Tags
[While I’m at App Academy, my blog is in reruns. Enjoy a classic Ozy post, salvaged from the sands of time by the wayback machine.]
I have concluded that part of the problem with talking about racism is that the word “racism” can be interpreted to mean about four different things.
Some people use “racist” to mean “having explicit beliefs about someone based on their racial background, particularly if those beliefs are derogatory.” (We can call that Racism-1.) Other people use “racist” in a broader sense, which encompasses subconscious, unintentional racism and systems that tend to treat people of different racial backgrounds differently (even if nobody means to treat people differently based on their race). (We can call that Racism-2.) At the same time, some people use “racism” to refer to an individual’s beliefs (Racism-A) and some people use “racism” to refer to an overall societal structure (Racism-B).
This causes much confusion, because anti-racists are usually working under the Racism-2B definition and ordinary white people are normally working under the Racism-1A definition (or maybe 1B). So you get a lot of conversations like this:
Anti-racist: You’re racist!
Ordinary white person: (checks beliefs, still doesn’t believe that black people are inferior) No, I’m not. I’m not racist at all; I’m colorblind.
Anti-racist: Of course you’re racist, all white people are racist.
Ordinary white person: …That’s really racist.
Anti-racist: No, it’s not, you can only be racist against people of color.
Ordinary white person: …
Anti-racist: …
I tend to use the Racism-2B definition myself, so I would like to say some words in its defense. Most white people don’t explicitly believe that people of color are worse than white people; we’ve had a very successful forty-year propaganda program explaining that people of color and white people are equal and Martin Luther King is great. However, most white people do get more scared when they walk by a black person late at night than they do when they walk by a white person, we do feel more comfortable living in a majority-white neighborhood than in a majority-POC neighborhood, and we do all kinds of other racist things we don’t explicitly know about.
Because the non-explicit-belief racism is more common, it’s also more damaging. Most of the hiring discrimination against black people isn’t because people believe black people are terrible. It’s because they want to hire someone who fits in, you know, is like us, is in tune with the culture of the company, who seems competent and together and smart, and what a coincidence all the people who are like that are white.
And the thing is… it’s totally possible that some majority-black company will not hire me because of my race. (Although people of color can be biased in favor of white people too– it’s not like people of color live in a Magic Not Picking Up On Cultural Racism Bubble.) But I’m in a much better situation than a black person, because most companies are biased in my favor and against black people. An act of hiring discrimination has very different effects on a white person and a black person; you can’t look at the act itself without looking at the context within which it takes place. Which is why I call discrimination against white people “prejudice” and discrimination against people of color “racism.”
Thing of Things 
I think there are at least two more variants– one is that prejudice has to be virulent to count as racism, and another is that if a white person is ignorant about poc, that’s racism.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Doesn’t ‘a white person ignorant about poc’ come under the 2B definition? The white person has not intended any harm or discrimination and they have the best of intentions(ie. they are not 1A racists), but the consequences of their ignorance can still be harmful because of the context of the wider racist society?
LikeLiked by 2 people
You may well be right. That level of attack (and yes, I do see it as an attack) leaves me too angry too see straight.
Perhaps I will be calm enough later to really think about this.
LikeLike
I think it’s pretty uncontroversial to say that the term racism was initially defined as either 1A or 1B. My primary object to definitions 2A and 2B is that they take an existing, highly charged, word with a previously well defined meaning and co-opt it to mean something entirely different. Further, being able to shut down accusations of racism 1A or 1B with “No, it’s not, you can only be racist against people of color.” seems like the primary (conscious or unconscious) motivating factor in this redefinition.
LikeLiked by 6 people
I concur. I am, generally, against any movement that wants to redefine language, especially emotionally charged language. First off, its intellectually dishonest because it requires all actors who operate on the normal definition to modify what they communicate, and how they interpret what others say, to account for the different definition, which puts them at a disadvantage (since they now have to expend resources to translate). Furthermore, when they inevitably make a mistake in translation, the people who redefined the language get to correct them, which makes it look like the people who redefined the language are winning the discussion (even though the correction is semantically empty, because everyone knows exactly what was trying to be communicated). It is, in short, rhetorically underhanded, and I disapprove.
