of “racism.” But as this bit of specialized nomenclature has migrated beyond its native habitat in left-leaning academic circles in the humanities and social sciences, it has entered the vocabulary of the average English speaker without a single, clear meaning. As the above examples show, it tends to be used as a catch-all for just about anything that anyone finds objectionable pertaining to the manner in which anything that can reasonably be construed as a “system” interacts with race. In addition, it is usually assimilated to racism 1.0 and 2.0. This is true even of ostensibly “educated” people. As we saw above, in the very act of advocating for a dictionary update, Mitchum herself failed to clearly articulate the sense of “racism” omitted from the current entry, with the result that Merriam-Webster’s Sokolowski understood D2 to cover “the sense that Ms. Mitchum was seeking,” and to respond with a promise of something that sounds more like racism 2.1 than 3.0. Racism 3.0 is not about “prejudice combined with social and institutional power,” as Mitchum put it. It is about the effects of social and institutional power minus the prejudice.
Moreover, whatever meaning they attach to “systemic racism,” most English speakers still make a distinction between it and racism simpliciter, where the latter retains its traditional person- and belief-focused meaning (racism 1.0/D1). As evidence of this, consider Robin DiAngelo’s lament that white people regularly come away from her workshops still insisting that they aren’t racists, that they continue to respond with outrage and indignation at the suggestion that they are. (See chs. 1 and 7–9 of White Fragility) She chalks this up to a supposed tendency on the part of whites to be very uncomfortable talking about race issues generally, and she invented the term “white fragility” to name this tendency. I find it much more plausible to suppose that whites object not to talk about race-issues generally, but to her kind of talk about race, which – in accordance with the behaviorist and consequentialist leanings of racism 3.0 – requires them to bear the label “racist” and “white supremacist” simply in virtue of being white in a social context where, due in part to the genuine racism of the past, their status as white benefits them in unearned ways. One can acknowledge some truth in these claims but still be unwilling to bear the label “racist,” because as a matter of current socio-linguistic fact, “racism” is still understood mainly along the lines of racism 1.0/D1, and hence as a damning label.
Tellingly, DiAngelo acknowledges that “the dominant conceptualization of racism” is focused on “terrible people who consciously don’t like people of color,” and she says:
If your definition of a racist is someone who holds conscious dislike of people because of race [racism 1.0/D1], then I agree that it is offensive for me to suggest that you are racist when I don’t know you. I also agree that if this is your definition of racism, and you are against racism, then you are not racist. (13)
Good news! If you’re a competent English-speaker who uses the words “racism,” “racist,” etc. with their ordinary meanings, then, unless you consciously dislike people of color, you’re not a racist! But here’s the bad news: DiAngelo insists that “the dominant conceptualization of racism” (racism 1.0/D1) is “misinformed,” (123) and a quick glance at the section headings in chapter 1 of her book reveal that she sees those of us who accept it as possessed of “uniformed” and “simplistic” views about race and racism.
But the average English speaker isn’t having it. Again, most seem to be using “systemic racism” in a way that assimilates it to racism 1.0/D1 or 2.0/D2, and most are still distinguishing between it and racism simpliciter, where the latter is understood as racism 1.0. Both of these linguistic practices are inconsistent with racism 3.0. This undermines McWhorter’s contention that a dictionary update along the lines of racism 3.0 would “reflect how language is actually used” by ordinary speakers. While it may be true, as McWhorter claims, that an understanding of “racism” along the lines of racism 3.0 is “shared by legions of people,” it is equally true that legions upon legions do not share that understanding.
Presumably this is why McWhorter felt the need to soft-pedal the radical nature of racism 3.0 in his Atlantic piece, describing it as focusing “less on attitudes than results,” and claiming that it refers to “societal disparities between white people and others … as racism, as a kind of shorthand for the attitudinal racism [racism 1.0] creating the disparities.” Either this is disingenuous, or McWhorter himself misunderstands racism 3.0; for, as the above passages from DiAngelo and Kendi show, racism 3.0 focuses solely on results while excluding attitudes. It is not a matter of focusing more on one and less on the other, of foregrounding one and backgrounding the other. Likewise, it is not a matter of shorthand meant to capture the relationship between racism 1.0 and disparity-producing systems. To the contrary, it is meant to sever that relationship. Racism 3.0 is a radical redefinition of “racism” made for political purposes. This is the standard M.O. of those coming out of the “school of resentment” and “grievance studies” traditions. As the philosopher Richard Rorty observed two decades ago, practitioners in these fields are “resentful specialists in subversion” who treat literature and philosophy, and indeed language itself, as tools to be used for political purposes. Hurling the damning label “racist” at people and systems that don’t deserve it in order to incite revolutionary outrage is exactly the kind of subversive linguistic manipulation prescribed in their playbook.
Those of us who care about such matters need to keep a watchful eye on Merriam-Webster’s update, which is anticipated as early as August 2020. For, despite the reassuring statements from Merriam –Webster and from Sokolowski about remaining true to the actual usage of words, and limiting the update to a clarification of D2, Sokolowski has also said that “[a]ctivism doesn’t change the dictionary, … [a]ctivism changes the language,” and that “the people working on the new definition will be consulting the work of experts in black studies.” These statements may suggest that, like McWhorter, Sokolowski overestimates the extent to which full-blown “racism 3.0” has entered ordinary discourse. Likewise, his response to the internet rumor that Merriam-Webster plans to update its definition of “racism” to say or imply that only whites can be racist suggests he does not understand that exactly this view is entailed by racism 3.0, as used by “experts in black studies” like DiAngelo and Kendi. Should the update turn out to be more like racism 3.0 than 2.1, it will count as a case of activist lexicography that will only strengthen the hold of critical social justice theory on our culture.
50 comments
Aaron dude! This article pretty much is a survey of my own investigations and conclusions on this matter, how cool to find it, and from someone I know personally! While I’ve been mostly a hobbyist philosopher since we were closer friends many years ago, I’ve been equally baffled by the (as you call) CJST movement and the academic post-post-modernist nonsense. How does one counter a philosophy that accepts, as an axiom, that any attempted rebuttal is to be dismissed immediately as improperly motivated by a desire to maintain a status-quo for personal benefit? Especially when the temptation is strong to assume motive on their end as well, given the evidence provided. Hope you are well.
Thanks Brett! Shoot me an email and let’s catch up!
