So, I used to think I had a really clear idea of what racism was. Now, I'm not as sure. I mean, my previous idea was "big" and a lot of the mechanics of how racism worked happened in a way that was not quite explicit. In other words, the individual-actor model, whereby a single person makes a choice to exclude something or someone from something else solely or predominantly because of a physical characteristic not highly correlated with meritorious variables. . . . whoa! What I mean to say is: malicious decisions based on race or color or ethnicity, largely. And that's not all. There was also a systematic or institutionalized nature to this racism too. Now, how did that work? Well, it was more of the impact of all of the small collective decisions of all of those smaller people, and what's more, it was also, and this was the most important part, how all of those decisions kept on going even without being explicitly racial in nature. So, in other words, it should be testable if we have the right data. And there are studies that link race with decreased loan approval, for instance, keeping all other factors consistent. I'm not going to go back to sources now, but can if you insist.
Okay, so hold that in your head for a minute, and consider that there are also people who have a desire, albeit slight, to live not in homogenized neighborhoods, but around people that are mostly like them. That's not quite racism. More like a preference, right?
So, where do we call racism, racism? If we can prove that race mattes statistically but can't pinpoint a bad actor, is there still racism?
4 comments:
"...there are also people who have a desire, albeit slight, to live not in homogenized neighborhoods, but around people that are mostly like them. That's not quite racism. More like a preference, right?"
I'm not sure what the distinction is. Racism per se, one that you describe as a situation "whereby a single person makes a choice to exclude something or someone from something else solely or predominantly because of a physical characteristic not highly correlated with meritorious variables," is also a preference.
The question is why we might attribute the broad effects of what we call racism to one preference rather than the other.
Good question, to which I don't know the answer. So let me add another question instead: Why do we seem to assume that one and the same preference (whatever it may be) is behind all situations where we see racially unfair outcomes?
Because we don't like to acknowledge that the world is far more complicated than we can possibly fathom on a daily basis, particularly with regard to moral culpability.
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