Racism as a moral wrong has no reality because the concept was not in any moral lexicon prior to the 20th Century. Prior the last 100 years, you never heard about “racism.” Jesus never condemned it. No great rabbi has ever written a book against racism. There is no law in Torah or in Christianity against racism. None of the great Greek philosophers condemned it. The sin of racism was invented in the 20th Century along with the sins of sexism, ageism, lookism, Islamophobia and the like. <\/p>\n
Rather than a sin, the judicious and moderate use of racism to prefer your own people to other people is adaptive in many circumstances. <\/p>\n
Greg Howard writes in the New York Times<\/a>: <\/p>\n On its face, inviting a former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan onto your radio show is a risky proposition with very little upside. The situation gets even more precarious when you\u2019re inviting this ex-wizard to dole out opinions on race. But these are wild times we\u2019re living in, which is why David Duke \u2014 who has emerged as a top cheerleader for the Republican presidential nominee, Donald J. Trump \u2014 appeared on N.P.R.\u2019s \u201cMorning Edition\u201d two weeks ago and defended the candidate from charges of racism.<\/p>\n The surprise was that Duke, now running for a Senate seat, actually had some perceptive things to say. The rising tide of buttoned-up Republicans who have spoken out against Trump\u2019s ethnic belligerence, he said, were betraying both \u201cthe Republican Party and certainly conservatism.\u201d He then managed to dismiss those Republicans and swiftly parse a complex national paradox. \u201cThese are just nothing more than epithets and vicious attacks,\u201d Duke said. \u201cDonald Trump is not a racist. And the truth is, in this country, if you simply defend the heritage of European-American people, then you\u2019re automatically a racist. There\u2019s massive racial discrimination against Euro\u00adpean-Americans, and that\u2019s the reality.\u201d<\/p>\n In positioning Trump as the victim of a smear campaign, Duke was defending him against claims of deep, personal, cancer-of-the-soul racism. Trump isn\u2019t racist, said the ex-Klan boss (who, of course, also isn\u2019t racist), because he doesn\u2019t harbor hate in his heart for America\u2019s racial minorities. But then he pivoted. The real problem, he claimed, is systemic racism, directed against European-Americans.<\/p>\n This is how David Duke, who most diverges from the stereotypical Klansman in that he wears suits, revealed an understanding that systems of race are more important than one person\u2019s motives, reputation or emotional health \u2014 that there is racism, and then there is racism, and the two are not the same.<\/p>\n The first cited use of \u201cracism\u201d in The Oxford English Dictionary comes from 1902, during the well-intentioned Lake Mohonk Conference of Friends of the Indian. There, a white man, Richard Henry Pratt, criticized government policy toward Native Americans. \u201cSegregating any class or race of people apart from the rest of the people kills the progress of the segregated people or makes their growth very slow,\u201d he said. \u201cAssociation of races and classes is necessary to destroy racism and classism.\u201d Pratt was what we might call \u201cprogressive\u201d for his time; his version of destroying racism involved forcibly assimilating Native Americans into white culture. (As he put it, \u201cKill the Indian in him, and save the man.\u201d) Both of these options \u2014 segregation by force or assimilation by force \u2014 had disastrous effects for Native Americans. But for Pratt, racism was a matter of policy, not malice.<\/p>\n \u201cRacism\u201d spent the first half of the 20th century in competition with an\u00adother word, \u201cracialism,\u201d though neither featured prominently in our national conversation. Then came the civil rights era, when the word took on for many a convenient new meaning, one that had more to do with the human heart than with practices like redlining, gerrymandering or voter intimidation. In 1964, Gov. George Wallace of Alabama \u2014 who just a year earlier promised \u201csegregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever\u201d \u2014 explained the clear difference, in his mind, between a racist and a segregationist: \u201cA racist is one who despises someone because of his color, and an Alabama segregationist is one who conscientiously believes that it is in the best interest of the Negro and white to have a separate educational and social order.\u201d<\/p>\n Soon, nearly everyone could agree that racism was the evil work of people with hate in their hearts \u2014 bigots. This was a convenient thing for white Americans to believe. Racism, they could say, was the work of racists. And wherever you looked, there were no racists: only good men like Wallace, minding the welfare of their black fellow citizens, or the segregationist South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond, defending states\u2019 rights. Racism definitely existed, at some point \u2014 no one was out there denying that slavery had happened \u2014 but its residue had settled only in the hearts of the most unsavory individuals. Society as a whole didn\u2019t need reform for the sins of a few.<\/p>\n Racism ceased to be a matter of systems and policy and became a referendum on the rot of the individual soul. Calling people racist was no longer a matter of evaluating their opinions; it was an accusation of being irrevocably warped at the very core. We can see how this plays out in news coverage of things that are, in fact, racist. \u201cRacist\u201d is seen as such a deep personal attack that it\u2019s safer and more civil \u2014 particularly in the eyes of mainstream media organizations \u2014 to refer to things as racially charged, or tinged, or explosive, or divisive, or (when all else fails) just plain racial.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Racism as a moral wrong has no reality because the concept was not in any moral lexicon prior to the 20th Century. Prior the last 100 years, you never heard about “racism.” Jesus never condemned it. No great rabbi has … Continue reading