Racism – the way of rationality

This clip is (hopefully) not very interesting for you non-speakers of Danish. Around 1.20, popular TV hostess Line Baun Danielsen (I think, isn’t it?), confronted with a photo of a Caribbean gentleman in a boat, blurts out: “Is it a monkey/ape?” A clear-cut fail at political correctness. Not much more than that, though, if you ask me.

Here’s a question:
What is it that makes political correctness seem so hypocritical?

If I’m not much mistaken, political correctness attempts to adress prejudice. It’s not politically correct to express prejudice concerning any group of people — especially not if the group (not) in question is defined by race, religion, gender, physical or mental capacities, or sexual orientation.

And of course we should do what we can to protect people from opposition, aggression, or limitation of opportunities due to such prejudice.

The trouble is that many of us can’t stop at not treating others in a prejudiced manner. We very quickly move on to the next stage, namely that of pretending not to harbour any prejudice at all — not even at a purely mental or emotional level. It becomes respectable, and indeed crucial for social acceptability, to be politically correct through and through, and, consequently, it would be catastrophic to ever be caught unawares and accidentally have one’s latent racism (for example) exposed in some sort of Freudian slip.

I think we’d do well to remember that politically uncorrect prejudice is often not without a rational basis. Or, to put it more bluntly, and in all political uncorrectness: racism, for instance, is a rational attitude. In many contexts, racial prejudice is an intuitive internalisation of statistic realities concerning race. So, as an example, racial prejudice might prompt me to avoid a group of young somali men in a Copenhagen street late at night — perhaps even if this would mean passing close by an equally large group of men with their ethnic roots in Denmark. Why? Because I, as well as the statistics, know that I am more likely to be assaulted by somebody whose ethnic roots are not in Denmark. This is racial prejudice. Most of us have it, we have it for a reason, and if we act upon it, it will (statistically speaking) protect us from unpleasant experiences. Racism is rational.

Does this mean that racism is also right? If rationality is an ethical stamp of approval, then the answer is yes.

Personally, I believe that racism and racial prejudice are wrong, even if they are factually accurate. The fundamental problem problem about prejudice is not whether or not it fits the facts of the world — i.e. the way people are. It often does, and too much time is spent running from the disillusionment of realising this. The problem, rather, is that whenever a particular person is treated according to prejudice against, for instance, the race to which he belongs, he is denied status as a free and responsible agent. In other words, if I treat someone from an arabic country according to my preconceptions concerning arabs in general (God knows I have them), I effectively deny him the option of acting in a different way than the one stipulated by my prejudiced viewpoint. For example, it is difficult to not assault someone in the street, if you are never effectively given the choice, because they assume that you are going to assault them and thus never come near you. It is also diffucult to prove the statistics wrong by not stealing from an employer who chooses, on account of statistics, not to employ you. At a more general level, the motivation is not strong to behave well towards someone who never believes in one’s capacity to do so.

The bottom line is that fighting racism means acting against one’s better judgment and assuming, in every particular case, that the statistics do not apply in this particular case. It means trusting someone who is statistically unworthy of trust. When statistics and personal experience combine to form one big slap on the cheek, we are still called to turn the other cheek. At bottom level, it means not treating human persons like dice which, if rolled a large enough number of times, will yield a predictable, even predetermined, outcome — or, in other words, it means treating persons as human.

(Of course, aspiring to this true anti-racist behaviour also has to imply training ourselves in an anti-racist mindset, but, again, at the level of political correctness, this type of training seems to take place at a petty level, far from the confrontations where it becomes relevant — and also at the impossible level of bidding the mind to create a non-racist attitude out of nothing. The question is whether non-racist thinking mustn’t simply come as an effect of the hard work of non-racist action).

In this case, I don’t know what to say:

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