Is There a Philosophical Way To Explain Racism?
Is There a Philosophical Way To Explain Racism?
Five philosophers offer their opinions.
We asked young people what their most burning philosophical questions are. In order to answer them, we went and asked some of today’s leading thinkers.
Q: Is there a philosophical way to explain racism?
— Michelle
James Tartaglia, Keele University, UK
Racists generalise about people on the basis of their race – they think that if you’re black, you’ll have trait X, that if you’re white, you’ll have trait Y, etc. That approach might work for apples (if they’re green, they’ll be crisper, if they’re red, they’ll be sweeter, etc.), but it’s a very unreliable and disrespectful way to treat human beings. Humans are complicated, individual, and they don’t like being treated as if they were objects. The philosophical error at the root of racism is that of treating conscious subjects as if they were physical objects.
Lewis Coyne, author of Hans Jonas: Life, Technology and the Horizons of Responsibility
My worry with trying to philosophically explain racism is that it might give racists too much intellectual credit. But, with that caveat in mind, here's my answer: racism is a way for people who don't like cultural difference, don't like outsiders, don't like “otherness'’ to pin down their hostilities on a group of people. These groups of people are construed as “races'’ usually on the basis of visible differences like skin colour. Sometimes physical differences are completely invented for that purpose - as with historic British racism toward Irish people - because the point is to mark out a group of people with a view to denigrating them.
Stephen Stern, Gettysburg College
I thought of Isabel Wilkerson’s work on Caste when reading your question. Wilkerson finds the word racism incomplete on its own. Racism is better understood as a caste system. Philosophy may help us understand parts of racism, as well as social psychology, but we won’t get far without help from anthropology and sociology. Finally, our need to always create ways out of caste systems isn’t about the ending but about how we live and how we now create.
Steven Gimbel, Gettysburg College
There are lots of ways to explain racism from different academic disciplines. Anthropologists like Claude Levi-Strauss argue that there is an imperative to protect the clan, and this leads to an us vs. them dynamic that makes us fear the Other. Sociologists like Ferdinand Toennies distinguish between communities defined by commonality and societies defined by diversity and argue that no matter how homogeneous we are, we will find a way to split ourselves into factions.
Social psychologists point to cognitive biases like the general attribution error that lead us to attribute bad acts committed by folks like us to character flaws in the individual, but similarly bad acts by those unlike us to the group the person comes from. Philosophers like Michel Foucault contend that the defining characteristic of society is power and that we arrange ourselves in ways that protect the power of those who have it from those who do not. Racism is just one way to make sure they don't take away what we have. No matter what its source, it is something we need to push against, especially when it becomes so embedded in the structure that it becomes invisible because of its normalcy.
Grant Maxwell, Author
The modern era is founded upon a slew of binary hierarchies, though the roots of these hierarchies precede modernity: men over women, straight over gay, rich over poor, white over nonwhite. Much of the most important and interesting philosophy of the last century has been focused on deconstructing and problematizing these binary dominations, showing how the situation is almost always more complex than a simple opposition. Race, in the sense of a binary opposition of “black” and “white,” is a concept that was invented in modernity as a way to justify imperialism and enslavement. Some of my favorite theorists who have done work on racism are Frantz Fanon and bell hooks.
Other posts in this series:
What is the Best Way to Aquire Happiness?
Can We Redesign the Aggressive Nature of Human Beings?
Why Do Things That Are Bad For Us Often Feel So Good?
Why Do Bad Things Happen to Good People?
How Can I Become More Authentic?