Race

Whenever I want to be intellecually offended and annoyed but challenged, I read David Stove. One of his most offensive papers is "Racial and Other Antagonisms", wherein he argues that "racism" is a word for what everyone knows it true. Yet the more time I spend with nice people, the more I think Stove might have been on to something.

Prima facie he was saying that we should all believe in racism and anyone who didn't was simply in denial. He went even further to ridicule the term, claiming that something so obvious requires no "-ism"; no more than the believe that the sun rises in the east should be labelled "eastism".

When I first read that essay, I struggled to see precisely what his mistake was. Then I realised that what he was actually arguing against was not what I thought racism was. The paper set out to argue that there are racial differences that are recognisable and are born out statistically. I think he argues this point relatively successfully so I had trouble seeing how his argument could be right and his conclusion wrong. Then I saw that he had done nothing to prove any particular racist theses in the superiority of some races over others. Likewise he blythely dismisses the objection that many of the characteristics he discussed might be social rather than genetic. It was then I decided that he was wrong for those two reasons, that for racism to be true it would have to be the case that certain races were genetically inferior. The "racism" that Stove showed to be commonsense was simply the belief that racial differences exist. But if racism means either racial prejudice or belief in the inferiority of other races, there's no defence for that.

Now, within the circles in which I move, all discussion of race is taboo. (In the narrow sense, of genetic difference, lineage etc. Discussion of ethnic differences is encouraged when it's sympathetic to the underdog.) This has led to the strange phenomenon that people who do discuss genetic differences in terms of race are looked at askance.

So much so that even generalisations about clearly cultural phenomena are frowned upon and criticism of other cultural practices are off limits. I flout this occasionally for trivial topics; I understand that it's just a generalisation but for me, if the question is not morally-laden, it's worth going out on a limb and guessing. For example, I told a Chinese friend that she'd definitely like liquorice despite having just waxed lyrical on how the world is divided into liquorice-lovers and liquorice-haters. I confidently told her that all Chinese people like liquorice (so far I've been right) because star anise is a staple of Chinese cuisine.

Recently I discovered that this attitude only exists in the Anglosphere, Europeans are not nearly as sensitive. For example, when French people (my sample set is 2) hear about the Spanish basketball team's slant-eye gesture, they don't see it as inherently offensive, they interpret it as affectionate. Likewise, even asian people who've grown up in asia (my sample set is 1) don't find it offensive, simply because they're tough enough to take a joke.

That's not meant to be a criticism of asians living in western countries, they've a right to be sensitive after the childhood teasing. But still, it's interesting to see this difference.

I'd also like to add that people who want to combat racism shouldn't use the arguement that genetic diversity doesn't match up exactly to our everyday notions of race. This may or may not be a good characterisation (depending on whether or not you thing all genes should be equally weighted). The problem is that it allows that we could justify hatred of other races if it turned out that we were more different genetically. The reason we shouldn't has little to do with descent. We should treat all races equally because the evidence is that they are all equal in the ways that count, that is, in terms of intellectual potential, social characteristics etc. If we were to encounter an extra-terrestrial race that had these same similarities, we should treat them well regardless of whether or not their DNA is like ours (or if they even have DNA). If the overall result is that we can have a civil relationship with those aliens, we should.