And that’s only when the redefinition is used properly. Often it’s a motte-and-bailey scenario where the colloquial definition is used when advantageous, and the redefined version when advantageous, even in the same discussion.
As an example, under the 2B definition of racism, no individual agent can be racist, because no individual agent is the entire system. Individuals are merely prejudiced, which in aggregate results in a racist system. However, people who ascribe to the 2B definition will often accuse individuals of racism, even though it doesn’t apply.
LikeLiked by 3 people
This seems like an overly conservative position. Changing language has its costs, but are there no benefits? And who decides which is the “established” language, and which is the redefinition? I’ve heard lots of people say that using “racism” to mean racism-2B is wrong because it’s an emotionally charged word, and that’s not what they’ve understood it to mean. I sympathize, but I need to talk about racism-2B somehow.
BTW, I had to expend resources to translate the phrase “motte-and-bailey scenario”. I want them back.
LikeLike
The purpose of language is to communicate. Good language rules establish salient signals. The only reason to change a language is to make more common concepts or phrases communicable with less effort (i.e. efficiency). Changing a language itself has intrinsic costs, notably the confusion that follows as some people switch to the modified version while others are still using the old. It should not be undertaken on whim. Why should the 2B concept be referred to as “racism” and not some other word that doesn’t carry the emotional baggage of the 1A version?
More specifically, I’m making the point that there are underhanded rhetorical benefits to changing language, and that I’m therefor skeptical of any movement that wants to redefine language without giving me a good reason to do so. “Translation costs” refer more to on-the-spot discussions, where you don’t have the time to carefully compose your message. The increased cognitive burden results in the side used to the normal definition taking longer to think and respond to the discussion, and depending on how much time they have, may result in them failing to articulate their response because it takes too long.
Additionally, what does “motte-and-bailey” translate to for you? Because I’m not sure “strategic equivocation” is any easier to unpack, and I suspect it takes as much effort to parse “use two meanings of the word, one that carries harsh emotional baggage and applies broadly, and one that is emotionally neutral but applies to a much narrower category, use the former when to attack when accusing people and the latter to defend when accused”. There is a difference between a short reference to a complex concept, which always takes effort to unpack, and a change in the bindings of references to concept.
LikeLiked by 3 people
Let me tell you, even though it took you a whole paragraph to explain what “motte-and-bailey” meant, it was still easier to read than me googling it and skimming a long post on Slate Star Codex. More generally, LW people are terrible about using terms that are difficult to understand, and have to be traced to overly verbose posts, which themselves use even more lingo. Sorry, I don’t mean to vent to you in particular, but sheesh, talk about translation costs…
You describe two different costs associated with racism-2B. The first is the cost associated with changing language, and the second is the cost associated with having one word mean two things.
However, as far as I’m concerned, 2B is established usage. Maybe it’s not established for you, and maybe it wasn’t in its “original” meaning, but why should those have any greater authority than my own language sense? By removing the 2B definition, you’re demanding that I pay the costs of changing language. I have to go so far as to invent a new term, one which is hopefully just as snappy, and instantly gains the same cultural momentum. Furthermore, I have to do the same for sexism, homophobia, and a number of other similar concepts which suffer from the same problem. It seems to me that it’s cheaper for you to simply see through any equivocation trick I might pull on you, since you’re apparently capable.
LikeLike
The 2B definition is not the established usage in the colloquial. To the majority of English speakers, if you say something (or more specifically, someone) is racist, they will take it to mean the 1A or 1B version. This is why so many people get defensive when accused of racism. This is why the majority of proposed solutions for racism (such as sensitivity training) are about fixing 1A and 1B racism, not 2B racism (such as helping poor people, which disproportionately benefits black people because black people are disproportionately poor).
The reason you have to coin a new word is because you’re the one trying to communicate a new concept. Co-opting an old word makes it harder to communicate, because it introduces ambiguity into what were previously unambiguous statements. LessWrong specifically creates new language to refer to new concepts in order to avoid ambiguity. Not coining new terms means that they would write even more verbose posts because they’d have to replace short phrases with entire paragraphs. Which is easier for people new to the community, but terrible for actual discussion (imagine how unreadably verbose feminist writing would be if they were never allowed to use feminist jargon).