Good evening,
I was having a discussion with a few friends and unfortunately cannot give a relevant scource for what I needed I wondered if you could help.
Most words can be traced back to the very first instance/mention of words and the meaning & intention of the words or phrases, for instance the first barter/trade note for merchants can be traced to sumarian tablets where one trader offers X for y as an example or the old adage of fuck being fornicate under concent of the the kind myth as oppose to the Latin truth futuere/fututus as in to engage in the act of sex
My question is as follows:
Historically when is the first mention to white pride or caucus pride.
The reason for my question is because I keep getting information from site such as the guardian news paper (sigh) insisting it was American 17th century racism… then I find your article which tells me this may simply be the media drowning the truth in narrative as opposed to telling me the actual history behind the first mention of white/caucus pride.
Again I am not using this for any neo nazi sympathy I’m just curious to see if the first mention was actually correct as I find it very difficult to believe the first time being proud of being white was mentioned a mere 400 years go considering the plethora of culture and history of light toned people’s.
To not make this distinction prior to the 17th century seems extremely odd and ultimately untrue
Ps.
I had to include the word lexicography in my Google search to find anything but WHITE PRIDE IS ONLY RACISM in my searches. I never thought I would type the word lexicography in my life but thank god I did or this article may never have come to me and I may have never know the answer to this.
PPS my apologies if this sounds uneducated and a little skiwhiff but the truth is I am not the most intelligent person although I am a curious soul and would love to see if someone who is well educated could shine some light on the subject for me.
Would love an response and will leave my email for a reply if you would be so kind
Thank you in advance
Chris
First, I think that postmodernism is wrongheaded for all the reasons in the OP.
People change language. It contains descriptions of reality, whether in single words (racism, horses), phrases (systemic racism), or statements (blacks are not human). And our descriptions do change.
This need not be considered postmodern epistemic and linguistic relativism. It is an observation of something that occurs in objective reality.
A difference between my position and postmodernism is that mine doesn’t necessarily, unavoidably consider ontic reality to be changed or created by language or by our perceptions of it. Words, phrases, and statements can in reality be “wrong”. That is, they may not correspond to their referents (e.g., “all cops are immoral pigs”.) They may also present a different moral evaluation (“that arrest was unjust”).
Postmodernist relativism fails in its overreach. Epistemically, to them my lived experience of “many cops act justly” has validity equal to its counterpart above. Otherwise, the rejection of reason as central to understanding reality undermines their entire approach, since they use reason to defend, persuade, and convince.
Postmodernism will fail tactically to improve human existence, because the resulting epistemic morass of “everything means whatever we want whenever we want” is unsustainable. People can change language all they want, but certain proposals, no matter how popular, will not persist. Examples are, “The world is flat”, “Slavery is good for people”, and “Germans are the superior race and are entitled to whatever *lebensraum* they want”.
It can take time for enough people to see the disadvantages of a way of thinking to move society away from it, as in the examples above. Regarding the last two in particular, people are too complex and diverse for those to last, though they may recur. Human nature is liable both to error and to change in a direction more acceptable to most people.
While necessarily slow and painful due to human limitations, progress is always possible. I look forward to the day when certain definitions are labeled “archaic”.
Could you by any chance provide the reference for your quote of Richard Rorty? You say it was decades ago, and I can find it nowhere.
Rorty, Richard. 2000. “Response to Bouveresse.” In Rorty and His Critics, ed. Robert Brandom. London: Blackwell, pp. 152-3.
The word Racism has a dictionary definition, but nowadays it is effectively used as a propaganda word. Let me explain:
Compare the terms terrorist and freedom fighter. Both are rebels. Depending on whether you agree or disagree with the political agenda of certain rebels, you’d either call them terrorists, or freedom fighters, respectively. The specific word chosen is a value judgment of those rebels.
You can even reverse this, and deduce (guess) somebody’s political views based on which rebels he calls terrorists and which rebels he calls freedom fighters.
Racism is used as a negative term in a similar way. The neutral term for the same is in-group preference. The corresponding positive term would be, for example, ethnic solidarity, or emancipation, or empowerment.
If somebody labels in-group preference of white people as racism, but the in-group preference of other ethnic groups as ethnic solidarity or empowerment, then you can deduce that that person’s opinions are effectively based on an anti-white agenda.
While I have read the article and comments with interest, I have to chime in with the question, why place all this at the door of solo parenting? Two parent homes, obviously can offer more in terms of resources, both personal of time from parents, and financial, in terms of often two wages. But that’s true of wealthy homes as well. Do we advocate for only wealthy people to have children? A poor family can raise great kids, but as with any family, in any circumstances, that is dependent on the moral, emotional and spiritual welfare of the parents. I think the need for welfare for sole parents is subsequent to personal problems in the home such as addiction, not causal of it. Solve the violence, addiction, criminality, and health problems in a community, and parenting will improve. Don’t solve those problems, and they will pass down and magnify generation to generation. I’ve seen this occur in my alcoholic neighbour, she came from an upper crust white family, but descended into alcoholism as a young mum. The effect on her daughter was huge, she became classic white trash you could say, and as a result, my neighbour was raising her grandchild at the time I first met her. The root cause was her alcoholism, her own great start in life was not able to prevent her from descending into a poverty spiral caused by nothing but her own problem with addiction. I don’t know what her home life was like, but it was a two parent traditional marriage. The answer is better addiction treatment programs, better access to educational help for children of parents in crisis, and yes, better targeting of welfare money so it’s used responsibly and not used to continue problems like addictions. I think you will find similar problems in two parent homes containing addicted or criminal, or violent parents. That’s the causal factor, not the sole parenting. I myself ended up sole parenting my son due to his father developing mental health and addiction issues. I can report that I did a great job, my son has a slew of school trophies and achievements, and is articulate and intelligent. To conflate the need for welfare for situations like mine, with bad outcomes is simply wrong. It looks like a moral bias based on Christianity more than a considered theory.
Here is some systemic racism for you.
You’ll like it because it absolves you of responsibility; safely in the past, except it’s not.
What if the residents of Tulsa’s Black Wall Street, 1919, of Rosewood FL 1923 , Wilmington 1898, Springfield 1908, DC 1919, Atlanta 1906, East St Louis 1917, Colfax 1873, NYC 1827, Chicago 1919, Elaine 1919, & many more riots and mass killings,
what if those residents, and all the individuals lynched over the last 150 years,
what if all those hundreds of years of slaves,
had been allowed to live, to work, to build their enterprises, to build family wealth,
so that today black communities would have all that accumulated wealth instead of the deep hole that most of them are in.
