Definition of racism

[darwinrlo]

https://www.facebook.com/karin.tamerius/posts/10218937009995884

[darwinrlo]

When people study a field in detail, they come up with very careful vocabulary words — to use a super-simple example: speed, velocity, momentum, and force are all clear words with different meanings after you take physics 101, but maybe not before. I think when a society doesn't want to look at an idea carefully, it uses a vocabulary with too few words.

"Racism" is too many things, jumbled into one word.

Is it having a negative view of other races? Is it hating other people? Thinking they have lower intelligence? How weird is it that those are combined: in normal life, we don't automatically hate people with less intelligence, but "racism" as it is commonly used jumbles those two. Why?

The basic definition of racism as either pre-judging or not-liking other races (already 2 different things) ... pretty nearly excludes slavery from the definition of racism. Slave-owners were generally trying to make money, to have other humans be their slaves and work without pay. It started because they wanted slaves, so then they came up with justifications.

In general there's not even effort to keep these consistent: when one group wants to enslave another, they'll call them brutes and lazy; one moment only that group is hardy and strong enough to survive the work in the field, the next moment that group is too lazy to deserve freedom.

It disturbs me how many people have definitions of "racism" so anti-historical that slavery, Apartheid or the Holocaust don't fit the definitions.

My great-grandparents were murdered by people, mostly, who didn't really have a negative judgment about them: those people shopped at their shop until a law told them not to. Friendships existed. And then took them to death camps not because they hated them, but because someone told them it was their job to, someone paid them to run the trains to the death camps that day. Racism (or religious equivalents, and in some ways sexism) had much more to do with turning a blind eye than with wearing a KKK hood and salivating at the desire to harm other humans. The crazy people in the hoods exist, but they are not the root of why historically racism led to slavery and the Holocaust.

[I might include my current working definition separately, but this is my starting perspective and my values when working on that definition.]

[darwinrlo]

Yes. I think a lot of the definition struggles are around that axis. I might even use the word "evil."

To me, there is something "bad" or "evil" in the Holocaust, slavery, and in milder more recent versions of (what I call racism, that others here are arguing terms about). Responsible adults have a moral requirement to look at how past generations f'd this up, and engage it, to make sure they don't accidentally become part.

I think there is a growing awareness among the "call in" (ie. not "call out") efforts that labeling people bad isn't helpful (true or not). [I can think of examples of this going way back; real conversations about race instead of tweet-battles have often talked about prejudice-racism being difficult, in a way similar to the video you shared.]

One's prejudices are more a thing to engage — if we use the "evil" word with them, people look at themselves, say "not evil," and feel insulted.

But I also see an effort to really pull up blinders about the parts of racism that I want to label evil, to reject looking at history of "racism" in the broader sense, or even being curious about why people from communities that were oppressed tend to want a different definition of racism than people who really haven't looked that closely, and get most of their info from internet chats. If someone is feeling inadequate, and another person (a politician) can make them feel less inadequate by blaming a race or religion, that is to me something that decent people should see as evil, much more so than a prejudice, primarily the politician but the individuals allowing themselves to blame others are not in the clear morally either. That's a core lesson of the Holocaust, to me. Evil even, perhaps especially, if the politician doesn't really have the psychological problems to see another race as inferior but is building up hate for their own power. [Slavery for profit could be substituted here as an example.]

[darwinrlo]

My starting point to this conversation was that we lacked words in our language to talk about these topics. But to approximate, I think I see a pattern like:

• People from communities who've been oppressed talk about power and use historical examples. Their theories of racism attempt to explain the history that got us here, keep history from repeating. They really wish the conversation would lead to reading a history book or other deep engagement.

• Less engaged people talk in terms of individual attitudes. They tend to use logical abstractions instead of historical examples. Racisms tend to come a bit out of thin air: people have racial bias or they don't, just so. The ideas often fit in a quick post.

[darwinrlo]

Yeah, I think the definitions here follow the pattern I described? Is it hard to match them to what I was describing?

I've also seen colonialism listed as a historical example here ... and expect that the pattern is likely to be a bit fractal, that the "racism is a word for a historical phenomena that can only be understood by looking at history and by listening to people's histories and experiences" would be more likely, if we left the world of facebook chats, to dig into more specific pieces of history.

vs "racism is prejudice or pre-judging based on race." which is an abstract definition.

[darwinrlo]

Is that what racism used to mean? When I was younger, racism was what caused slavery, or anti-Semitism (basically the same thing with a different target) caused the Holocaust. And the definitions people are saying today ... no one writing a history about the Holocaust or slavery would have used these definitions.

I grew up learning about the Holocaust, and the central lesson was that people were "just following orders." Elie Wiesel said "The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference." That's not this individualized, isolated feeling that people come up with on their own — which is the new definition I keep hearing on the internet.

Only a relatively few people actually hated Jews, at least before they were told to. Laws were passed to force people from shopping at my great-grandparents shop, because otherwise their neighbors were mostly just their neighbors who were happy to shop there — but because they were a bit different, society collectively turned a blind eye. Germans wanted to blame someone — for most it could have been anyone, they stole from Jews, they blamed Jews when they wanted someone to blame... not random hate, but organized by a few, and the biggest sadness is how many turned their eyes, not the few full of greed and hate.

That to me is anti-Semitism, and I've always thought of racism the same way: when people hear that black parents have to warn their kids about being shot by police, and brush it off, never listen to people who have those actual experiences, and turn the other way. It's rarely hate, it's mostly laziness.

[darwinrlo]

I agree with both your comments: "racism, murder and slavery are different things that do not necessarily have to go together" and slavery can exist without racism. It also seems, to me at least, that the the American institution of slavery and Jim Crow was entangled in what I called, what my high school teachers called, what everybody before the internet called racism.

Listening to this conversation, I think Racism, in the past, was a word used almost more like Capitalism or Socialism — Capitalism involves lots of unlike things, it involves people, laws, goods and services markets and stock markets, investing (so, nouns and verbs), attitudes about materialism. It's a complex concept. I feel like people are now trying to reduce racism from the definitions it used to have to a simplified synonym for prejudice (related to race). There's very little to learn or be curious about anymore. This new racism was not a driver in our history, it's just a personal problem.

Racism [definition from my high school] involved people who wanted to own slaves (so, mostly motivated by greed) convincing other people to think that black people were inferior (so, creating prejudice where it might not have existed, and the motivation might have been to feel superior; the first group was profiting and the second group quite often this was a financial loss.)

Before the internet discussions, you were definitely a racist if you were willing to turn other people against blacks because you wanted to profit, definitely a racist if you were willing to suppress blacks because you had been convinced — those are basically as different as an investor and entrepreneur in capitalism: investors and entrepreneurs are both capitalists; slave owners who cynically encouraged racism for profit and non-slave owners who allowed themselves to be susceptible to that encouragement, and people who would have gotten upset if white people were slaves but just kindof ignored when black people were enslaved were all "racist" as I learned the word.