Commenter “Ray”asks:
The Oxford English Dictionary dates the word racism to 1935, and defines it thus: “The theory that distinctive human characteristics and abilities are determined by race.” Unless you believe the blank slate theory, what’s to disagree with?
One can agree or disagree with the statement on one or both of two levels. The first is whether the definition is correct in terms of the word “racism,” and the second is whether the statement itself is true. I’m not sure which Ray meant, but no matter. I’ll tackle them both.
I wasn’t around back then, but I was around in the 50s and I was among people who had been adults in the 1930s, and what they meant by the word was usually something like this: “the idea that distinctive human characteristics and abilities are determined by race, are almost certainly unchangeable, and that therefore certain races are inferior and should be treated as such.” Although the definition included racist thinking, it was racist action that was considered even more important to the definition.
The definition of the word has changed. When did that happen? I’m not exactly sure, but certainly by the 80s and 90s it was starting, and in the 21st Century it has come into full flower. The new definition went through stages. I’d characterize the starting point as “attributing bad qualities to any race (or any person because of his or her race), or speaking that way, or acting in a way that discriminates against anyone because of race.” It was inclusive and applied to all races.
Then it became something like this: “attributing bad qualities to black people, Hispanic people, Asian people, or any other minority, because of race.” Actions were even worse than thought, but thought was just about as bad, and “actions” were more broadly defined than before. They included the use of ertain words and expressions that hadn’t previously been seen as racist (see for example the “water buffalo” incident, circa 1993).
It was also at that point that CRT began to spread in the guise of its original law school manifestation, Critical Legal Theory. The history of CLT – and of how it came to morph into CRT – is too lengthy and complex for this post, but you can find various discussions online. The point we have now reached is that it has become mainstream and has spilled over even into elementary education and the workplace, and this has been building for quite some time.
That current CRT-based definition of racism is in fact a profoundly racist one. In other words, it defines the racist by the race of the person, with white people inherently racist and “people of color” by definition non-racist. This is considered true because of systemic societal reasons, a poorly-defined (and thus very difficult to refute in any rational way) word. All differences in achievement between races, whether personal or average differences, that put the designated minority-victim groups at a disadvantage, are ascribed to the influence of racism rather than having any reality in characteristics of people in those groups. For some, racism is an immutable characteristic of white people, and others seem to think it’s society that is set up this way and if society were utterly changed and improved according to their dictates then racism might someday cease in the distant future.
This is why arguments such as “what about the NBA, where most of the players are black? Isn’t that racist?” don’t work. Racism only works in once direction, according to this definition.
Now we come to the second question that started this post: is it true that “distinctive human characteristics and abilities are determined by race”? My answer is “no,” and my reason has to do with the definition of the word “determined.”
There is no question that human groups, even groups within groups such as ethnicities or place of national origin within groups, differ on average on a host of characteristics. The overlap is huge, but the average differences are there and there are differences in the tails as well. Thomas Sowell has done an enormous amount of work documenting this and explaining its meaning, and I refer you to his book Race and Culture or any number of his videos and article on the subject. But suffice to say that races definitely exhibit different physical traits (again, on average) and a host of other different traits, and such differences are also found within races by country or place of origin.
“Race” is defined by a spectrum of certain physical traits – for example, skin color. But race is not solely determined by any one trait; it’s a grouping of traits. For example, you can find very light-skinned people defined as black, and very dark-skinned people (from some Indian ethnic groups, for example) are not considered to be of the same race as black people from Africa. It’s a constellation of average physical traits that makes up a race, and those races were generally defined quite a few years ago, although there’s been a certain level of change since.
The bottom line is that the racial designations don’t determine the average differences one finds in the “human characteristics and abilities” among the races. Such differences exist among all groups, including differences within each group such as the average differences between white people of different national origins. People differ for a host of reasons we have yet to fully tease out, and one would never expect those differences to completely even out among groups to produce a total homogeneity. But the differences are not determined by racial classifications; they are exhibited by the different groups (including racial groups), and they are averages.
The differences are also especially pronounced at the tails, as one might expect. That’s why you get all those black NBA stars, and all those Jewish Nobel winners. Is it “racist” of me to say so? I think it’s merely acknowledging what is observed. That doesn’t mean that one doesn’t have a genius such as Thomas Sowell among black people. And if you think there are no Jewish basketball players – well, there sure aren’t a lot, but there are some (see also this).
The definition of racism has therefore expanded way beyond its original meaning, because old-school racists are just not all that common today compared to yesteryear, although they certainly exist. Because accusing people – and groups – of racism has become so very politically (and sometimes individually) useful, it had to be redefined in a broader way, and it had to become divorced from discriminatory actions since such actions became more and more uncommon if they continued to be defined in the old way.
The question that seems to obsess many people is whether these average differences among groups are mostly cultural or mostly genetic. That’s a question that people argue about vociferously, and I’m not going to take it up here. I’ve read tons of material on the subject, including The Bell Curve and much of Sowell, and I believe the differences have a small and poorly-understood genetic component and a huge and poorly-understood cultural one.
I also approach each person not as a member of an ethnic or racial group but as an individual capable of good or bad and usually a combination of both. I realize that’s an old-fashioned notion. But I think it’s the right one.