Or, more “benignly”, all the urban renewal that destroyed other thriving communities in the 50’s and 60’s defined as “blight” because of the race of the inhabitants.
What if that wealth were around today to fund their descendants’ schools?
Here it is, 66 years after Brown v. Board, we still have “separate but equal but not really equal due to property taxes etc”.
The results of all that racism are here today. Not generated (mostly) directly by today’s “Racism 1.0”. No. It’s systemic.
There have been white lynch mobs and black lynch mobs, there have been white victims and black victims of lynch mobs. History doesn’t fit the black victimhood vs white perpetrator narrative. And not all those who were lynched were innocent.
Furthermore, if blacks in the USA weren’t the descendants of slaves, they’d be born in Africa instead. Probably as the descendants of slaves owned by African masters.
Just a technical question: how did you get white space between paragraphs? I used double returns but they were ignored.
Racism 3.5: White people are literally to blame for all of black people’s bad experiences, real or imagined.
There. Be sure to brandish your copy of Merriam-Webster containing this new definition when they come for you. They might make it quick.
Racism 4.0: all of the above, incl no possibility of being NOT racist, but to now include no guilt because of it. The Woke might want to consider what they wish for.
Hi Aaron,
Thank you for the article. The key element that the social justice/Woke activists have added to the definition of “racism” is the concept and requirement of “power.” According to them only those with power can be racist, and since — they will argue — white people have held positions of power, only white people can be racist. If you point to all the POCs who have held powerful positions in companies, city councils, police departments, city halls, school boards, Congress, and even the White House, they will move the goal post and say that they actually mean “historical power.” So their definition is a sneaky way to alter our language and the very concept of “racism” so as to attach it to white people. The result is only whites are racist and POCs can never be racist. (The best you’ll get out of the Woke activists is that POCs can “discriminate” but otherwise are incapable of racism.)
The intentional distortion and redefining of language — and reality — is a central tool used to fuel revolutions and wars, which is the underlying purpose of this movement.
Unfortunately for the”woketivists,every single point they attach solely to Caucasians,fails utterly to account for the originators of both individual and”structural or systemic” racism; so far back in history as to predate the Roman Empire.Namely the Han Chinese.
Let me make two brief comments. First, you can define “systemic racism” independently of any human’s beliefs or goals. It is the persistence of racially-biased outcomes (especially those disadvantageous to a particular racial group) in a variety of different contexts. (So: there are persistent racially-biased outcomes disadvantageous to Black Americans, not only in criminal charging and sentencing, but also in income, health, housing, education, capital accumulation, etc.) This definition is clearly different from D2 and also from any strand of philosophical theory that contributors to this thread, Including you Aaron, object to. I also think it reflects Mitchum’s statement that there is “so much more in play” than prejudice.
My second comment is that I am amused by Cal’s smear-by-association of Bobby Seale because of his affinities with University of California professors. I like his acknowledgement of the power of intellectuals, but it’s ironic that usually that particular smear runs in the opposite direction. But for what it is worth, I personally admire both Bobby Seale and Angela Davis, even though I am no fan of critical theory. Likewise, I revere Martin Luther King and M. K. Gandhi, though I strongly disagree with many of the things that the two of them, particularly my countryman and namesake, said.
Thanks for pushing the discussion further, Mohan. I’m glad to find that we share some sensibilities – that you are no fan of critical theory, and that you revere Martin Luther King and M. K. Gandhi. And of course I agree with you that some of their views and statements were, shall we say, misguided – nobody’s perfect.
If I understand you correctly, you’re basically saying that the concept of “systemic racism,” defined in the way you suggest (=“racism 3.0”), bears no necessary, conceptual connection to any particular philosophy that one might find objectionable, like critical social justice theory (CSJT). There *just is* this observable, theoretically-neutral fact: a pattern of racially-biased outcomes in a variety of contexts. Or, as I’d prefer to put it, there just is this pattern of disparate outcomes which consistently divide along the same racial lines in a variety of contexts. (This sounds less pejorative to me than “racially-biased” outcomes. I know that “bias” can be used purely descriptively, but I think it’s more common for it to be used evaluatively, especially in contexts pertaining to race). So we have this sociological fact or phenomenon, and we want a handy label for it, and one need not be a CSJ theorist (etc.) to accept “systemic racism” as that label. I agree.
However (and apologies in advance for using some philosophical jargon, but I’m thinking that you are probably a philosopher? And if not, hopefully Google will clarify all 🙂 :
I.
Although there is a possible world in which “systemic racism” is unrelated to any objectionable philosophical system, in the actual world it bears a historical connection to a particular and highly objectionable thought tradition: the school of resentment/ grievance studies/ CSJT tradition. I don’t think this can be discounted, for reasons I’ll give below.
II.
I don’t think “systemic racism” is an apt label for the phenomenon in question, and in fact I think that to select it violates certain Gricean maxims of discourse, like “be perspicuous,” “avoid obscurity of expression, and “avoid ambiguity.”
Imagine that we’re in the position of having to choose a label for this phenomenon for the first time, and consider the following facts (I take them to be facts at any rate):
1. “Racism” already has an established range of uses, as per D1 and D2.
2. The total causal situation behind each and every one of the domain-specific disparities in question is highly complex. In most if not all cases, it’s highly plausible to suppose that past racism (D1 and/orD2 style) played a significant role in setting the stage for what we see in the present. But, in the interim, racism in these forms has largely disappeared, and many other causal factors have arisen, both in sequence and in tandem, which perpetuate, extend, and deepen the problem – things like low economic status (including poverty), poor availability and quality of various social services, the erosion of robust moral standards in American culture (and along with them associated patterns of training and social enforcement), the breakdown of the family structure, the rise in certain patterns of criminal behavior, etc. Many of these are, in part, downstream consequences of the initial racism. And many are as much *examples* of the problematic phenomenon as they are *causes* which perpetuate and even extend it. Nonetheless, genuine racism is but a distal cause of what confronts us now. These other factors are more proximate causes, and have taken over racism’s role as the main or principal causes, of the present disparities.
So here we are in the present, and we’re looking at these disparities, and we’re seeking an apt label for them. And someone suggests “systemic racism.” What’s the rationale for this choice?