Furthermore, it is specifically the highjacking of cultural momentum I oppose. You are not owed the allegiance of society for fighting 2B racism just because society agrees that 1A and 1B racism is bad. You have to generate cultural support for your new concept, not steal it by stealing the name of something else. The same applies to sexism, homophobia, etc… A concept stands on its own merits, not the merits of other concepts that share its name. It is exactly the intellectual dishonesty of tricking people into agreeing with you that I find so distasteful. Yeah, it takes effort to speak the unambiguous truth, but lying to people is wrong.
Finally, part of my objection is specifically to protect the less capable. I can catch equivocation tricks, but most people are vulnerable to them. Fighting equivocation tricks everywhere is far more expensive forcing people to use unambiguous language. The cost of disambiguating ambiguous language (i.e. having to clarify whether you’re talking about 1A or 2B racism) is the same as having unambiguous language in the first place. The only people really opposed to it are the people trying to abuse equivocation tricks, which depend on the ambiguity. And I don’t know why you’d want to help them.
LikeLiked by 3 people
I still disagree that the 1A/1B definitions are the only colloquial ones. Lots of anti-racist activity is clearly geared towards the societal level. Like affirmative action, anti-segregation, and even abolitionism.
And in my experience, people are plenty good at spotting equivocation, when it’s convenient to them. It happens in nearly every conversation about race, somebody assumes that racism needs to be intentional for it to count. In other words, they think that the 1A/2A definition is the colloquial one. Clearly you disagree since you think 1B is also colloquial. Are you being dishonest by equivocating between 1A and 1B, highjacking the cultural momentum of the former in service of the latter, or do you just have a different sense of what is colloquial?
LikeLike
Many actions can be taken on the societal level to counteract behavior at the individual level. 1A/1B racism of employers can be fought by affirmative action; there’s a school of though that prolonged interaction with an ethnic group will reduce 1B racism against said group; etc.. And since some people do use the 2B definition, some plans will focus on the societal level because of that.
Partly its that I have a different sense of what’s colloquial. A combination of what I observe in the parts of popular culture I interact with, and what I get out of a dictionary. Partly its because I don’t say things like “X is racist, so we have to implement Z to fix it”; it’s kinda hard to equivocate without using the word I’m being accused of equivocating with.
LikeLike
That is not uncontroversial because it is wrong.
One of the earliest uses of the term “racism” was “Segregating any class or race of people..kills the progress of the segregated people… Association of races and classes is necessary in order to destroy racism and classism.”, from 1903. I think that at least the implication of unconscious, broad racism is definitely present in the quote.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I assume you’re asserting that Richard Henry Pratt was referring to systems of oppression when he used the word racism in the speech quoted here: http://books.google.com/books?id=KGE-AQAAMAAJ&pg=RA5-PA134&dq=racism#v=onepage&q=racism&f=false
If so, then I disagree, The usage is ambiguous, and could equally well refer to the destruction of racist beliefs about Indians by close proximity to actual, flesh-and-blood Indians.
LikeLiked by 1 person
In context it’s even more clear that he’s using 2B. I agree the quote alone is ambiguous, but in the context of that speech you have helpfully linked it is very clear that he means societal racism:
LikeLike
I agree, and my usual suggestion is that rather than jargon-izing the definition of “racism”, we should find another word. Or at least another phrase. I think “institutional racism” is fine. (But I don’t think institutional racism is fine!!)
LikeLiked by 1 person
I’m not sure that this adequately distinguishes between 2A and 2B. Also, the word “racist” is too politically charged to be included in the new definition imo.
LikeLike
Errm, I see a lot of this discomfort to the “one word meaning two different things” in the anglosphere. Somehow, that argument does not hold as well when it is done in French where homonyms are way more common. One of the thing French speakers realize when learning English is that its vocabulary is way more extensive and specific than in our mothertongue.
