The Problem of Racism

We all know that racial divide in this country is a problem. A serious problem. An "at the verge of going to war with each other over it" kind of problem. The levels of hatred some people hold or experience over the color of our skin is a very real evil. I do not deny that racism is a problem. That's not the problem I wish to discuss here.

There is a problem with the concept. You begin to see it when you define "racism" in its traditional sense as "a belief or doctrine that inherent differences among the various human racial groups determine cultural or individual achievement, usually involving the idea that one's own race is superior and has the right to dominate others or that a particular racial group is inferior to the others." If you are to understand that definition, you have to ask, "What is race?" That term is built on the concept of genetic divisions within the human race. Wait ... racism within a race? That should cause at least a momentary bump in our pondering. Where does "race" within the human race come from?

The whole concept is built first on ethnicity. Ethnicity is a social group of common national or cultural tradition. It is a construct. That is, a white person and a black person and an Asian person and an Hispanic person share, in common, personhood. At our core we are all people -- humans. The differences are not in the DNA, so to speak. They are an after-birth process. It's how you're raised and who you're raised with. It's language and environment and social interaction and religion and so on. It is the product of a basic, unconscious, "us against them" response where "us" is "what I'm used to" and "them" is ... not. Race theory has held that it is a genetic difference, but "Genetic evidence has undermined the idea of racial divisions of the human species and rendered race obsolete as a biological system of classification." Race as considered as a subset of the human race, then, is purely subjective. It is not a scientific classification; it is a self-identification based on physical traits, historical affiliations, and national origins. It is sociological, not scientific.

If that's true that race is a subjective reality, not a scientific reality, how is it that we have redefined "racism" as a systemic oppression of one race over another? Race is a social construct and should make racism an individual thing, but now they've applied it to an entire population in this social construct. Why? How is this reasonable? How is it fair?

I started with the clear agreement that racial divides in this country are a major problem. I end with that, too. I'm not saying there is no problem. It would be stupid to argue that there is no work to be done here. I'm simply pointing out that this new definition of racism as "all white people oppress people of color" is nonsense. It makes no sense scientifically. It makes no sense rationally. And it diverts attention from the problem -- individuals. It makes enemies of friends (e.g., the white person that has no animosity toward black people) and friends of enemies (e.g., the black person who disagrees with this new definition). It leaves no room for repair or reconciliation. If you get outside of a society where white people are dominant, it falls apart entirely. No racism exists, apparently, in black nations or other non-white cultures, right? It can't. But even black people acknowledge that discrimination exists between people of color. (They call it "colorism.")

We have some serious problems here. Making it an institutional problem where everyone of a particular social construct that we'll call "white" is at fault simply obscures the problem and slows the ability to address the problems. If race is a social construct how can it be that, in racism, individuals are irrelevant? Social constructs are not universal and cannot be applied universally. Today's racism is a bizarre concept that ignores science and hangs everything on who has and who does not, on an uneven perceptions of who is oppressed and who is not. It's not actual race (human). There is no solution in complaining about a problem of an entire group that doesn't exist in an entire group. That's the bottom line. That's a problem.