In part one of this essay, which hopes to explain how the question “Am I racist?” is, largely speaking, an unnecessary one, I observed that those people who believe in racial inferiority / superiority already acknowledge their own racism and would not therefore have a need to ask the question — though they may not take kindly to the designation itself, which has become fraught over time, given the way “race” has been used culturally and historically, mostly without the benefit of scientific rigor. The scientific idea that there are quantitative group differences in things like average cognition scores between races, for instance — hereditary genetics — differs from “racial” studies in that the conclusions it draws don’t adhere to “racial” designations in their broad and largely misleading popular iterations. “Race” as a category is a relatively recent construction, after all, and the broad designations we use to label the “races” are undercut by more refined and specific genetic data, in which “racial” data is subdivided and separated.
Such data, which problematizes traditional racial categorization, is culled from hereditary traits gathered through, among other things, geographical sampling. So while the hereditary geneticist will certainly argue that “racial” traits, as commonly understood, may play a role in the raw data under investigation, they will (most of them) also readily acknowledge that things like culture, government, inbreeding or other reproductive habits, and patterns of historical movement within the group, all contribute in various ways to understanding the data in its more rigorous analyses. This explains, e.g., how data evinces variation in overall IQ between, say, Haitians and Dominicans, even though the two groups share the same basic geographical space, though not the same culture, the same form of government, or the same historical patterns of immigration and settlement. Variance within “racial” groups over geographical distance, then, makes the traditional idea of race overly vague and scientifically dubious.
— and that’s only if you accept that IQ is a neutral category of measure, which many scientists emphatically do not. Still.
That said, the racialist — be he a lay person or certain of the more dogmatic hereditary geneticists — will readily acknowledge a difference between the races, and so will acknowledge, if only tacitly, that racialism is in effect “racism” as it is ordinarily defined, even if the racialist does not believe that members of different races should be treated differently simply because they have a lower mean score on tests of cognition. It is enough, per definition, to believe in the inferiority of certain races; it is not necessary to act on that belief to be racist. And this is because racism itself is perspectival. It is a mental frame of reference that some people have and others do not.
It follows, then, that those who do not share with the racialists the idea that certain “races” are inferior are themselves not racist. In fact, they cannot be. Because if racism is a belief, and you don’t share the belief, you are not and cannot be racist unless and until you adopt the perspective and hold the belief.
This all seems simple enough. So simple, in fact, that academics and race theorists, in order to justify the efforts they put into the examination of racial grievance, look to suss out racism where very little actually exists. To do so, these neo-racialists have been forced to attempt a re-framing of what constitutes racism, turning it into a deterministic and unchangeable power dynamic — a critique for which obvious and rank sophistry I offer in part one of this essay.
Still, if you recall, I ended my previous column with a scene in which an elderly black man sitting on a park bench encounters a white kid shouting something as he hurries his way within earshot: “Hey, boy! Hey, boy! Here, boy!”
And it’s here I’d like to revisit an excerpt from The National Museum of African American History and Culture’s explanation of “whiteness”:
Whiteness (and its accepted normality) […] exist as everyday microaggressions toward people of color. Acts of microaggressions include verbal, nonverbal, and environmental slights, snubs or insults toward nonwhites. Whether intentional or not, these attitudes communicate hostile, derogatory, or harmful messages
The key phrase here, which some of you may have already seized upon, is the qualifier “whether intentional or not,” which seeks to position unintended “verbal, nonverbal, and environmental slights, snubs or insults toward nonwhites” as “hostile, derogatory, or harmful.”
To justify such an indictment of whiteness, one has to accept — on faith — the idea that racism, as a function of perspective and a belief, can exist outside of one’s own recognition that he holds such a belief, and therefore operates from such a perspective. That is, the “racism” must come from somewhere other than the consciousness of the “racist” to allow that he’s still really quite racist despite having no conscious knowledge of his racism.
To contemporary race theorists, the idea of “implicit bias” accounts for this malign posture. Whites, it turns out, are all racist — and they are all racist precisely because they do not control their racist state of being. Instead, it is the “system” into which they are born that, gazing upon their white skin, immediately imprints upon them the stain of racism. Implicit bias, we’re told, is an offshoot of such systemic determinism. It is the “unconscious” set of biases that drives a supposed “preference for (or aversion to) a person or group of people.”
Thus, whites could be consciously racist; but no matter. Because whether they intend to be racist or not, they are nevertheless unconsciously racist, because the system they exist in is itself racist, and it is the system that defines and inscribes their whiteness.