I can think of two: first, genuine racism really is part of the complete causal explanation, albeit a distal factor, and no longer the main factor. Second, whatever the proximate and principal causes may be, the effect is still (in some respects) the same as it would be if racism was the principal and most proximate cause. So there’s a kind of analogical relationship, as well as a distant causal relationship, between the disparities and racism (D1/D2).
So there are some reasons for considering “systemic racism” an apt label. But in my mind these reasons are outweighed by the following considerations:
(a) By directing us to a single, distant factor in the complex web of causal contributors, “systemic racism” is, as I put it in a previous comment, “a misleading oversimplification that serves mainly to blind us to the principal and proximate causes of most of these disparities,” among which racism in its established senses does not appear.
(b) The things just mentioned under (a) fly in the face of certain norms of thought and talk about causation. In speaking of the “main or principal causes” of the phenomenon, I had in mind the fact that even the simplest cases of causation are highly complex, and we usually identify a very limited number of factors as “the cause(s)” of the effect in question – e.g., the cause of the egg’s breaking was my dropping it, as opposed the fragility of the eggshell and the hardness of the floor, even though these are part of a complete causal explanation of the egg’s breaking. Our selection of certain factors over others as the “main” or “principal” cause, or “triggering event” as it’s sometimes called, is rarely arbitrary. It usually has something to do with the distinction between causal factors that we can readily control and those that we can’t. I can’t readily make the floor soft enough to cushion the egg, and I can’t readily make the egg resilient enough to survive a tumble onto the hard floor. But I can readily make, or could have readily made, an effort to be more careful so as not to drop the egg. Likewise, we can’t readily do anything to change, or even adequately compensate for, wrongs in the distant past. We have a much better chance of getting control of causal factors operative here in the present. So it makes sense to select terminology that draws our attention to them, if our aim is to actually solve the problem. To do otherwise is counterproductive and misleading, in violation of the Gricean maxims mentioned above.
(c) the term itself flies in the face of established uses of “racism” by detaching racism from “any human’s beliefs or goals,” as you put it, a move that is virtually guaranteed to generate misunderstanding on account of violating the Gricean maxims mentioned above.
(d) Given the established uses of “racism,” the misunderstandings that the term is virtually guaranteed to generate are themselves virtually guaranteed to, as I put it earlier, “incite all manner of negative and destructive reactions, from animosity to violence.”
On balance, it seems to me that these reasons against selecting “systemic racism” as a label outweigh the reasons for it, and we would be wise to find an alternative. It seems to me that any competent English speaker of goodwill would have to agree with that assessment.
Consequently, the fact that, in the actual world, some set of people selected “systemic racism” as their preferred label requires further explanation. Either they were not competent English speakers, or they were not people of goodwill. And it seems to me that the latter it the case, that the best explanation for the selection of the term is found in certain characteristic psycho-social features of the school of resentment/ grievance studies/ CSJT tradition and its members, which makes (d) look like a “pro” to them, rather than a “con.”
Mohan, Bobby Seale was a peer of Angela Davis. Angela Davis was a student under Herbert Marcuse who was in The Frankfurt School and with others developed critical theory. Critical theory united with deconstructionism and produced Critical Social Justice Theory (CSJT) . CSJT is the driver of systemic racism.
Racism 3.0 is an illuminating concept: I take it that it’s a system that produces unequal outcomes for different races. Presumably, if there are unequal outcomes for races, there has to be an explanation of how those unequal outcomes come about. It doesn’t do just to say: black men are incarcerated more because they commit more crimes. On the face of it this needs to be explained. Why do they commit more crimes? Nor does it do to say (like Adolph Reed) that these results are better explained by poverty . . . Why does a poverty-based outcome predict a race-based outcome?
Now, racism 3.0 might be explained, at least in part, by racism 2.0. Not just prevalence, but insidious prevalence. Personally, I find this quite plausible. More people have racist beliefs than acknowledge them or express them openly. The comments on this thread seem to me to illustrate this quite well. Somebody writes: “It all seems to be a hideous redux of the 1960s Black Power/Black Panther (see Bobby Seale) movment. Just like climate change seems to be a redux of the 1970s Ecology movement.” First, were the originals really so hideous? And, second, isn’t a bit chilling that the original poster calls this a “quiet stand for sanity.”
Thanks for your thoughts, Mohan. When I commended Cal for taking a quiet stand for sanity, it was because he “reject[s] ideas like systemic racism and all other Critical Social Justice theories.” I don’t know enough about the Black Power/Black Panther movement to say whether I think they were “hideous.” However, as someone committed to the kind of philosophical Personalism expressed in MLK’s approach to social justice, I have at least the same level of discomfort with them that King expressed in his relevant 1966-7 works (https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/black-power) .
I agree that the total causal situation behind significant racial disparities is worthy of critical investigation. But I think labeling such disparities “racism” is a misleading oversimplification that serves mainly to blind us to the principal and proximate causes of most of these disparities, while also serving to incite all manner of negative and destructive reactions, from animosity to violence. I just don’t think racism 3.0 is either illuminating or helpful in dealing with our current social ills – many of which may well be forms of genuine injustice, but they are not “racism”.
“But here again we have a case in which the intentions of specific people made all the difference to the way the system malfunctioned: the intentions of the witnesses who gave false testimony against MacMillian, of the police who coerced them to do so, and of the district attorney who withheld exculpatory evidence. It’s unclear just how far these acts were motivated by overt (D1) racism, and just how far they were motivated by other factors, like the prosecutor’s desire to win – an unfortunate byproduct of our adversarial approach to law. Regardless, the injustice exemplified in the MacMillian case is not “systemic racism” in the sense explained by DiAngelo or Kendi. Replace the bad actors with good ones, and McMillian would never have been convicted. The problem was with individual people, not “the system.””
