Like nervous children who hear a monster in every creaking floor, many journalists and academics see a racist in every joke or story that does not conform to current progressive sensitivities.
Let's say that you live in a village inhabited by a family of moral mutants whose members lack the natural familial instinct to favor kin. This happens within the family as well, so children don't favor their own brothers for example over third cousins. Somehow this works out splendidly; roles and prestige in the village are assigned based on competence and objective moral behavior instead of being distorted by strength of familial ties.
Then one day a new family moves in. The average member of that family is far far less competent than the average member of your family. If familism/ie racism (5) is bad, as Bo Winegard states then you are still obligated to judge them by their individual capacities and not the group they belong to.
Wait a second this is insane! You are a mutant, they are not. Even kind and competent members of the other group still lack the mutation that made you capable of dismissing familial ties. To persist in this family neutral policy in the presence of a family without the mutation; somehow achieves a level of amorality (if not anti-morality) so complete, no one ever thought to make rules about it. What would that rule even look like?
* Don't hurt those who would help you to help those that would hurt you hurt those who would help you!
Modern Western Europeans are moral mutants. They are the result of specific eugenic interventions, a legal ban on cousin marriage and the dispersal of extended families over a 1000 year period. No capacity for individualism can be expected of most other racial groups.
...think it's more or less the premise of Henrich's book about the WEIRDest People in the World, Western Educated Industrial Rich Democrats: the first group in history to practice xenophilia and to exchange home, nation and family for abstract concepts like "fairness" and "equality".
Secular Westerners abandoned Christianity but swapped it for a fundamentalist form of Egalitarianism based on the Parable of the Good Samaritan.
This is why if you tell a postcollegiate liberal that we should prefer our own people to foreigners they act like you just farted in church. Performing compassion to the poor and brown (White Saviorism) is their real religion, or at least the foundation of the Left worldview and its morality.
Blacks are better off in America than anywhere else. The compassion is real and does benefit it's targets. It's main victims are liberals themselves, who regularly suffer the consequences of urban dysfunction.
I don't understand this obsession with pointing and sputtering; "hypocrite", "virtue-signaller". If a liberal murdered his mother to give her organs to the drug-addicted homeless man with a failed liver, some conservative would suddenly appear at the funeral to accuse him of being performative.
But I'd argue that definition 4 is much more plausible than definition 5 in being able to satisfy the moral-ladenness of the term 'racist'. Hating someone just because of the group that they belong to (rather than having negative impressions on the group as a group - as you rightfully distinguish), is a morally repugnant thing to do. Whereas advocating for differential policy/treatment could be a constructive thing justified on utilitarian grounds. You mentioned for example the hugely disproportionate crime rate; couldn't one argue that that calls for tougher law and order measures on the higher-offending group? One might argue that the law can be more libertarian with the W population, which seems more able to self-regulate and self-police, but that it needs to be more explicit and restrictive with the B population which seems unable to do so.
Now, I am NOT arguing for that policy, as I don't think it feasible in political or pragmatic terms. But if one were to advocate for trying such a policy, and suppose that this policy ends up giving positive empirical results, reducing black crime ans saving thousands of black lives, are we so sure that we want to call that racist with all the moral value-ladenness that comes with that term?
What if differential policies based on race work empirically to reduce social harms for both groups, should we a priori condemn them as racist, even if they may be producing moral results on utilitarian grounds?
A racist is someone who you (as one of the NICE and definitely not DEPLORABLE caste) want to feel superior to.
NOTE: I seem to have been misunderstood here (probably my wording) The YOU was not referring to the writer of this post; it was referring to my notional stereotypical virtue-signalling anti-racist-type poser.
This is unfair. Bo is far, far braver on the issue of race than most deplorables and has suffered considerable consequences for his bravery. And I say this as someone who claims that soft racism is not a positive good, but morally obligatory, even and perhaps especially if one believes in individualism at all.
I seem to have been misunderstood here (probably my wording) The YOU was not referring to the writer of this post; it was referring to my stereotype of a virtue-signalling anti-racist-type poser.
Got it. I'm not sure this explains the use of racist well though. I think it's just a logical inference by leftists that 'deplorables' will notice things and reach their logical conclusions. If a KGB agent arrests a peasant who claims "this is a poor country, much poorer than America!", and accuses him of capitalism, he's not being unreasonable.