If this all seems like a rather silly, self-serving circular argument, that’s because it is. Whiteness here is defined by its systemic tether to racism; and racism, in turn, is defined by its systemic tether to whiteness. The distinction between consciousness or unconsciousness is used to account for a rejection of the premise that whiteness, by those who don’t believe in the inferiority of certain races but who also happen to be white, is still somehow dispositive of racism. It’s not that you aren’t racist, whitey. It’s that you just didn’t realize you were racist. And this “racism” you’re unaware of is made manifest in other beliefs or preferences you may have. As the Perception Institute explains, “a fairly commonplace example of [implicit bias] is seen in studies that show that white people will frequently associate criminality with black people without even realizing they’re doing it.”
That this example of “implicit bias” can be explained by things as disparate as media portrayals of crime one has encountered and the frequency with which they encounter them, or crime statistics one has pored over, or any immediate or secondary experiences with crime one has had personally, is unmentioned here. And that’s because such examples are explicit reasons for holding biases. Whether the bias is logical or illogical is immaterial; the point is, the bias itself is not “implicit” — not the function of some systemic determinism based around “whiteness” — but rather a discriminatory (in the positive sense) perspective arrived at through conscious engagement with the world as it exists.
Still, you might argue, whether the reasons for the bias were derived from explicit stimuli, the bias itself is “unconscious” — and thus, “implicit” — in the sense that you react in a biased way without recourse to conscious consideration of any of the “evidence” you’d mentally accrued over time. That is, you are reacting on a visceral level, not an intellectual one, on an “unconscious” level, not a conscious one.
To which it is reasonable to reply that both reactions, “conscious” or “unconscious” — in that they come from the same person, the same agency — are part of the same overall consciousness. Meaning, the distinction itself is entirely artificial. That you don’t cite your mental evidence in each moment of perception and engagement is not somehow proof that you are acting without it — that your “bias” is “implicit” simply because you haven’t raised to the point of consciousness, in each and every instance of decision making, that which your mind has already mentally digested and subsumed.
“Whiteness” hasn’t led you to favor one person or group over another. A whole host of lived experience has — including, among those experiences, the potential for your having been seeded with overtly racist ideas. Like the idea that blacks are inferior mentally. Or that “whiteness” itself portends racism.
But back to our city park and the elderly black man sitting on the bench. This scenario was presented to me many years ago by a “conservative” in defense of the idea that racism exists even when it is accidental and unintended. That is, racism happens when someone feels it has happened — and this is true irrespective of the intent of the person who is said to have engendered the racist encounter, and irrespective of whether the source of that racism is a function of the interpretive prerogative — and linguistic whim — of the “victim” himself. And this is true so long as the claim is deemed plausible, presumably by the larger community, who it is argued gets to decide on both the fact of the offense and its relative seriousness, with proper punishment often thereafter recommended. In law, this move separates Textualism from Originalism, though in the area of legal hermeneutics, special circumstances require we allow textualism some leeway, though not for the reasons self-styled textualists often believe.
In the example under review here, the elderly black man sitting on the bench notices the nearby white kid as the kid moves ever closer toward him. Perhaps he sees the white youth shouting and grows wary of him; after all, he has life experience that convinces him to be on guard. He is also alone and older. His concern for his safety is understandable.
The white teen is yelling “Hey, boy! Hey, boy! Here, boy!” — and the elderly black man, product of a past that in his living memory includes racial segregation and overt racist language aimed at people who look like him, hears the cries of “boy” and, by force of habit, believes that the white youth has shouted a racial epithet at him.
Has he, though? And does it even matter any more?
These are the questions my “conservative” interlocutor raised, concluding that racism had indeed occurred — an elderly black man who’d lived through segregation and overt racism was confronted by a signifier — “boy” — that in other instances were aimed at diminishing him as a man, so from his perspective, he has every right to believe the white kid was attacking him.
And yet the white youth, it turns out, was merely calling for a lost dog. “Boy” wasn’t aimed at the elderly black man. “Boy” as an epithet toward black men was the product of a past the white kid hasn’t lived through and is largely still ignorant of.
So we’ve reached the point of friction. The elderly black man heard a racial epithet. The white kid uttered a sign whose referent was his dog. The elderly black man reacted to a signifier — the sound form “boy” — and added to it a referent that turned it into a racial epithet. The white kid signified — supplied the signifier he’d already attached to a referent, to form a sign. The white kid intended. He meant. And what he meant was “boy” = “my dog.” So now what?