I may be wrong about this, but I don’t think that “systemic” is meant to imply “having *nothing* to do with peoples’ beliefs, intentions, motivations, etc.”. I also don’t think it implies that in specific situations we can’t identify specific individuals who produce, maintain, or exemplify systemic norms. The major difference between systemic racism and personal racism is that the former is a mark against a system, whereas the latter is a mark against a particular individual. But a system can very well include patterns of beliefs, intentions, motivations, etc., and obviously will require particular actors making particular decisions in order to be maintained and lead to harms for black people. If this is all correct, then there’s an issue with your analysis of the film (and maybe some downstream conclusions of the piece as well). You write, “[1] Replace the bad actors with good ones, and Macmillian would have never been convicted. [2] The problem was with individual people, not “the system””. This depends, however, not on whether the problem could be fixed by replacing the bad with the good, but instead whether the “bad” actors were themselves (predictable) outputs of systemic racism (which can’t be pinned on a specific person). In other words, [1] does *not* entail [2]. And this is not at all incompatible with some/all of the bad actors themselves being personally racist, but it’s also not incompatible with none/few of the bad actors themselves being personally racist (e.g., it may have depended on unconscious attitudes, or on learned dispositions that sustain systemic injustice). In short: systems themselves may be responsible for producing bad actors, ones who are personally racist as well as ones who are not, but are nonetheless disposed (in a more covert manner) to maintain racial inequity. Anyway, hope this helps!
Hi Phil. I agree with writers-systemic racism is a flawed concept designed to obfuscate and obtain power over others. Also, remember, per the theory, if one is white, one is irredeemable. Am I missing something? Maybe. Please tell me if I am.
Something I haven’t yet read it that such ideas are predicated on the notion that people know why and what others are thinking. In other words, attribution theory. However, no one can enter the mind of another and hear their thoughts/experience their feelings.
Thanks for your very incisive comments, Phil! Let’s start with these three remarks of yours:
1. “I don’t think that “systemic” is meant to imply “having *nothing* to do with peoples’ beliefs, intentions, motivations, etc.”
2. “… a system can very well include patterns of beliefs, intentions, motivations, etc., and obviously will require particular actors making particular decisions in order to be maintained and lead to harms for black people.”
3. “systems themselves may be responsible for producing bad actors, ones who are personally racist as well as ones who are not, but are nonetheless disposed (in a more covert manner) to maintain racial inequity.”
I more-or-less agree with these observations (one quibble, which may be more than a quibble, really – but I’m going to ignore it for now and try to return to in a separate post). However, at least for DiAngelo and Kendi, and at least in those of their works that are being widely touted as “essential reading” for understanding systemic racism, it sure seems that – as I put it in the essay – “beliefs, motives and the like, are at most incidental to racism [3.0], and are therefore excluded from its definition,” and that “their criterion for diagnosing systemic racism is entirely consequentialist: “disparate impact” along racial lines is its sole necessary and sufficient condition.”
Now, this certainly leaves room for human psychology to have *something* to do with racism, but it’s not clear what role it actually plays. On the other hand, what *is* clear, based on what DiAngelo and Kendi actually say, is that, whatever role psychology plays, it’s not an essential one. It’s dispensable, incidental.
This is also apparent from certain patterns of inference observable among other authors in this field. Take Michelle Alexander’s inference in The New Jim Crow from disparate rates of incarceration to a charge of systemic racism in the criminal justice system. I don’t see any way to explain that inference except in terms of a purely consequentialist, system-level criterion for “racism 3.0,” to which individual psychology is merely incidental.
Now, it may be that other CSJTs (Critical Social Justice theorists) – or even these same theorists in other works – are more nuanced in their thinking about the way racism 3.0 interacts with human psychology. I’ve read a reasonable amount of the academic and non-academic literature in this area – more than most of the “woke” that I’ve interacted with – but I’m still learning and wouldn’t claim anything like expertise here. I’m reporting on the picture that has emerged to me so far. If DiAngelo, Kendi, Alexander, et al., are not representative of the larger body of CSJTs, I’d be glad to be corrected on this point.
Thank you for honing a finer edge on this conversation. The importance of understanding why the Woke have redefined racism with an institutional spin cannot be overstated. To implement their worldview, the Woke must transform racism from an individual sin to a collective one. After all, repentant racist individuals can be reformed within the existing paradigm, while unrepentant racist individuals can be identified and excluded within the same. This is not hypothetical conjecture; we have evidence of this reality that we can point to as vindication of the claim.
However, the Woke seeks to disrupt, destroy, and reshape existing systems, and a call for individual reformation does not provide enough impetus for radical change. In other words, if the system ain’t broke, then it doesn’t need to be fixed.
That’s why I think at the end of the day that this entire movement is really nothing more than a Marxist revolution. The conversation has been reframed from “peasant vs bourgeoisie” to “Black vs White” but the end goals are the same.
Abe, you might be interested in an old Twilight Zone (TZ) episode. It’s called: He’s Alive. It’s a comment on how totalitarian governments obtain power through defining problems and people. There are, in fact, other insightful TZ episodes on government, power, people, and thinking.
Thanks for your TZ recommendation, Cal! I’ve also heard good things about a recent film called “Mr. Jones” (https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/mr_jones_2019), although I haven’t yet seen it myself.
Thanks for your comment, Abe! I find it very disturbing how this approach seeks to bypass the inner lives of (some) individuals and treat everything as if it’s a system-level problem, as you pointed out. Presumably there are problems worth addressing on both levels – although it’s far from clear that they all merit the label “racism,” and it’s far from clear that the correct response is wholesale revolution rather than careful modification/improvement. Trying to approach things from one level only just muddies the waters by generating this tendency to equivocate among the different senses of “racism” in play, as pointed out in some of the other comments.
I am so glad I found this site. Thank you to the contributors and commentors for providing this excellent resource.
Thanks so much for your clear piece. It helped to give me a better understanding of some the lexicon of “systemic racism” in America. I got my introduction to ideas like this in the 1995 or so when I read an op-ed in the Chicago Tribune. Tere, a self-described, wealthy white man admonished readers “the system” of racial inequality has got “to change” and, of course, that at he felt guilty for living in an affluent suburb, owning a “BMW with heated leather seats, and that his daughter attended “Brown university”. It wasn’t satire. Shortly thereafter, ideas like this began to emerge in journal articles and the American Psychological Association.
It all seems to be a hideous redux of the 1960s Black Power/Black Panther (see Bobby Seale) movment. Just like climate change seems to be a redux of the 1970s Ecology movement. This time around, all the “new” movements are more virulent. Words, by the way, are important in social movements and everything else! Changing the meaning of them necessitates changing sentences, paragraphs, thoughts, and eventually actions. That shouldn’t be news to anyone.
The above dynamic about word meaning is exactly the kind of stuff I would use in counseling a client. (Yes, I am a mental health counselor; however, I don’t share my most of my ideas with peers. Why? I’m beginning to wonder if my license to practice could be adversely affected because I reject ideas like systemic racism and all other Critical Social Justice theories). Oh, I also live in a rabidly dogmatic northeastern American state.
