Redefining Racism

So there’s been a lot of news stories of late that seem to hit at racism issues. The Virginia Governor forgot to mention that slavery was a major factor in the Confederacy. The Texas Board of Education renamed the 18th century slave trade shipping routes to the “Atlantic triangular trade.” Arizona decided that it should be illegal to teach ethnic studies in public schools. And its gotten me thinking about the history of racism since the civil rights movements of the 60s.

And what I’ve been struck by is that, yes, these are all forms of racism. Trying to forget about slavery is insulting to those for whom it’s still an open wound. Banning classes designed to teach the history and culture of a certain people is belittling that culture.

And I think there’s still some widespread forms of racism out there.

But…

But, it’s not the same form of racism as pre-1960. In my grandparents’ era, racism meant that simply because you were black you were inferior. The color of your skin determined your innate ability to accomplish normal life tasks.

And I don’t really think that’s what you see with racism in the 21st century. The bias against Muslims that you see isn’t really that they’re inferior. Just different. And that’s really the same with the whole Arizona situation. Nobody seems to be saying that illegal immigrants are incapable of performing in society. It’s just that they don’t speak English.

Racial profiling isn’t that another race is unable to drive well or is more prone since birth to behave in a certain way. It’s that race is a pretty good indicator of one’s culture. And the profiler then assumes that a culture will behave in a certain way.

Take Dan Fanelli’s campaign ad:

His argument is not that those with brown skin are inclined to blow up planes. It’s that those with brown skin are more likely to belong to a radical Islamic group that wants to blow up planes. Skin color is an indicator of culture.

To be completely clear, claiming that brown skinned males are likely terrorists is an argument that forgets there are tens of millions of brown skinned males currently in the U.S. who are not terrorists. Tens of millions dwarfs the few dozen (high estimate) of brown skinned males in the U.S. who are potential terrorists.

Sum all these up and it kind of reminds me of SNL’s Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer‘s famous phrase “Your world frightens and confuses me” – revise it to “Your culture frightens and confuses me” and I think you can summarize well how racism works in the 21st century.

Is this “racism”? Or “tribalism”?

So, if racism today is really more of racial profiling, is it really the same as racism was in 1959?  I don’t think so. Instead, it hits me more as what social anthropologists call “tribalism“:

the possession of a strong cultural or ethnic identity that separates oneself as a member of one group from the members of another. This phenomenon is related to the concept of tribal society in that it is a precondition for members of a tribe to possess a strong feeling of identity for a true tribal society to form.

Tribalism has long been used to understand intra-African politics (see here, here, and here). And there’s a lot of chatter about it being used to explain current U.S. politics.

But I think it can be extended to help us understand what we term “racism” in much of our political conversations.

Humans are social creatures. A long time ago we learned that if we bonded with those who looked like us and lived with us, we had a better chance of killing the gazelle and gathering enough roots to make it through the winter. And, if we bonded together to fight the clan over in the cave across the way, we’d have a chance for more gazelles and roots. Hence, we have an evolutionary urge to dislike those who don’t look like us. (plus, appearance is also a good indicator of genetic similarity – helping those who look like us helps propagate our genes)

That prejudice against those who don’t look like us can be called racism. But it’s not really the same kind of racism where Negroes were seen as inherently inferior humans who were only able to perform menial tasks.

It’s just that race indicates genetic variation.

Racism is dead?

So, when you hear of political candidates saying that we need to profile brown skinned males or when you hear of a state banning the study of a particular ethnicity, you’re really hearing a different kind of racism. Neither of those groups are inferior to the speaker’s race. They’re just, well, different.

That is, their race is used to indicate their tribe. And since they’re from a different tribe, they’re to be disliked and pushed out.

The racism of the 1950s may very well be dead. Or, well, close. White supremacists are still out there. They’re just usually shunned by the rest of society.

And if there’s any comfort to be taken from the actions of Virginia’s Governor or the Texas School Board, it’s that their actions were designed to “forget” the ugly, racist past of Southern Conservative culture. They weren’t glorifying slavery (racism) — they were hoping we could all forget it ever happened. Not a bad bit of progress for 50 years, no?

Of course, I could just be blind to the racism that’s out therIf this piece is all washed up, let me know. Really.