To some, although “boy” in this instance was never meant to address the elderly black man, the very fact that the man encountered the utterance, and it triggered in him the belief that he was racially attacked, is enough for “reasonable people” to conclude that the white kid should have been more careful with his words — the idea being that “boy” can at once mean “young male,” “my specific dog,” and “a diminution of black manhood,” and that the boy was responsible for considering how listeners might draw from each of these potential meanings at the moment of his utterance.
Thus, he was not intentionally racist, but his “words” could “reasonably” appear racist to the elderly black gentlemen, given the history of cultural and conventional signification with respect to the signifier “boy.”
In essence, the argument is this: whatever “boy” has meant, in the history of ever, is part of its meaning here, regardless of how the white kid himself intended it.
— which fits in quite nicely with the idea promulgated by those at The National Museum of African American History and Culture, who likewise believe that “acts of microaggressions include verbal, nonverbal, and environmental slights, snubs or insults toward nonwhites” that, “whether intentional or not, […] communicate hostile, derogatory, or harmful messages.” That is, they are racist, born of whiteness, and intent is irrelevant.
But let’s take a step back. Why would we ever concede that, simply because “boy” has at some moments in history, in some contexts, been used to diminish black men, its usage in every other context from now on must account for that occasional prior signification? That is, why would we ever allow that what we mean when we signify is determined — at least in part — by how someone else chooses to select from the whole history of discourse, then attribute to us the referent that best suits his purposes?
In this instance, the elderly black man took “boy” to be a racial epithet because he attached to the signifier “boy” the referent “less than a man, with respect to black men.” That’s the sign he created.
When we interpret, what we aim to do is decode the signs offered us by those with whom we’re engaging. All sort of considerations account for how we do this — context, conventional usage, inter-textuality, intra-textuality, other linguistic cues that signal irony, etc. — but in the end, to say that what we’re doing is “interpreting” is to agree that our goal is to best try to decode the message presented us, which is a collection of signs intended by some agency. In this case, the sign was offered by the white kid. The elderly black man decoded that sign incorrectly. Whether he did so because he missed certain cues, or misread the context, explains how he might have done so. But simply because it is plausible that missed cues or a misreading of the context — or even carelessness by the white kid in signaling his meaning — led the black gentleman to conclude as he did, doesn’t mean his interpretation is also correct. The fact is, he still concluded wrongly.
There was no “racism” here, then, unintentional or otherwise. There was only a miscommunication. And such things are not uncommon. To quote a 20th century sage, “screws fall out all the time. The world’s an imperfect place.”
The linguistic ground even for conceiving of unintended racism relies on two dubious claims: first, that the totality of one’s consciousness can be divided into two separate spheres, each unknown to the other — the conscious and the unconscious (or sometimes, subconscious) — and that one half of this divide harbors attitudes and beliefs alien to the other half. And second, that something unintended, converted into language, can be fairly attributed to the same agency — the same person with the same consciousness — that never meant what it is that is being attributed to him. This second, which sadly too many putative “conservatives” have adopted — and which has essentially become institutionalized as part of our epistemic architecture — is the very mechanism by which the left is able to claim that, for instance, the Constitution is a “living document” whose meaning evolves along withe the language.
This is not only incoherent, it is profoundly dangerous. He who controls the interpretation controls the meaning. And when we allow that meaning is determined by the most motivated and vocal interpretive community and not by the signifying agency whose meaning can sometimes be unclear or misunderstood, we have granted the collective control over individual agency by granting jurisdiction over meaning to those tasked with decoding, but who instead choose to rewrite, laying claim to the new text of their own creation, which they’ll then either celebrate as a freedom from authorial control, or, when it suits them, return to the author in the form of an indictment of his text, just as happened here with the white kid who simply called for his dog but wound up a reluctant, unintentional racist.
Ceding the ground for meaning to interpretive communities as a nod toward “democratizing the text” is the biggest mistake classical liberals ever made. The process of meaning is personal, and the meaning made is fixed. It is authoritarian.
There’s a reason our Founders and Framers rejected the easy grace of straight “democracy”; mobs are not always beneficent. And when meaning is reduced to who most loudly proclaims it, the grounds for all of Western civilization have been reduced to nothing. All is power and power is all.
This is the advent of leftism at its core.
Reject it. Before it’s too late.
*****
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This puts me in mind of how the word ‘gay’ was transmogrified during my lifetime