Anyway, the actors in the tragic comedy of systemic racism do appear to have a great deal of anger, resentment, and envy, Unfortunately for everyone else, these actors also have some power. What can be done? Resist.
Thanks Cal! Very glad to hear you’re taking a quiet stand for sanity in a field that – so far as I can tell – has been deeply infiltrated by the modes of thought characteristic of Critical Social Justice Theory. I actually began a program in Clinical Mental Health Counseling about 10 years ago, because I wanted to “help people” and didn’t feel like I was able to do much of that as a Philosophy Prof. But I abandoned the program after completing most of the coursework, before the practica and interships and whatnot, in part because it became clear that the field was dominated by these forms of thinking. I found most of the coursework extremely interesting and intellectually profitable, however, thanks in large part to courageous Psychology profs who were willing to gently push back against, or just simply ignore, these trends in their own teaching.
Thanks for your thoughts. I finished grad school in 1989-before it got really absurd. It’s unfortunate your program was so dogmatic and fundamentalist that you chose to leave. I don’t think I’d even start a program in counseling psych now. At the same time, how will a person know just how bad it is unless they see it for themselves?
I can only begin to imagine how absurd todays curricula are, Yikes. If my former neighbor’s actions reflect just how bad it is, it’s pretty bad. Here’s a true story to illustrate my thought: my former neighbor who happens to be Asian Indian and a professor of social work at a public university approached me one windy day and said/asked: “My garbage can is missing some plastic and has been knocked over! Did you see who did it?” …”It’s a hate crime…I have a security system…I will sue!” I did not remind her that hey, it’s really windy and a lot of cans are blowing down the street, but I did mention she could not sue because the garbage can was property of the garbage company! I’m not making this up.
By the way, I recently finished 40 hours of continuing ed units. I took some required hours in cultural competence. The class was actually about cultural humility. Yeah, sure, I learned some things-mostly how illogical, absurd and irritation-inducing critical theory and social justice are.
So, I’m an ideological relic among my peers. I still think if one wants to “get better”, one needs to accept personal responsibility. We are not responsible for the actions of others. If someone else is dictating our behavior, we have no freedom and can’t be responsible for our actions because “they made me” (no freedom) . Hopefully the argument is not so tortured the point is lost.
Finally, let’s not forget about Stanley Milgram’s authority compliance experiments. Milgram’s conducted studies to better understand why Nazis committed the horrors they did. The Nazis were, of course, “only following orders”.
Human systems are made of people. That is their basic building block. Therefore any system functions consistent with the people who make them up, as this article correctly points out. Systems will be racist if they are composed of racist people. Systems won’t be racist if you get rid of the racists within them. Trying to distinguish between systems and people is meaningless. It’s like trying to draw a distinction between 4 divided by 2, and the number 2 itself. They both equal the same thing. Anyone trying to draw that distinction and thereby argue that they aren’t calling you racist, just the system you are a part of and support is simply gaslighting you in an effort to emotionally manipulate you into caving to their demands.
Well said, Michael! But note that there is a tendency among Critical Social Justice Theorists to adopt a social-constructionist view of the human person that construes human psychology itself as a matter of following socially-constructed “scripts” embedded in culture and language. For instance, DiAngelo asserts that the process of “socialization” (which seems similar to what others have called acculturation or enculturation, although people sometime make fine distinctions among these) renders objectivity impossible. This seems to assume that socialization determines and constrains everything a person might think, feel, value, etc., i.e., that human psychology is really just a function of the social system in which it finds itself. The implicit view seems to be that individual human persons are not the primary building blocks of anything, but are themselves “built” by the social systems they inhabit. The issues here run very deep, and have to do with different ways of thinking about parts and wholes going all the way back to Aristotle. I don’t want to bore people with the details, so suffice it to say that, while I agree with you, the consistent Critical Social Justice Theorist will reject the “bottom-up” picture of social systems that you endorse, and will insist on an alternative “top-down” picture that sees individual persons as something more like avatars of the social systems they inhabit.
That’s nothing more than chicken or egg word games by them. Which came first, the social systems that allegedly create and enforce racism or the “racists” created by those systems? It has to have started somewhere. And unless the argument is that these systems just spontaneously came into being, then someone or some group had to have created them that was allegedly racist prior to the systems being created and put in place. Or perhaps it’s turtles all the way down and there were other racists systems that created those racists and the creators of those systems were in turn created by other racist systems, ad infinitum. This socialization concept doesn’t seems like a particularly useful one. All it does is remove individual agency from the equation by saying that (white, because that’s apparently the only group of people this applies to) people have no choice about their racism. And if they have no choice about something, then why on earth would they ever fight against it? Seems like a recipe to get a whole lot of people to just embrace racism instead because that’s the way they were “socialized” and they’re being told that they can’t ever overcome it.
I agree with your critique of the way they use of “socialization,” Michael. You’ve just put your finger on a deep incoherence in the Critical Social Justice perspective that can be traced all the way back to the original Critical Theorists and beyond: namely, claiming to have knowledge (and powers to act on that knowledge) that they couldn’t possibly have if their “official” epistemic and ontological views were true.
Too true! If the System categorically creates racist people who are programed to reinforce the System, how did these great heroes emerge from the System that now fight to tear it down? The matrix has glitched.
And this is EXACTLY why the religion analogy fits so snugly. They are priests, culling their religion.
Quite frankly, the greatest issue I take with the 3.0 definition is that it will be (and indeed, already is being) used as a catch-all to explain many unsavory social phenomena for which racism is not the primary cause. For example, numerous scholarly studies have demonstrated that rates of incarceration for black males in the US dovetail quite neatly with the rates at which they commit crimes. Furthermore, black men being given longer sentences for certain crimes than their white counterparts committing the same crimes is readily explained by the fact that black men, on average, also begin committing crimes much earlier in their lives and therefore arrive before the judge with much more extensive rap sheets than their white counterparts, which is a major mitigating factor in sentence length. These types of inconvenient truths are routinely omitted by social justice activists seeking desperately to show how even when no single actor is overtly racist in their actions, the outcomes statistically disfavor certain people of color.
