Racism

Typology

Handweaving Freakoutery:

Racism (1): Individual racial prejudice

"If I as a white man refuse to go to a black dentist, that’s racist. This is what most of the country thinks of when they think of the term “racism,” even though the actual dictionary definition is not this.

Racism (2): Prejudice Plus Power

This is the common Woke definition, and it stems largely from blending some stuff feminist academic Patricia Bivol-Pavda cooked up in 1979 with some stuff critical race theory academic Kimberlie Crenshaw cooked up in 1989. It’s complicated, but it works basically like this. Imagine you were so focused on identity politics that you classified everyone you meet by their immutable birth characteristics, including sex and race, and then you decided that each one of those immutable birth characteristics granted everyone you met some amount of innate privilege or marginalization inside society. Then you laid them all out on a grid, decided some are privileged and some are marginalized, and then further decided that individual racial prejudice only actually matters when the privileged do it to the marginalized, because when individual racial prejudice flows the other way there’s no “impact.” That’s Racism (2).

In Racism (2), if I’m white and I refuse to go to a black dentist, that’s racist. But if a black man refused to go to a white dentist that would not be racist, because he’s marginalized and the dentist is privileged on Crenshaw’s matrix. But then you need a “totem pole of oppression” style ranking system to figure out whether a black man refusing to go to an Asian dentist is racist, or visa versa. And if you have a white anti-Semite who hates Jews in the USA, he’s racist, but if he moves to Israel he suddenly becomes antiracist because the Jews are in charge there.

The reason the Woke use this definition is because it allows them to use individual racial prejudice against the perceived dominant group as a tool for racial equity, and also because it allows them to recruit prejudiced people into their fold, provided they’re prejudiced against whites.

Racism (3): A system of socioeconomic factors]]

.. that, in combination, produce differential racial socioeconomic outcomes even if no single element in that system is intrinsically racist.

This is sometimes referred to as “systemic racism,” but sometimes the word “systemic racism” means something different, as detailed below. Racism (3) is one of the most easily identified versions of the word, and examples abound. Redlining, the process of refusing to give mortgage loans to people who live in certain areas due to their bad credit, was systemically racist even though it didn’t attack black people directly. Tuning artificial intelligence algorithms to screen resumes can be systemically racist, even though the computer literally has no concept of what race even is. HWFO did a very deep explainer about how New York City gun control laws are systemically racist, because they led directly to the “stop and frisk” policy, even though no link in the chain that led to that policy was explicitly racist.

Racism (4): The universal and not directly measurable impact that society wide subconscious individual racial prejudice has

.. against a racial group at a population level.

The Woke also call Racism (4) “systemic racism,” and they point to the fact that society has differential racial outcomes as proof that it exists. But this is circular reasoning, because it’s a self-referential definition, and turns the entire thing into a complicated racial version of begging the question.

Blaming differential racial outcomes on society wide subconscious racial bias can also hide real instances of Racism (3) and prevent people from fixing them, like what happened in New York with stop and frisk. The blowback over stop and frisk was so loud they stopped the specific policy of throwing black males ages 18-24 up against walls, but the gun control laws remained, and are still disproportionately enforced, because only the rich or very well connected can get a gun permit in NYC. And guess which race those folks are?

Racism (4) leads to gaslighting behavior by the Woke, where they claim your subconscious bias prevents you from admitting you have bias. It also leads to a practice we at HWFO like to call “ghostlighting,” which is when someone gaslights you into believing you are responsible for the sins of your ancestors.

Racism (5): The belief that race is fundamentally determinant of human traits and capacities

.. and that because of this one race may have superior traits than another race

This is actually the dictionary definition, which is hard to believe in the modern racism discussion because it almost never comes up anymore. The reason it never comes up is that (A) racism is understood to be universally bad, but (B) it is fundamentally true that there are different statistical distributions of different traits between races, and that many of those traits are absolutely genetic, such as height for instance. And when you have a true thing that is true, but it is universally bad to talk about, nobody talks about it."

