The Ironclad Argument Against Racism

I'm on board for arguing that racism is bad because it's collective guilt (and, by extension, collective punishment).

What you find though is that most people aren't interested in ethical arguments. They're interested in preserving the power structures they have benefited and continue to benefit from. They see empowering another group as taking something away from their group. In the US in particular, fear is a huge motivator here. There's also a touch of projection: many fear some form of retribution from the newly-empowered group because, well, that's probably what they would do. It's kind of a self-report.

But let's say you manage to convince people of the evils of collective guilt and punishment. Let's see if that extends to the treatment of Palestinians. Gaza is the world's largest open-air prison [1].

As an aside, this is really the point of the Republican censorship crusade against what it calls "critical race theory" because Republicans don't want people to be educated in system racism and collective punishment. That's no way to preserve a power structure.

It's also worth pointing out that a bunch of states have laws on the books that teachers cannot disparage Israel (eg [2]).

[1]: https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/02/israels-apart...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-BDS_laws

Hmm, has anyone here met someone who espoused the argument "White people are inherently morally guilty due to racism"? I'm getting the sense that it might be mostly a strawman argument. Those I've actually talked to about anti-racism seem to fall into two camps; either white people (a very hard to define group of people, but mostly you know what I mean) aren't all racist, but they have benefited from past racism, so they hold extra power unjustly (though not due to a fault of their own); or they are "racist", but where "racist" is defined as prejudice + power, and we understand that many people are prejudiced due to societal and cultural messaging, so being "racist" doesn't mean you're individually guilty.

This is a moralistic argument, and may be more or less convincing depending on personal values.

My argument against racism would be a practical one: racism is used to divide the working class against itself, it's another wedge issue just like gay marriage or abortion. It's necessary to combat this divisive rhetoric, because otherwise we won't have the strength to collectively resist the real evils.

I agree with the author, to the point of stomp holler and cheer for having said it so well. Unfortunately I don't think even this brilliant articulation of the point will help when there's a bunch of people who seem to honestly disagree that "collective guilt is wrong."

There is no lack of very hard evidence that racism is wrong, but there is a lack of ways to convince certain groups of people that they are wrong and that they should change their ways. To add to that: there are quite a few politicians and political parties that actively push these buttons to drive the divisions that help them to stay in power.

Racism is a form or subset of bigotry. I view bigotry as bad - elevating one subgroup at the expense of another or it’s reverse. It’s a group property as well as an individual’s property. Different treatment based on colour, religion, language, …, is “bad” unless you’re in the top group. It’s really always bad, but you have to see past the groupthink to see it.

I’m white, which is bad. But both sides of my family come from non-dominant European groups, which is good. The Irish portion was discriminated against in the 1800’s, which is bad. Depending on when they actually came to the us, they might have fought for the North in the civil war, which is good. So how do I parse my actual goodness/badness based on the current tv scores?

Nobody I’m aware of can change the past. We all can change the future and even aspects of the present if we give a shit and try to change. It requires seeing others as people, rather than “them”.

Automatic indemnification of children is the tool that oppressors worldwide use to transfer wealth. It is limited but useful.

For instance, I can’t steal a million dollars and give it to my son and have him get away with it.

However, I could put Japanese Americans in internment camps, getting their homes when they don’t really want to sell and go live in a camp, and then if sufficient time passes and my kids have now inherited the home, they can keep it! Indemnity!

Personally, at some particular age, I intend to use this tool to juice my grandkids chances at life. When I’m old enough I should commit some crime that can be exploited in this manner. The problem is it isn’t scalable. I don’t want one house. I want many. But I have 40 years to figure it out.

Modern ("scientific" [1]) racism was born out of a misinterpretation of Darwinism. Under such interpretation there's no concept of "punishment" or "guilt", so saying that "racism is wrong because collective guilt is wrong" will not dissuade any bona fide "scientific" racist.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism

The term "scientific racism" is very unfortunate, because it is all but scientific (i.e., it is basically entirely disproven by our modern knowledge about human genetics). Hence my use of the double quotes.

I'm so confused why the author thinks this is ironclad. I don't see why racism necessarily has anything to do with collective guilt or how it comes out of a desire to extract reparations for a wrong someone else has done.

Racism can have many impulses and origins behind it, from using a race as a careless and convenient boogeyman against which to unite a community against, to a natural fear of the unfamiliar and foreign by a monocultural society. These do not involve seeking reparations for a past injustice.

This argument only works against a particular type of racism that is rather antiquated. People exploring racism contemporarily focus on presumed-heritable characteristics such as intellectual potential or "capacity" for violence and crime. Moral arguments are harder to land in modern societies, but utilitarian ones can stick on just a few statistically-insignificant quantifiers – to the purpose of racists and anti-racists alike.

>For the most part, though, “racism” is a doctrine we ascribe to others in order to damn and ostracize them.

No, racism is the belief that another race is inferior. It isn't ascribed to hurt people, it's ascribed when someone makes a racist statement, in order to maintain community standards of behavior. Just like we ascribe pedophilia to someone who has sexual relations with children.

It would be cool if I had ever met a racist who was receptive to rational argument about their absurd social views.

This is not a well-thought-out post, makes a mess of things by lumping bigotry in with systemic discrimination, and the "ironclad argument that a child can understand" isn't - there's evidence of an analytical mind here, as you'd hope from a professor of economics, but this is slapdash, hastily-written stuff that starts with a flawed assumption of what racism is.

“So suppose you wanted to construct such arguments. What would they be? Many people would start with something like, “Racism is wrong because it has been used to justify mass murder and slavery.” True enough. But…”

Where we go on to a what-about, the article could have ended here but it turns out the article was about something else entirely…

Fig. A: everyone can see that collective guilt is wrong

Fig. B: In the past, most whites were racist.

Ah, I can see why you're a NYT bestseller.

The argument based on collective guilt assumes that there are no differences between whatever is labeled race. Racists may not agree.

I’ve seen takes where expecting immigrants to integrate is considered racist.

Maybe I’m just a racist, but when a fellow Canadian with a heavy South Asian accent is calling me buddy and talking about going to the lake/the leafs suck, I feel good about my country.

Compare to the problems in the UK where you have no-go areas in certain cities (overblown but it happens) and generations that won’t even attempt to fit in to the dominant culture. That said, the UK is much more xenophobic than Canada wrt nationality.

Jesus Christ hackernews wtf?

I find this pretty poorly argued for a few reasons.

First, racism isn't necessarily about collective guilt. Racists can absolutely recognize that any particular person should not be lumped in with their entire race. See: "one of the good ones". One can say horribly racist things in terms of statistics while leaving open the possibility that they might not apply to any particular person.

Second, policies like affirmative action aren't about collective guilt either. The justification is not that white college applicants are evil and must be punished. Maybe there is some of that lurking beneath the surface, but I have never heard the argument in those terms from anyone worth listening to. The argument is that racism is so pervasive and so entrenched that avoiding bias requires adding bias in the other direction, not mere even-handedness.

There are parts of this idea that are good. I find that huge parts of our society are based around rewarding or punishing people for the actions of their family and peers (see: the whole class system). But this article in particular is flawed.