On that note, let’s not even get into how outcomes for Asian Americans completely blow the running narrative out of the water. But, of course, when you construct your narrative around a desired outcome, as social justice activists do, you can easily adjust it to explain anything. For example, proffering new terms like “brown fragility” and “white adjacency” to explain away the inconvenient truth of Asian success rates by every major metric.
To me, the greatest irony of all is that white, liberal, tender-hearted, guilt-ridden good intentions have paved the road for the most consequential racial disparities we see in modern America. White liberalism is the wellspring of modern racism. There can be zero doubt that the American welfare state, which came about during the civil rights era, has destroyed black families by incentivizing lifelong, intergenerational state dependency for unwed mothers. This state of affairs ensures that over 70 percent of black children grow up without fathers in the household in 2020. The devastating long-term consequences cannot be understated, and the correlation between that statistic and the fact that over half of all murders and non-negligent homicides in the US are committed by young black men is undeniable.
No social justice activist has yet been able to unequivocally show white supremacy, racial oppression or poverty to be the principal causal factors explaining those obscene statistics. The best you get are vague anecdotes, entreaties to place faith in people’s ‘lived experience” and other non-white “ways of knowing” and when that doesn’t work, smug grins followed by dismissive remarks about how you “just don’t get it” or that it’s “not their job to educate you.”
At the same time, there is never a shortage of white liberals lining up to make it known that black people are somehow less responsible for their decisions and actions because of some amorphous spectre of racism that explains everything and magically absolves them of personal responsibility. Indeed, McWhorter said DiAngelo’s White Fragility is insulting to black people in the way it treats them as pets who are somehow “less than”.
The more that identity politics takes hold — a power grab fabricated by jealous, resentful people with life skills that don’t translate well into the modern job market — the more I am convinced that one of the single greatest gifts of Western Civilization has been the supremacy and the centrality of the individual in our culture.
Excellent points, but I’d like to take issue with one thing: Why do we keep saying these people are ‘well-meaning’ and their ‘intentions are good’? Sure, that is what they say, but feeling guilty for things you never did and never had control over is a vice, not a virtue. If that leads to policies and ways of thinking that perpetuate a problem, those who really do care about solving it should be really interested in the truth and well-argued alternative solutions, shouldn’t they? Instead, you get a bunch of emotional invective and bullshit. This leads me to think we’re really dealing with people who wallow in their ‘virtuous’ sentiments (so-called compassion) and don’t actually care about solving the problem, in which case they are not well-meaning at all.
Great points, James. I agree with most of what you said, but I’m hesitant to lay so much of the blame for the breakdown of the black family etc. at the feet of the welfare state. Like most socio-cultural phenomena, the causes are likely to be many and complex. Several important pieces of the causal puzzle, I think, concern trends in thinking about moral knowledge and their effects on moral education/training, as covered in Julie Reuben’s _The Making of the Modern University: Intellectual Transformation and the Marginalization of Morality_ , James Davison Hunter’s _The Death of Character_, Hunter and Nedelisky’s _Science and the Good: The Tragic Quest for the Foundations of Morality_, Dallas Willard’s _The Disappearance of Moral Knowledge_ (I had a hand in that one), and many others. That’s not to say that misguided welfare policies haven’t contributed as well. But one might think that stronger morals, in individuals, communities, and culture at large, might have led to greater resistance to the problematic incentives you mention.
Hmmm, food for thought. I will look into the works you enumerated above. Thank you for the considerate response. Not to oversimplify, or to put words in McWhorter’s mouth, but he once mentioned in an interview that the welfare state arose during a time (the mid-60s) in which black people were finally finding their voice (which was being listened to seriously) and white people were conceding their collective guilt surrounding the most tragic and traumatizing aspects of the African American experience. In that milieu, I imagine welfare and social programs of any stripe would have been seen as a sort of penance aimed at righting a wrong (even though none of these programs explicitly targeted any demographic other than the needy).
And in a way, that was correct; a pretty direct line could be drawn at that time between higher per capita rates of poverty among blacks and their historical exclusion from full access to the nation’s social levers and avenues of upward mobility. You don’t have to dig too deep to unearth bona fide examples of black individuals or communities beating the odds through their own efforts and ingenuity, only to be undermined by subversion with a clearly racist animus. Couple that legacy with an emergent white, liberal voice reinforcing the ideas that (1) American society is structured to pretty much guarantee black people’s defeat regardless of their efforts, and (2) welfare and any other freebies are an entitlement more or less earned through hundreds of years of severe oppression, and marrying the state suddenly seems very enticing. It was the LEAST society could do to repay that debt.
Once the trap is set, it would only take two or three generations of state dependency and maladjusted, poorly socialized children creating more children when they are barely out of puberty themselves to witness a self-propelling cycle of misery and stagnation. A grossly deluded sense of entitlement is the textbook response of people who are perpetually coddled and never obligated to learn the value of hard work.
People like AOC, for example, mistakenly believe that black crime rates are rooted in poverty. Thieving and looting are almost painted as noble acts engaged in by people who are merely trying to survive. But go to the deepest inner city housing projects and you will see no shortage of smart phones and flat screen TVs. I tend to agree with Jordan Peterson’s take that poverty doesn’t correlate strongly at all with violence or lawlessness, but rather RELATIVE poverty does. That is, how poor a person sees oneself compared to others. The prime motivator is NOT the noble will to survive, but the base drive for reproductive fitness and the need to move up the pecking order relative to those around you with greater access to resources garnered through work, education or inheritance. That mindset with all of its attendant violence and dysfunctional behavior is encouraged by white liberals who jump through every logical hoop to excuse and pardon it in order to cure themselves of their perceived complicity or guilt by association.
I guess what I’m saying is that I always conceived of the increasing lack of moral knowledge as a byproduct of the welfare state. That is to say, evisceration of any sense of moral knowledge is a forgone conclusion when generations of children are raised by uneducated single mothers whose basic needs (and then some) are guaranteed to be met by an outside source with minimal investment of energy required, constantly being fed the message that they are oppressed, that nothing is their fault, that they are not responsible for their decisions, and that they have an absolute right to feel anger at a society bent on oppressing — even murdering — them with virtual impunity. I don’t think that this is just the SJW world view; increasingly it is the mainstream liberal understanding of America. That scares the shit out of me. Every liberal media outlet and major Democratic politician promotes this weltanchauung as so self-evident that it is beyond discussion and any attempt to do so is taken as a basic admission of deep, willful bigotry.