You're getting away from my point here. My comment was just a bit of light satire on the mentality of your average virtue-signalling lefty - which, in my, view is fundamentally a psychology (albeit a semi-subconscious one) about feeling more-sophisticated-than-thou.
I've never seen someone use definitions like "somebody who believes that race is a real, biological phenomenon and that races are different from each other" or "somebody who believes that some races have higher average socially desirable traits such as intelligence and self-control than others" to describe racism.
It's widely agreed that racism infers showing prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism towards someone based on their race/ethnicity. I've enjoyed many of Aporia's posts in the past, but such willful bending of well-accepted definitions simply to suit one's own agenda is weak writing.
“The fifth and last definition … The differential treatment of races under the law is not only antithetical to liberalism, but also deeply offensive to most people’s sense of fairness and decency. In fact, this definition is so sound and reasonable that I cannot imagine a credible counterargument to address.”
What about people who choose to live under their chosen laws in racially homogeneous societies with clear, private, geographical boundaries? Such societies could be the size of some countries. Presumably, this would mean that people of other races are not legally entitled to enter—except for occasional exceptions of various kinds—and will be evicted if they somehow gain illegal access. Of course, analogous societies are also possible on the basis of religion, sex, sexual orientation, etc. The classical liberal, or at least libertarian, response would seem to be that this is an innocuous example of freedom of association.
“The fourth definition, that a racist is somebody who dislikes members of another race simply because they belong to another race is not only plausible, but virtually unassailable.”
Perhaps “racialist” would be a preferable term to racist because racism often implies unfair treatment under the law. I do not think discrimination based on race is immoral if you prefer your own kind for aesthetic reasons. Freedom of association is a fundamental freedom. If we don’t condemn women for preferring tall men over short, then we shouldn’t condemn someone for preferring to associate with his own kind (for whatever reasons).
We find it OK to discriminate against non-citizens, and usually its about not liking low IQ brown people from immigrating.
But Levittowns were pretty much the same thing. If you don't want black citizens to move into your neighborhood because they will cause crime, it's basically the same not wanting black immigrants to move to your country because they will cause crime.
I think the only reason there is a difference is because citizen blacks have votes and thus can influence policy, while non-citizens can not. The taboo reflects underlying political power. I view it as a matter of power rather than moral essentialism.
"If, for example, John Doe dislikes Jina, a nice, funny, morally upstanding person, simply because she is Korean, then that is racist, and John Doe is a racist."
When you examine demographic turnover in neighborhoods it often starts with better behaving middle class members of an ethnic group moving in because they can afford it. Then their relatives, friends, etc move in. Then their relatives, friends, etc move in. It doesn't take that many degrees of separation for this, 1/3 of black men are convicted felons.
So what starts as a few nice middle class black people moving in eventually becomes a demographic surge of regular black people. I could show you case studies of this phenomenon.
If you understood this phenomenon you might not even want middle class people to move in, especially in any kind of numbers, because of how it might trigger this phenomenon down the road. Or you would take measures to keep poors out (like zoning for SFH only, or having racial quotas like Singapore or Oak Park).
In fact this phenomenon is very similar to the arguments of immigration critics. The Great Migration of blacks to Detroit wasn't a huge problem at first but eventually it destroyed the city. On a smaller level there was blockbusting.
I take the view that the entire Civil Rights regime should be dismantled and freedom of association be respected. If you want people to be "less racist" then do the work of convincing them. Most people I think have fairly reasonable views on this stuff.
If black people want to be liked more they can change their behavior enough that people simply have higher opinions of them. If they can't (genetics, whatever) tough. They will have to accept that some people don't like them. That's life.
"I take the view that the entire Civil Rights regime should be dismantled and freedom of association be respected : "
The problem here is that we have run several experiments on defending freedoms, and they almost always come up short. Most people even in individualistic societies don't seem to respect a difference between; "I don't like this" and "It should be banned by law." Goldwater lost, decisively.
If you want not to be forced to be around someone you don't like, you either have to 1) marginalize them or 2) exclude them from your society entirely. Or just 3) do away with Democracy entirely.
I view the entire period since the Civil Rights as the slow dawning acknowledgement that the base assumption at the bottom of it all, that blacks would be equal to whites in all the ways that matter if only we would outlaw freedom of association, has fundamentally failed.
