Jacques writes,
I had a few thoughts about your post on the definition of "racism".
First, I think your definition and almost everything you say here is reasonable, but you may not be engaging with the enemy's reasoning (if we can call it that). As you anticipate, Leftists will say that only whites can be "racist" because only whites have power as a racial group over others, only whites oppress others, and so on. Your response is to say that in that case they are using the wrong word. Why talk about "racism" rather than "oppressivism" if really we're talking about oppression and power rather than race.
But the Leftists would say that they are talking about race too, or racial oppression. They say race is a "social construct" but, of course, a social construct can be real and socially important. So their idea is that in our evil western societies some people–the "white" people–are given special privileges and power over other people; this is how the biologically meaningless notion of race comes to be important, and how racial (or "racial") power and privilege are sustained. From this perspective, then, it would still make sense to talk about racial oppression or "racism" for short. By analogy, someone who doesn't believe in the Nazi ideology of Aryanism could still reasonably describe Nazi Germany as a society based on Aryan supremacy or "Aryan" oppression of non-Aryans. It makes sense for them to continue to call this "racism" because the system of oppression is based on this false mythology of race that underwrites the distinction between oppressors and oppressed.
I think there are two good responses to this standard Leftist claim:
(1) Grant that "racism" in this sense of the term refers only to systemic privilege and oppression (etc.) based on socially recognized racial categories. That's a matter of how their concept or principle is supposed to work. But now we just point out that it's an empirical question whether, in a given society at a given time, some particular socially recognized race is in fact systemically privileged, oppresses other groups, and so on. And on the empirical side, isn't it ludicrous to claim that whites are the systemically privileged oppressors in any western country in 2018? Whites are the only group that faces severe social costs and often serious legal trouble merely for publicly defending their own racial interests. Whites are the only group against whom racial discrimination is legal. And on and on. I think we have to press them to defend the empirical part of their thesis. It's ridiculous, indefensible…
You are right to raise the empirical question., Jacques. Since I was concerned to make a merely conceptual point, I conceded arguendo that whites as a group oppress blacks and other non-whites as groups. As you point out, it is false at the present time, and indeed ridiculous as witness the case of Sarah Jeong.
(2) Grant for the sake of argument that whites can't be "racist" in their sense of the term. But now just point out that whites can still be victims of racially-motivated hate, racially-motivated bias and injustice, racially-motivated violence, and so on. (Basically, whites can be victims of "racism" in your sense of the term.) All these things are plainly bad and wrong in themselves, regardless of the larger "systemic" context. Press them to explain why it doesn't matter morally or politically when blacks torture a mentally retarded white man live on Facebook, because they hate whites as a group. Or at least, ask them why this doesn't matter anywhere near as much as the fact that some black guy who wasn't buying anything wasn't allowed to use the bathroom at Starbucks.
I recommend adding these two lines of argument to yours because I know Leftists are going to dismiss your entirely reasonable arguments by saying you just don't get it. These other arguments are directly targeting their (absurd) understanding of racism.
Right. We might just give leftists the word 'racist' to use in their way, according to which non-whites cannot be racists, and then challenge them to explain why it is morally acceptable to act in violent, bigoted , and unjust ways towards whites.
We could grant them that Sarah Jeong, being Asian, cannot possibly be racist, but then ask how her membership in a group oppressed by whitey justifies her vicious anti-white tweets. For even if Asians as a group at the present time are being terribly oppressed by whites, Jeong herself is enjoying all sorts of advantages.
I am reminded of the identity-schmidentity move that Saul Kripke makes in Naming and Necessity. "You say what you are doing is not (reverse) racism? Racism-schmacism! What you are doing is morally wrong."
In re: the Starbucks dude, we could say to lefties "OK, the black loiterer was treated in a racist manner, on your idiosyncratic understanding of 'racist' according to which a member of a group that is on the bottom is an object of racism even when he does something objectively unacceptable. But that doesn't change the fact that he was loitering, refusing to buy anything, taking space away from paying customers, and thereby violating important social norms."
But deeper than all this are the Left's absurd claims that race is a social construct and that there is such a thing as institutional or systemic racism.
My question to Jacques: since these claims are prima facie absurd, how is it that lefties can convince themselves otherwise? And what exactly do they mean by them?
