With good reason, few things are more affronting to humans, universally, than being misjudged by their appearance, by some superficial feature they know can only ever reveal a fraction of their inner selves, if at all.
The word for this misjudgement is “racism” – the irrational (or unintelligent) belief that a large nose, a pallid complexion, straight hair, a darker skin, an eye shape really does express an essential fixed quality that is typical of all who have the same feature or combination of them, and is magically conveyed from generation to generation as a matter of immutable physiological destiny.
Invariably, those who cleave to the irrationality of racism imagine, in addition, that the qualities they are content to believe are physiologically inherent in themselves confer a rank that places them above – never below – other humans who only look different.
Hence, no doubt, the statement in Garth Zietsman’s Daily Friend piece of 6 February, Why is racism bad? that “of all social behaviours various facets of racism have among the highest associations with being measurably unintelligent”.
Yet Zietsman’s piece has sparked much discussion – and no small measure of disquiet – within the broader Daily Friend community for going on to say that “there are situations where racism is not bad” (in the sense of being more or less sensible).
While Zietsman asserts that “(f)orms of prejudice, or hate, are definitely bad when they inflict, or advocate inflicting, physical harm to a person who poses no threat to you”, he adds that while “(p)eople have a right to dignity in the sense of the consideration due to fellow human beings … even with consideration, denying an unflattering truth is a bad idea – particularly if the truth exposes real threats to others”.
The entire difficulty of the argument is contained in the idea of “unflattering truth”, since it immediately raises the difficulty of authority. Who says? On what grounds?
Zietsman offers, as an example, the statistical evidence that “young men are seven times as likely to be violent than women”, arguing: “Hiding that fact because it ‘undermines a man’s dignity’ is a bad idea because it poses a risk to women. In terms of morality and rights, a woman’s safety trumps a man’s hurt feelings.”
“Element of truth”
He writes: “Stereotypes usually reflect a statistical reality. They contain an element of truth.”
And this, with good reason, is where liberals pause to reflect.
Race is not, after all, anything like sex since it is not physiologically definable within the discrete boundaries that mark the difference between men and women. There is no gene for race, for example, but merely a sum of variations on a spectrum of humanness; race is not a biological category.
Still, can we look at race in a similar way to sex?
Zietsman asks: “What if the racist mistakenly thinks there is an average racial difference on a matter of importance to him? Is it morally bad to be wrong when it influences the outcome for the target of the racism? Should it be illegal?” (My emphasis.)
“I do not think so,” he goes on. “Firstly, is it impossible to be unerringly correct on statistical matters that are not widely publicised? Secondly, the authorities are frequently wrong themselves about the facts even when there are research findings available.”
Zietsman complains: “One cannot research whether racial differences are genetic because authorities have preordained that they must be socially determined.” Thus, “(a)t the end of the day, we must rely on our own thinking for every choice”.
The essence of the three quoted paragraphs above is perhaps critically qualified by that italicised word, “mistakenly”.
Racial predisposition to violence
We could say, for instance, that what has been called the worst-case paradigm of genocide, the Holocaust, along with the tens of millions killed elsewhere in the rest of the Northern Hemisphere in the 20th century alone (never mind the human costs of the doleful colonial episodes of the pre- and post-Columbus epoch), suggest that lighter-skinned people, or people with a narrower shape of eye or this or that kind of nose are to be especially feared for seeming to have some racial predisposition to violence and terror. For all its seeming statistical strength, this would surely be a mistaken line of inquiry.
Zietsman suggests, however: “Researchers should investigate whether differences in racial outcomes or unflattering traits are genetically determined. If the research shows these hypotheses to be false, we will have strong anti-racist ammunition. Without knowing the answer there is always the suspicion that the racist is right.
“If the hypothesis proves true, then we can control for that to find environmental solutions that do actually help. If the racist is right, and we declined to check, we have a slew of unhelpful, wasteful and harmful policies in play. Likewise, if there are large racial differences in harmful behaviour it is fair and important that the victims know about the risks. If a racial group is falling behind at school, we cannot deal with it if society bans noticing.”
Well, does society really “ban noticing”, and do we not already have “strong anti-racist ammunition” in volumes of scientific inquiry? Of course, it depends a little on what is meant by “noticing”, but one thing we do know is that scientists have spent vast time and energy on looking at what “human” means, and have concluded that “race” is only a social construct with no biological underpinning.