BLM, etc are in many ways the logical conclusion of all the various reformers, on both the left and the right, failing to achieve that promise, because it was fundamentally impossible.
I listened to you reading this. When you said “The difference between “Your son has intellectual challenges” and “Your son is a f**king idiot” is real” I literally LOLd Nice piece.
This might be my favorite article by Bo yet. It is on a very important and dangerous (to discuss openly) topic that Bo treats rigorously, thoughtfully, thoroughly, honestly, and courageously. It is an article I wish I had written myself (were I to have the talent and cajones to do so), especially as I similarly relish the apparently Socratic habit of considering the proper meaning of words and proposing my own definitions. P.S. Thanks for creating Aporia too.
On the whole, I would consider the Definition ranked 8/10 to be far more satisfactory.
Suppose an individual is desirous of preserving the ethnic purity of his nation. There may be entirely satisfactory universal motivations responsible for guiding this preference, just as there are entirely satisfactory reasons for acting in a manner predisposed to rational self-interest, according to the liberalistic framework.
He elects to discriminate upon the basis of ethnicity or race when considering the degree to which immigrants from particular foreign nations may be admitted to his nation of origin. Under your accepted definition, this would enable his classification as a racist, as he is desirous of denying individuals access to immigration upon the basis of race or ethnicity. (Incidentally, this was the approach the late Enoch Powell took.)
And you recommend members of such a group for condemnation, when it is entirely possible that they are not admitting any deficiency in their evaluation of a particular racial group merely because they are not desirous of admixture with them, like Powell.
Someone with an irrational bloodlust for members of other races, on the other hand, absolutely deserves condemnation, with this individual satisfying the definition for private belief to a far greater extent.
Thanks for a logical, well-written article about a subject fraught with social stigma.
You are welcome. Thank you for reading.
Bo W
Non-racism as total amorality:
Let's say that you live in a village inhabited by a family of moral mutants whose members lack the natural familial instinct to favor kin. This happens within the family as well, so children don't favor their own brothers for example over third cousins. Somehow this works out splendidly; roles and prestige in the village are assigned based on competence and objective moral behavior instead of being distorted by strength of familial ties.
Then one day a new family moves in. The average member of that family is far far less competent than the average member of your family. If familism/ie racism (5) is bad, as Bo Winegard states then you are still obligated to judge them by their individual capacities and not the group they belong to.
Wait a second this is insane! You are a mutant, they are not. Even kind and competent members of the other group still lack the mutation that made you capable of dismissing familial ties. To persist in this family neutral policy in the presence of a family without the mutation; somehow achieves a level of amorality (if not anti-morality) so complete, no one ever thought to make rules about it. What would that rule even look like?
* Don't hurt those who would help you to help those that would hurt you hurt those who would help you!
Modern Western Europeans are moral mutants. They are the result of specific eugenic interventions, a legal ban on cousin marriage and the dispersal of extended families over a 1000 year period. No capacity for individualism can be expected of most other racial groups.
Your concluding paragraph is very interesting and deserving of consideration.
...think it's more or less the premise of Henrich's book about the WEIRDest People in the World, Western Educated Industrial Rich Democrats: the first group in history to practice xenophilia and to exchange home, nation and family for abstract concepts like "fairness" and "equality".
Secular Westerners abandoned Christianity but swapped it for a fundamentalist form of Egalitarianism based on the Parable of the Good Samaritan.
This is why if you tell a postcollegiate liberal that we should prefer our own people to foreigners they act like you just farted in church. Performing compassion to the poor and brown (White Saviorism) is their real religion, or at least the foundation of the Left worldview and its morality.
Performing compassion, or just performative?
Blacks are better off in America than anywhere else. The compassion is real and does benefit it's targets. It's main victims are liberals themselves, who regularly suffer the consequences of urban dysfunction.
I don't understand this obsession with pointing and sputtering; "hypocrite", "virtue-signaller". If a liberal murdered his mother to give her organs to the drug-addicted homeless man with a failed liver, some conservative would suddenly appear at the funeral to accuse him of being performative.
fine line? is all a performance but the show is called Compassion (or Look at how compassionate me and my tribe are!)
Prison shows what humans natural response to race really is.
Great article as always, Bo.