Of course, you could argue that it is one of the reason why continental philosophy is so muddled…
But anyway, languages change all the time, words can acquire new meanings and loose older ones through the course of their lives. You may have a point about the fact that ‘racism’ is a highly charged word, but it could also be argued that racism 2B is strongly linked to the meaning and context of 1A.
LikeLike
Another part of the problem is that if one labels someone racist using the 2B definition, most outsiders will interpret as racist according to the 1A definition, and treat the person accordingly if the labeler has enough credit. This can be accidental, or this can be used as a weapon in some communities (e.g., Require Hate and their alternate avatars were very fond of this).
LikeLiked by 8 people
As said elsewhere, the conflation of the different definitions is what causes a lot of social anxiety, a motte and bailey tactic as it were.
Separating these out is helpful not only because of the anxiety, but because it tells us what the problem is.
Racists are people under Definition 1. They go on forums and videogame chat channels and use profanity and explicitly denigrate people of other races. Sometimes they are Donald Sterling.
Racism as Definition 2B is, as you point out, the major driver of misery for black people in this country. It infests everyone. (It doesn’t even require an unconscious bias. You may just like hiring your friends or previous coworkers. Who happen to be white.)
Looking at these two things makes clear: racists do not cause racism. Attacking the forum posters and Donald Sterling does nothing to the 2B dynamics. In fact, they become a very exciting distraction from the 2B problems. The NBA is in very many ways a racist institution (under 2B and some 2A) that was able to buy itself credibility by removing a Definition 1 racist.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Overt racism in a culture probably amplifies habitual unconscious racism– they’re at least somewhat related.
I think the big problem is that no one seems to know much about undoing unconscious habitual racism, and (as a result?) an all-punishment strategy is being adopted.
From my point of view, it looks like people saying “Make me feel welcome! If you get it wrong, you’ll be attacked. If you don’t know what I want and don’t want, that’s you fucking up again, as usual. You have to keep trying, or you’re a bad person. Don’t behave as though you’re afraid of me or angry at how you’re being treated.”
LikeLiked by 1 person
I think what the last paragraph fails to reckon with is that while true, it’s a terrible way to recruit people to the anti-racist banner. Telling a white person who’s suffered interpersonal racism or a man who’s suffered interpersonal sexism, “that’s unfortunate, but since it’s not as bad as what happens to blacks and women, I’m just going to act like it doesn’t really count” (which is what “POCs can’t be racist” people are de facto saying even if they don’t come out and spell it out) is… not a great way to convince whites and men to help you tear down the walls of oppression?
LikeLiked by 5 people
I actually disagree with the point in the last paragraph. An individual act of prejudice is not worse because it belongs to a class of prejudice with more members than another. An individual is more harmed when the class of prejudice they face contains more members than the class of prejudice faced by a different individual. It is incredibly important to remember that when you’re talking about systems, you’re talking about an aggregate. An individual act of prejudice is just as bad when it’s a black person prejudiced against a white, and vice versa. Black people suffer more from prejudice because of the sheer quantity of it. Acknowledging that doesn’t justify prejudice against any other group.
LikeLiked by 2 people
I agree that the *indignity* is just as bad (I suspect Ozy would also agree); Ozy’s point was that the economic consequences are not just as bad. A white person unfairly denied a job can… get a different job; a black person denied a job is likely to run into the same problem over and over. The indignity should not be ignored, however, which is where I part company with the tumblr-moron version of social justice.
LikeLike
Basing the wrongness of an action on its race-adjusted consequences is kind of… weird, though, even if it’s defensible in the abstract. One could argue that stealing from a black family is likely to be worse than stealing from a white one, but no one says “Whites can’t be robbed!”
Moral language is conventionally deontological.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Is that because stealing from a minority is intrinsically worse, or because minorities are more likely to be poor, and stealing from the poor is more harmful as a function of their inability to recover from the loss of resources? Is stealing from poor white people less wrong than stealing from rich Hispanics?
LikeLiked by 3 people
I’m making a parallel case to the claim that unfairly denying a black person a job is worse than unfairly denying a white person a job. While that might be true as a statistical generalization, and might even be relevant in, say, a courtroom, it simply isn’t how we use moral language in everyday life. We don’t have different words for consequentially different grades of wrongdoing.
