The "right" amount of concern about racism

How much should we be concerned about things that are racist, relative to all the other things we should be concerned about?

Written by Noah Carl.

For the last few years, the United States and much of the Anglosphere has been in the throes of a moral panic around racism.

Explicit measures of racist attitudes are at all-time lows. Back in the 60s, for example, most white Americans said they disapproved of mixed education and interracial marriage; now only a small percentage do. Yet we constantly hear about how this or that is “racist” – whether it’s gardening, the countryside, Fawlty Towers, Dr Seuss or Aunt Jemima’s Syrup.

Properly defined, of course, racism is wrong. And nobody’s suggesting we should ignore the phenomenon. But what’s the “right” amount of concern about racism?

Someone of a woke sensibility might balk at the very question: “The “right” amount of concern about racism? How absurd! And racist!” What I mean is: how much should we be concerned about things that are racist or could be perceived as such, relative to all the other things we should be concerned about? And I think it’s clear that we are currently too concerned about racism.

Once again, this is not to say that racism is fine or that we shouldn’t be concerned about it at all. What I’m saying is: we haven’t got the balance right.

You can imagine a society where gangs of racist thugs roam the streets with impunity, terrorising ethnic minorities and making their lives a misery (like Germany in the 1930s, or to a lesser extent, the South after the Civil War). And I think we can all agree this would represent much too little concern about racism. But it’s possible to go too far in the other direction: to act like racism is such a big problem that all other concerns get sidelined.

Here are eight examples illustrating that Western society is too concerned about racism:

Cancel culture. Numerous people have lost their jobs, had their reputations maligned or suffered other penalties for expressing views that their detractors considered “racist”. And in the vast majority of cases, the accusation was unfounded – or at best, massively exaggerated. Note that cancel culture is not merely distressing for the person involved, but also damaging for the wider society. As Steve Pinker notes:

The sheer number of cancellations (though not small) misses the point: it’s the regime of intimidation that silences many more and warps our knowledge. It’s like saying, “Criticizing that autocracy is based on anecdata, since it imprisons only a few journalists.”

Self-censorship. A large fraction of our fellow citizens now self-censor for fear of being called “racist” or accused of some other form of bigotry. And it’s not as if their holding back n-bombs (which we arguably do want them to refrain from blurting out). They’re afraid to express sincerely held views on issues like immigration, cultural heritage and affirmative action.

In a poll carried out for the Cato Institute in 2020, 62% of Americans agreed with the statement, “The political climate these days prevents me from saying things I believe because others might find them offensive”. Unsurprisingly, conservatives were much more likely to agree than liberals. Self-censorship is particularly widespread in academia and the arts – two domains where freedom of expression is surely crucial.

The media’s Great Awokening. The media now spend vastly more time talking about racism, leaving readers swamped in vast morass of almost-identical articles. (I was able to find more than 40 with the title ‘The unbearable whiteness of such-and-such’.) Between 2010 and 2019, mentions of ‘racism’ increased 480% in the New York Times and 352% in the Washington Post. The same is true in Britain, where mentions of ‘racism’ and its synonyms are up 500% since 2010.

It’s increasingly hard to separate reporting from opinion, with almost every story somehow coming back to race (or gender, or trans). And there seems to be much less on-the-ground war reporting. How many people does the New York Times have covering the War in Tigray? And how many does it have on the racism beat? There’s also much less investigative journalism (unless you count “investigating” people for mean tweets).

The response to police shootings. Wilfully inaccurate coverage of police shootings, combined with irresponsible statements from politicians, gave rise to the “Ferguson effect” in 2014. Police officers began “retreating to the donut shop”, as Steve Sailer puts it, for fear of getting into a confrontation with a black perp and then winding up in jail or on social media. This, in turn, led to increased violent crime in inner cities. The much larger “George Floyd effect” followed in 2020, pushing the murder rate up to a multi-decade high.

The conspiracy theory of “systemic police racism” has not only fuelled community-wrecking riots and a sustained rise in homicides; it’s also prompted reprisal attacks on the police. Back in 2016, a black man named Micah Johnson killed five police officers and injured nine others” because he was “upset about the recent police shootings” and therefore “wanted to kill white people, especially white officers”.

Hiding the race of suspects. Various media outlets and other institutions now refuse to mention the race of criminals, including dangerous suspects on the loose. Last year, the University of Illinois announced that it “will no longer routinely use race, ethnicity or national origin as a descriptor in public safety advisories”. This is because public safety has to be balanced “with the potential negative perpetuation of stereotypes”.

So there could be an active shooter on campus, but the University of Illinois won’t tells staff and students what he looks like (and therefore whom to run away from) because that might be “racist”.

Hugging people during a pandemic. In February of 2020, just before the first Covid wave hit Europe, the Mayor of Florence urged residents to a “hug a Chinese” as a way to combat “prejudice”. While this probably didn’t have a major impact on the epidemic, it doesn’t take a genius to work out that encouraging physical contact – particularly with people who might have recently come from China – is bad public health advice when there’s a respiratory virus going round.

You might assume that a mayor’s first priority during a pandemic would be protecting the health of the vulnerable. But for the Mayor of Florence, it was fighting “prejudice” against Chinese people.

Not profiling terrorists. In 2017, an Islamist terrorist detonated a bomb at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, killing 23 people and injuring 200 more. The subsequent inquiry revealed that a security guard had been alerted to the terrorist, and had had “a bad feeling about him”, but failed to act because he didn’t want to be “branded a racist”. According to the white security guard, who was only 18 at the time:

For all I knew he might well be an innocent Asian male. I did not want people to think I am stereotyping him because of his race. I was scared of being wrong … It made me hesitant. I wanted to get it right and not mess it up by over-reacting or judging someone by their race.

Ignoring grooming gangs. Over the last few decades, hundreds of vulnerable English girls have been sexually abused and in some cases violently gang-raped by groups of mostly South Asian men. Various independent inquiries have revealed that the authorities failed to intervene and stop the abuse for fear of the dreaded “racist” label. As one such inquiry notes:

A parent told a police station about information provided by the daughter and queried why no immediate arrests were being made. The parent says the desk officer responded by saying that such arrests could not simply be made on such information and that the Police were also under pressure not to appear institutionally racist.

I’ve given eight examples that illustrate how obsessing over “racism” can do harm: cancel culture; self-censorship; the media’s Great Awokening; the response to police shootings; hiding the race of suspects; hugging people during a pandemic; not profiling terrorists; and ignoring grooming gangs.

Of course, denouncing someone who actually does something racist may be entirely appropriate; I’m not saying that anything goes. What am I saying is this: carelessly throwing around the term “racism” is not ethical or even morally neutral. It is a harmful thing to do.

This article was originally published behind a paywall on Noah’s Newsletter.

Noah Carl is Editor at Aporia.

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