(https://hwfo.substack.com/p/the-five-confusing-definitions-of?)

History

Excerpted from a recommended 2-part essay.

Loren Goldner:

""Race", as blood consciousness, an idea unknown to antiquity and to the Middle Ages , first appeared in 15th century anti-Semitism in Spain as a new phenomenon, but still entangled in the old "cosmology" of Christian, Jew, Moslem and heathen ; it then migrated to the New World in the Spanish subjugation of the ("heathen') native American population (and in the further actions of the Inquistion against Jews, both in Spain and the New World). 150 years later, it re-migrated to the newly-emergent British empire, which was picking up the pieces of the decline of Spanish power, (in part by posing as a humane alternative to the widely-believed (and largely true) "black legend" of Spanish cruelty). In the second half of the 17th century, with the defeat (as indicated) of the radical wing of the English Revolution, the triumph of the scientific revolution (above all in Newton, and theorized into a politics by Hobbes), the burgeoning British slave trade, and the revolution of 1688, this evolution culminated in the new idea of race. The collapse of the idea of Adam15 , the common ancestor of all human beings, was an unintended side effect of the Enlightenment critique of religion, which was aimed first of all at the social power of the Church and, after the religious wars of the 16th and 17th centuries, at religion generally. But it was also the necessary "epistemological" prelude to the appearance, in the last quarter of the 17th century, of a color coded hierarchy of races. Locke drove out Habakkuk, as Marx said, and Hobbes drove out Shem, Ham and Japhet.

In the waning phase of more than 200 years of Anglo-American dominance of world capitalism, it is easy to forget that England was a relative latecomer in the 500 years of Western hegemony, and the significance of that latecomer status for ideology. The impulse, conditioned by the Anglo-French Enlightenment, to overlook the entwining of the Enlightenment and racism, is part of the same impulse that downplays the significance of pre-Enlightenment developments in Spain in shaping the modern world.

The initial European experience of proto-racism was the appearance of high medieval anti-Semitism, where it had largely receded during the lower Middle Ages (6th-11th centuries). England expelled its Jews in 1290; France did the same in 1305, and Spain, where Jews had prospered for centuries under both Moslem and Christian rule, expelled them in 1492. It is interesting to note that this new anti-Semitism came into existence at the time of incipient national consciousness20 and also on the eve21 of the feudal breakdown crisis; the accelerating transformation of "Christian kingdoms" into nations eroded the older, tolerated citizenship of Jews (and, in Spain, also Moslems) based on religious identification, often linked to relative self-administration within the confines of the ghetto. In the English, French and Spanish cases, (the three major European countries which consolidated national monarchies by the late 15th century, and developed absolutisms in the 16th and 17th centuries) the expulsion of the Jews was also often a pretext for the confiscation of wealth by the heavily-indebted monarchies (often indebted to Jewish money-lenders, as Christians were at least theoretically proscribed from charging interest). In deeply-fragmented Germany and Italy, on the other hand, where early modern national unification was blocked by the medieval legacy of the Holy Roman Empire and the Papacy, Jewish expulsion was a local and sporadic phenomenon, and Italy received many Jews expelled from Spain. Thus the correlation between anti-Semitism and the new national consciousness (the latter , like race itself, being unknown in the ancient or medieval worlds23 ) is one compelling reason to see the appearance of racism as a by-product of early modern developments.

In 15th century Spain, anti-Semitism moved from a late-medieval "communal" phenomenon to a modern ideology of blood consciousness, and it is here that the difference between the one and the other is clearest. But Spain (which actually was still divided between the two major kingdoms of Aragon and Castile until 1469) was preoccupied for centuries with the crusade to reconquer the Iberian peninsula from the Moslems, a crusade which was only completed with the fall of Granada in 1492. The Inquisition began its activities in Spain in 1478, and its targets were first of all Jews and suspected "marranos", or Jews converted to "new Christians" and engaged in clandestine practice of the old ways."

(https://libcom.org/article/race-and-enlightenment-part-i-anti-semitism-white-supremacy-1492-167)