In the British magazine
spiked, sociology professor Frank Furedi looks at how our
cultural
concept of racism has shifted. Once understood as something
ideological and systemic, racism is now frequently used to describe
any act or speech that reveals potential prejudice or could cause
offense.
Furedi explains that in the lead-up to the
recent EU elections, there seemed to be “a new consensus,
especially in the media, which says the problem of racism is far
greater today than it was in the past.” You’d be hard-pressed to
find many Americans in agreement about the relative problem of
racism today, but Furedi’s piece still has applicable insights for
those of us west of the eurozone.
Anyone attune to pop culture, current events and social media
knows how frequently charges of racism are thrown about and how
fluid the concept has become. “Racism” on Twitter today can merely
mean not knowing how to properly signal that one isn’t racist (that
there’s a privelege inherent in knowing to check one’s privelege
seems lost on many).
There are certainly omnipresent examples of systemic and
individual racism in 21st century America. But the kind of causes
and comments that most rally Internet social justice warriors tend
to have little relation to these, and the concept of racism they
espouse has strayed far from context or historical meaning. From
Feredi:
We should recall that until the outbreak of the Second World
War, racial thinking was rarely questioned in any part of the
world. Even in academic circles, critics of racism were very much
in a minority in the 1930s. Back then, the term ‘racist’ was used
neutrally and sometimes even positively in Western societies. It
was only in the 1930s that the word ‘racism’ started to acquire
negative connotations. It was in that decade that the use of the
word racism in a derogatory way was first recorded in the English
language. But even then, the idea of racial equality had few
defenders–including within the intellectual community.
Since the 1930s, racism, with its oppressive claim that some
people are superior to other, ‘subhuman’ people, has been
systematically discredited. The idealisation of the racial
superiority of whites and the dehumanisation of people from Africa
and Asia has been culturally marginalised. Even the most extreme
xenophobic cults and parties now find it difficult explicitly to
use the language of racial ideology. The notion of racial
superiority is conspicuous by its absence in public discussion in
the twenty-first century.[…] Historically, racism expressed the worldview of the
powerful. A sense of superiority, be it biological, moral or
cultural, was integral to the outlook of the elites that dominated
Western societies. Today, those with economic, political and
cultural power rarely express themselves through the narrative of
race. The powerful rarely express open hostility or crude prejudice
towards other groups of people. On the contrary, today it tends to
be those who feel they have been left behind, who believe they have
been socially and culturally marginalised by mainstream society,
who express some kind of racist thinking.
Racism, for the record, is defined as a “doctrine
that inherent differences among the various human races determine
cultural or individual achievement; a policy, system of government,
etc., based on fostering such a doctrine; or hatred or intolerance
of other races.” It’s an entire belief system, a pattern of
conscious thoughts and actions. It’s not an offhandedly offensive
remark or insufficient sensitivity to how your views may be
culturally or racially biased.
But the redefining of racism has been long-coming, according to
Feredi:
Since the early 1980s, racism has been subtly redefined as a
psychological problem. The redefinition of racism from an act of
conscious oppression to an unwitting problem of the mind was
boosted by the former British High Court judge, Sir William
Macpherson, in his 1999 report into the Metropolitan Police’s
handling of the murder of a black London teenager, Stephen
Lawrence. The
Macpherson report defined institutional racism as
something that ‘can be seen or detected in processes, attitudes and
behaviour which amount to discrimination through unwitting
prejudice, ignorance, thoughtlessness and racial stereotyping which
disadvantage minority ethnic people’. The key word here is
‘unwitting’–this depicts racism as an unconscious response driven
by unspecific emotions. The idea that people can be racists
unwittingly means that literally anyone can be a racist–whether
they know it or not.… The complexity of the psychological motivation behind
so-called unwitting racism was discussed by Macpherson in the
following terms: ‘A racist incident is any incident which is
perceived to be racist by the victim or any other person.’ In
making individual subjective experience the foundation stone of
accusations of racism, Macpherson ensured that ‘unwitting racism’
would be a problem that would expand exponentially as time went
by.
Read the whole thing
here.
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