But I'd argue that definition 4 is much more plausible than definition 5 in being able to satisfy the moral-ladenness of the term 'racist'. Hating someone just because of the group that they belong to (rather than having negative impressions on the group as a group - as you rightfully distinguish), is a morally repugnant thing to do. Whereas advocating for differential policy/treatment could be a constructive thing justified on utilitarian grounds. You mentioned for example the hugely disproportionate crime rate; couldn't one argue that that calls for tougher law and order measures on the higher-offending group? One might argue that the law can be more libertarian with the W population, which seems more able to self-regulate and self-police, but that it needs to be more explicit and restrictive with the B population which seems unable to do so.
Now, I am NOT arguing for that policy, as I don't think it feasible in political or pragmatic terms. But if one were to advocate for trying such a policy, and suppose that this policy ends up giving positive empirical results, reducing black crime ans saving thousands of black lives, are we so sure that we want to call that racist with all the moral value-ladenness that comes with that term?
What if differential policies based on race work empirically to reduce social harms for both groups, should we a priori condemn them as racist, even if they may be producing moral results on utilitarian grounds?
A racist is someone who you (as one of the NICE and definitely not DEPLORABLE caste) want to feel superior to.
NOTE: I seem to have been misunderstood here (probably my wording) The YOU was not referring to the writer of this post; it was referring to my notional stereotypical virtue-signalling anti-racist-type poser.
This is unfair. Bo is far, far braver on the issue of race than most deplorables and has suffered considerable consequences for his bravery. And I say this as someone who claims that soft racism is not a positive good, but morally obligatory, even and perhaps especially if one believes in individualism at all.
I seem to have been misunderstood here (probably my wording) The YOU was not referring to the writer of this post; it was referring to my stereotype of a virtue-signalling anti-racist-type poser.
Got it. I'm not sure this explains the use of racist well though. I think it's just a logical inference by leftists that 'deplorables' will notice things and reach their logical conclusions. If a KGB agent arrests a peasant who claims "this is a poor country, much poorer than America!", and accuses him of capitalism, he's not being unreasonable.
You're getting away from my point here. My comment was just a bit of light satire on the mentality of your average virtue-signalling lefty - which, in my, view is fundamentally a psychology (albeit a semi-subconscious one) about feeling more-sophisticated-than-thou.
I've never seen someone use definitions like "somebody who believes that race is a real, biological phenomenon and that races are different from each other" or "somebody who believes that some races have higher average socially desirable traits such as intelligence and self-control than others" to describe racism.
It's widely agreed that racism infers showing prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism towards someone based on their race/ethnicity. I've enjoyed many of Aporia's posts in the past, but such willful bending of well-accepted definitions simply to suit one's own agenda is weak writing.
I have seen countless examples of far less eliciting screeches of racism in public discourse. It is not at all widely agreed.
Maybe in America. Not elsewhere.
“The fifth and last definition … The differential treatment of races under the law is not only antithetical to liberalism, but also deeply offensive to most people’s sense of fairness and decency. In fact, this definition is so sound and reasonable that I cannot imagine a credible counterargument to address.”
What about people who choose to live under their chosen laws in racially homogeneous societies with clear, private, geographical boundaries? Such societies could be the size of some countries. Presumably, this would mean that people of other races are not legally entitled to enter—except for occasional exceptions of various kinds—and will be evicted if they somehow gain illegal access. Of course, analogous societies are also possible on the basis of religion, sex, sexual orientation, etc. The classical liberal, or at least libertarian, response would seem to be that this is an innocuous example of freedom of association.
“The fourth definition, that a racist is somebody who dislikes members of another race simply because they belong to another race is not only plausible, but virtually unassailable.”
Perhaps “racialist” would be a preferable term to racist because racism often implies unfair treatment under the law. I do not think discrimination based on race is immoral if you prefer your own kind for aesthetic reasons. Freedom of association is a fundamental freedom. If we don’t condemn women for preferring tall men over short, then we shouldn’t condemn someone for preferring to associate with his own kind (for whatever reasons).
"The possible exception is immigration policy."
It's worth asking why?
We find it OK to discriminate against non-citizens, and usually its about not liking low IQ brown people from immigrating.
But Levittowns were pretty much the same thing. If you don't want black citizens to move into your neighborhood because they will cause crime, it's basically the same not wanting black immigrants to move to your country because they will cause crime.