I don’t know if the following will cast any light on my own potential blind spots, but I’m white, gay, a child of immigrant parents, raised in 1980s Brooklyn (during the height of the AIDS and crack epidemics) at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder in a non-white neighborhood. I was the first in my family to finish college. It took me well over a decade as I was working full time to pay my own way through and attending at the dawn of the internet age with a dearth of social skills, resources and negligible experience with computers. My degree is a BA in Cultural Anthropology from CUNY Hunter. I was at one time very much a True Believer in the religion of Social Justice, ready and willing to own my privilege and speak truth to power. But the message just started to get too crazy. I’d see people engaging in theatrics, over-dramatizing their lives and experiences to unquestioning acceptance if their skin had the right amount of melanin. Meanwhile, my genuine life story was increasingly dismissed because it simply didn’t jibe with the narrative. I was eventually excommunicated for asking too many questions, so I concur with John McWhorter and Jim Lindsay’s characterizations of social justice as religious or cult-like in nature. My conversion was completed the day I watched a young black woman, raised in an upper middle class household and attending school at Yale, hysterically excoriating a professor because he wasn’t upholding his duty to make her feel safe by shielding her from culturally insensitive Halloween costumes. According to Racism 3.0, the Social Justice worldview, and now even Oprah Winfrey(!), this young lady experienced a depth of oppression that my privilege could never allow me to fathom.
Sorry for the tangential screed. I realize it’s gone way off topic and I understand if this doesn’t get published. I appreciate your feedback, Aaron, and will certainly follow up on your reading recommendations, as well keep my eye out for further writing from you in the future.
Thanks, James! My mom started her career (pre-kids) as a social worker in CA the late 60’s, but returned to the workforce as a welfare-fraud investigator after we were in school. So she’s seen the welfare system from both sides and actually “switched sides” because she came to believe that she wasn’t actually helping people as a social worker so much as enabling them. So I think there’s a lot of truth to what you, McWhorter, and others have to say about the welfare system’s role in all this. I just don’t think it’s the whole story, and as a guy who’s into the history of philosophy and the history of ethics, I’m a bit preoccupied with those angles – but I try not to have tunnel-vision! Fascinating to hear about some of your personal history! Thank you for sharing it. You’ve got a great, strong voice in your writing, and you’ve clearly thought a lot about these matters… so I’m kind of hoping you’ll publish some articles too, if you haven’t already.
Whatever your thoughts may be about any given religion, the doctrine and culture of my religious upbringing instilled the absolute value of the individual. The only other entity that can be remotely as important as the individual is the family; both the ‘earthly’ family of parents and child, as well as the ‘spiritual’ family as kin of God (which included all mankind).
Thank you for this article. It clarifies a lot for me. It seems that in order to believe in racism 3.0, it is necessary to a) believe in a thing called a “system” that b) is perpetuated by the people who do well within that “system” [and also by the *unsuccessful* people who happen to share a skin tone with the majority of those successful people].
This explains why I don’t give a hoot about “systemic racism.” I would not call life in general a system, first of all. It’s just…life. (Maybe I’m wrong in that; I’m sure there is some philosophical argument to be had whether reality can be called a system.)
Second of all, even if life is a system, it is certainly not *perpetuated by* people with status. That’s like saying the top gorilla is perpetuating the social structure of gorillas, instead of saying it’s perpetuated by *all* participating gorillas.
In this way, racism 3.0 utterly, abjectly denies even the merest agency among black people. They are just pawns in a “system.”
So glad you found it helpful, Rebecca. You’re absolutely right that the “system” approach eliminates agency. Your important observation reminded me of something Jonathan Chait said in a recent article in the New York Intelligencer: “One of [Robin] DiAngelo’s favorite examples is instructive. She uses the famous story of Jackie Robinson. Rather than say “he broke through the color line,” she instructs people instead to describe him as “Jackie Robinson, the first Black man whites allowed to play major-league baseball.” It is not an accident that DiAngelo changes the story to eliminate Robinson’s agency and obscure his heroic qualities. It’s the point. Her program treats individual merit as a myth to be debunked. Even a figure as remarkable as Robinson is reduced to a mere pawn of systemic oppression.” (“Is the Anti-Racism Training Industry Just Peddling White Supremacy?”, July 16, 2020).
Sheesh. It’s not been a great secret that “system racism” removes all individuality (and therefore blame or credit), but DiAngelo’s switcheroo regarding Robinson is so blatant an example.
Why are people buying into this? They talk about lived experience but who’s lived experience tells them they were “allowed by whites” to do such and such? Where is the sense of self? Surely not all individuals within a given minority relate to this.
More generally, why do we, as humans, except victimhood so readily? It seems such an easy sell for someone to fully embrace they have no control or accountability within their life. (equally faulty is the delusion someone might have that they control all influences in their life)
Thats the point, my dear: remove all agency from ANY individual. Then we are no longer people at all…just populations. A Brave New World indeed.
I’d add that this also means, if black people are just pawns in a deterministic system, that if a black activist expresses traditionally racist views, or uses emotionally abusive tactics to bully people into following the ideology, they can neatly exclude themselves from having accusations of racism leveled back at them. This is a tactic used, for example, by domestic abusers as a grooming technique, who will often say, “you made me do this” before abusing their victims. They can just say, “the devil made me do it, and that’s you.”
Thank you, Aaron, for making so clear and explicit what I had heretofore only intuited. Racism 3.0 as the new standard definition (along with “racism” as defined by any minority individual‘s “lived-experience“) is for me THE principal cause of confusion for those of us wanting to earnestly address racism in this new era, because we orient and operate under the understanding of Racism 1.0 and 2.0. Those who say they subscribe to the morally-“neutral” Racism 3.0 are either consciously or subconsciously still also oriented to the morally repugnant Racism 1.0 definition, as witnessed by their types of wording (“that’s SO racist!” “Silence is violence!”) as well as their advocating for remedies that are forcefully disproportional to the “problematic” but “neutral” situation (e.g., cancel culture techniques, re-education approaches that must not be questioned). They play both sides of Racism 3.0 and Racism 1.0.
Glad you found it helpful! “Those who say they subscribe to the morally-“neutral” Racism 3.0 are either consciously or subconsciously still also oriented to the morally repugnant Racism 1.0 definition, …. They play both sides of Racism 3.0 and Racism 1.0” That’s a crucial insight, and very well-put!