In which case, do we really need to investigate the possibility of racial proclivities of any kind when we already know as much as we need to about more or less indivisible human proclivities? (And is not every steadily modernising [open, non-authoritarian] society engaged in trying to identify “environmental solutions that do actually help”?)
Finally, Zietsman considers circumstances in which people “prefer people like themselves”, or do “not want cross-racial interaction in any other sphere, in business or neighbourhood, say”, wondering if these are automatically bad, and concluding: “In sum, racism can be bad, neutral and even good. It is bad when it leads to actual harm or fails to invoke real consideration for the victim as an individual. It is not bad when it identifies racial differences that are associated with harm to the racist.”
Not automatically racist
Marrying someone who looks like you is not automatically racist, of course, and nor is preferring company that excludes white people, for example. However, determining by statute – along the lines of apartheid, for example, or Nazi Germany – that excluding white people from a neighbourhood or a job in a corporation on the grounds of their not being acceptably similar would be.
At the very least, racism “fails to invoke real consideration for the victim as an individual” (and people who are judged by their appearance rather than their substance are automatically victims of an invariably costly misjudgement), which is why racism is always bad.
Quite clearly, the difficulty lies in what constitutes “racial differences” (which science tells us are always socially, not biologically, determined), and who decides. If it is the racist who decides, it must be unreliable, for the racist is, by definition, undiscerning, and necessarily self-regarding in assessing what she perceives to be personal risk.
In identifying a supposed racial difference that appears to be associated with the potential for harm to the racist, the racist may well believe her racism is not bad because she has saved herself from potential harm.
One imagines, for example, a Khayelitsha-born post-doctoral student in applied mathematics stepping warily in rural Limpopo, and doing so with considerable intelligence and self-regard in view of the fate of Maria Makgato, 45, and Lucia Ndlovu, 34, who were thought to have been looking for food on the farm of Zachariah Olivier near Kotishing village in August 2024 when they were shot, their bodies later being fed to pigs.
And should she, travelling alone, encounter a couple of young white farmers in khaki shorts and veldskoens, her apprehension would be entirely respectable and possibly even wise. But, even if they were unsmiling and unwelcoming, and went on to threaten her with hunting rifles and the prospect of being fed to pigs, were she to think to herself that these two brutes represented universal “whiteness” and that all white-skinned people were just like them, her racism would still be “bad” (unfounded, irrational, unintelligent and fundamentally harmful).
Needless to say, the virtue of subjecting all white farmers to a study designed to determine whether this or that seeming rural pathology had a racial dimension that may justify corrective intervention would be dubious at best, very likely wasteful, and without doubt racist.
A little more at ease
Or am I quite wrong? Might there in truth be some virtue in it? Might black South Africans feel a little more at ease in their world were they to be reassured that the impulses that led to the grisly fate of Makgato and Ndlovu were established by research to be racial ones after all, and that sensible corrective interventions could thus be properly targeted to address the deficiency in our midst?
Or would we ultimately discover that the deficiency was always in the mind of the racist mistaking human behaviour for the conduct that she believed was typical of one or another portion of humanity on the grounds that, in her eyes, it was visibly – by definition, superficially – distinctive?
Which brings me to the point of this piece – and, indeed, the point of the Daily Friend itself, and, in particular, of its publishing Garth Zietsman’s article earlier this month.
Liberalism – alone, it often seems – steels itself to live up to the exacting demands of epistemic humility, of being willing to consider and reconsider every question under the sun, and being determined to find no reason whatever to shy away from the most difficult topics, and every reason to address those in particular.
An open society in which citizens enjoy liberty as individuals and equality before the law is not some hoped-for objective, an end, a plateau of contentment from which we might look back with satisfaction on whatever means it took to reach it, but a thing that must be made and remade every day, and every moment, a perfect case of means and ends being indivisible.
At the very least, if we want an open society, we must speak our minds openly, too, and show that we can test our fundamental convictions. The very same is essential if we want a society free of the casual racist assumptions that contaminate civilisation. It should never be enough to declare them invalid without examining why.
[Image: Nicolas Ladino Silva on Unsplash]
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