I think the only reason there is a difference is because citizen blacks have votes and thus can influence policy, while non-citizens can not. The taboo reflects underlying political power. I view it as a matter of power rather than moral essentialism.
"If, for example, John Doe dislikes Jina, a nice, funny, morally upstanding person, simply because she is Korean, then that is racist, and John Doe is a racist."
When you examine demographic turnover in neighborhoods it often starts with better behaving middle class members of an ethnic group moving in because they can afford it. Then their relatives, friends, etc move in. Then their relatives, friends, etc move in. It doesn't take that many degrees of separation for this, 1/3 of black men are convicted felons.
So what starts as a few nice middle class black people moving in eventually becomes a demographic surge of regular black people. I could show you case studies of this phenomenon.
If you understood this phenomenon you might not even want middle class people to move in, especially in any kind of numbers, because of how it might trigger this phenomenon down the road. Or you would take measures to keep poors out (like zoning for SFH only, or having racial quotas like Singapore or Oak Park).
https://www.unz.com/isteve/the-oak-park-black-block-system-in/
In fact this phenomenon is very similar to the arguments of immigration critics. The Great Migration of blacks to Detroit wasn't a huge problem at first but eventually it destroyed the city. On a smaller level there was blockbusting.
http://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/hood.htm
I take the view that the entire Civil Rights regime should be dismantled and freedom of association be respected. If you want people to be "less racist" then do the work of convincing them. Most people I think have fairly reasonable views on this stuff.
If black people want to be liked more they can change their behavior enough that people simply have higher opinions of them. If they can't (genetics, whatever) tough. They will have to accept that some people don't like them. That's life.
"I take the view that the entire Civil Rights regime should be dismantled and freedom of association be respected : "
The problem here is that we have run several experiments on defending freedoms, and they almost always come up short. Most people even in individualistic societies don't seem to respect a difference between; "I don't like this" and "It should be banned by law." Goldwater lost, decisively.
If you want not to be forced to be around someone you don't like, you either have to 1) marginalize them or 2) exclude them from your society entirely. Or just 3) do away with Democracy entirely.
Yeah, he lost. But he was right.
I view the entire period since the Civil Rights as the slow dawning acknowledgement that the base assumption at the bottom of it all, that blacks would be equal to whites in all the ways that matter if only we would outlaw freedom of association, has fundamentally failed.
BLM, etc are in many ways the logical conclusion of all the various reformers, on both the left and the right, failing to achieve that promise, because it was fundamentally impossible.
The Eternal Wordsmiths want us to waste our time on things like these, instead of actually saving our race.
I listened to you reading this. When you said “The difference between “Your son has intellectual challenges” and “Your son is a f**king idiot” is real” I literally LOLd Nice piece.
This might be my favorite article by Bo yet. It is on a very important and dangerous (to discuss openly) topic that Bo treats rigorously, thoughtfully, thoroughly, honestly, and courageously. It is an article I wish I had written myself (were I to have the talent and cajones to do so), especially as I similarly relish the apparently Socratic habit of considering the proper meaning of words and proposing my own definitions. P.S. Thanks for creating Aporia too.
On the whole, I would consider the Definition ranked 8/10 to be far more satisfactory.
Suppose an individual is desirous of preserving the ethnic purity of his nation. There may be entirely satisfactory universal motivations responsible for guiding this preference, just as there are entirely satisfactory reasons for acting in a manner predisposed to rational self-interest, according to the liberalistic framework.
He elects to discriminate upon the basis of ethnicity or race when considering the degree to which immigrants from particular foreign nations may be admitted to his nation of origin. Under your accepted definition, this would enable his classification as a racist, as he is desirous of denying individuals access to immigration upon the basis of race or ethnicity. (Incidentally, this was the approach the late Enoch Powell took.)
And you recommend members of such a group for condemnation, when it is entirely possible that they are not admitting any deficiency in their evaluation of a particular racial group merely because they are not desirous of admixture with them, like Powell.
Someone with an irrational bloodlust for members of other races, on the other hand, absolutely deserves condemnation, with this individual satisfying the definition for private belief to a far greater extent.
Nowadays if you're a racist it just means you're a pragmatic realist
We must stop stigmatizing racism and start embracing it maybe even celebrating it
Nowadays a racist is a pragmatic realist