LikeLiked by 3 people
In my opinion, if one has humanistic, goals then endorsing definition 2-B seems really counterproductive. It will result in you saying things like “all white people are racist” to mean “all white people benefit from a system that harms PoC.” The second statement is much less controversial (though I really think it should be “almost all” not “all” as universal statements are dicey). However instead of saying the second quote many people chose to make people feel hurt and insulted. This is not a good plan imo.
LikeLiked by 2 people
I think their is an obvious third option that is being overlooked here. Which is combining the multiple definitions into one. “Racism is either explicit and/or implicit actions, beliefs, attitudes, social norms, and systems that discriminate against people based on their racial background”. This avoids the disingenuous it’s “prejudice not racism” argument. That and also although implicit and explicit racism aren’t the same thing they are almost certainly connected. Not everyone who isn’t explicitly racist is not a racist, but everyone who is explicitly a racist is a racist. Also any discussion about race and racism should take into account that global definitions of race and racism aren’t the same. For example in America people tend to be lumped together based on their physical appearance and continent of origin. But this doesn’t apply else were. In Japan racism towards Chinese and Koreans is rampant.
LikeLike
Side note: I found this post fascinating from a “reading philosophy backward” perspective. To me, the main idea is so well-tread that it’s amazing someone had to write a blog post explaining it just a few years ago.
LikeLike
Part of why I come to this blog is that I enjoy reading considered, intelligent defenses of things I consider “SJW-y” and therefore have a pretty negative reaction to. I don’t think anyone here is actually unfamiliar with the 2A/2B definitions, but they are mostly deployed in the wild by people who are… shall we say, temperamentally distinct from Ozy.
LikeLike
An important point is that ‘racist’, while strictly speaking a descriptive term, is almost never used in any other role than a prescriptive one; ‘X is racist.’ universally has the implication ‘X is bad!’. Thus a debate over definitions of racism is inseparable from value judgments about people’s actions.
What obscures the issue further is that, often racism is talked about as a Bad Thing on a deontological level in discussions, rather than confronting the issue of why racism is bad.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I feel a bit like a stuck record on this because I made a similar post on this recently. ‘Racism’ has a sociological definition and ‘racial discrimination’ has an international legal definition. Discussions of both use the word ‘racist’ to refer to them at every level of expertise (or the lack of it). Furthermore, many people in everyday speech say ‘racism’ when they mean, in the legal sense, racial discrimination. If somebody turns up at the police station, or in the classroom, or to their employer and says they have just experienced racism and want to make a complaint, nobody listening is going to pontificate about sociology. They are going to understand it as a complaint of legal racial discrimination. They are not going to rename it prejudice, because legally that isn’t what it is called.
The law and associated definitions of racial discrimination are internationally agreed and monitored, from every level from genocide, crimes against humanity through contemporary chattel slavery and institutional structural racial discrimination down to hate speech. These are all racist. They are racist when done to white people. They are racist when done to people on the basis of their being of Polish descent. That is the law.
Many countries do not have a constitutional right to free speech to the extent the US does. You can be sent to prison for hate speech. You can lose your job. You can be made to leave your school or university. In legal terms, it is simply factually incorrect to say that you cannot be racist to white people.
LikeLiked by 6 people
I think separating out 1a racism and 2b racism (ideally, with separate words or phrases would be helpful.
My read is that most white people basically want to live in a world that is fair, and one that is free from racial tension (probably as long as the cost to them persionally is not too high, to be fair). So one could probably get pretty far with “The current system is unfair because x, and some good steps towards addressing that fairness would be y and z.” At the very least, we would have a better idea what we were talking about.
Whereas, saying “you’re racist because all white people are racist and therefore you should do y and z” doesn’t accomplish very much. (As Ozy implied.)
Sexism is an interesting issue. Should we be concerned that men appear to be doing worse than women in school by many measures, or about the apparent sentencing disparity between similarly situated male and female criminals? There’s a lot to unpack there, but it’s an awfully quick shorthand to say “We should only be concerned about 2-B sexism, so men at the short end of a localized disparity will have to lump it, or at least wait around until someone else gets to that problem.”
LikeLiked by 3 people