Taboo by Wilfred Reilly

Author:Wilfred Reilly
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Regnery Publishing
Published: 2020-01-27T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 6 Taboo Obvious Fact #6: Anyone Can Be Racist (and “Racist” Has a Real Meaning)

After spending a chapter arguing empirically that racism is not the primary cause of contemporary problems for minorities, it is worth taking a look at what racism actually is. In recent years, liberal debaters have spent a great deal of time arguing straight-facedly that almost anything can be racist. Treating Blacks especially well is “well-meaning racism,” employing racial stereotypes (for example, of Italian or Black criminals) in the movies is “representational racism,” neutral tests like the SAT (which produce slightly disparate results across racial groups) are part of “institutional racism,” and so on. Furthermore, some claim, all of these varieties of racism are exclusively white provinces—only whites can ever be racist, due to the structure of contemporary American power relations. In a sentence, all of this is nonsensical garbage. Racism remains what it has always been: the vice of disliking members of other groups for genetic reasons. And importantly, by this or any other reasonable standard, many of the POC activists on the modern left are among the most racist members of our society.

The idea that racism, traditionally defined as simple skin-color bias, is some complex and all-enveloping miasmatic phenomenon has been prevalent on the political left for decades. In a widely cited 2018 essay, scholar Dr. Nicki Lisa Cole defined racism as any system of “practices, beliefs, social relations, [or] phenomena” that works in any way to produce a racial hierarchy, or that yields “superiority, power, and privilege for some… and oppression for others.”1 Cole stated openly that this idea of racism goes far beyond any mundane theory of race-based prejudice, and it frankly seems that her definition of the concept could encompass almost anything. The SAT exam, for example, “produces a racial hierarchy” because Asians usually do better than whites, whites finish one hundred or more points ahead of Blacks, Blacks often surpass Native Americans and recent Hispanic immigrants, and so forth. Is math racist?

Cole might well say so. She actually listed at least seven forms of complex racism that are to be avoided at all costs by right-thinkers. “Representational racism,” according to Cole, is the presentation of racial stereotypes in essentially any context, such as depicting people of color as disproportionately likely to be criminals or Native American Indians as skilled and brutal warriors in a film. The related concept of “ideological racism” refers to the individual belief in any racial stereotypes whatsoever, such as the idea that Latin or Italian women are fiery or passionate lovers. “Discursive racism” refers to the use of terms which a liberal or sensitive person might see as racially loaded, such as “ghetto” for a decaying neighborhood. “Institutional racism” refers to laws and other policies that disproportionately affect people of color, such as educational tracking policies that move children into specific classes on the basis of tested IQ. And so on, through “interactional racism,” “structural racism,” “systemic racism,” “subtle racism” (which I would argue should be applied to all of the above), and “racism in sum.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.