Racism

[The Intransigent Faction]

I've been having trouble with an argument against collectivism lately that:
"Racism is inherently collectivist. It judges people based on their being part of a group (race) rather than as individuals."
Just wondering how to respond to this?
All I can think of is that certain individual "freedoms" can be used to propagate racism..on the part of employers, for instance.

[Dros]

Collectivism doesn't mean judging people as a group or looking at every grouping as a collective entity. Collectivism is a way of distributing goods in a society.

[Chapter 24]

Collectivism doesn't mean judging people as a group or looking at every grouping as a collective entity. Collectivism is a way of distributing goods in a society.

EXACTLY! This type of argument in which someone uses the word "collectivism" as if it implies judging entire groups of people collectively rather than individually is a fallacy. If I remember correctly it was Ayn Rand who first stated this slanderous view of collectivism.

[Glenn Beck]

Yeah, collectivism, like so many other concepts, is a construct of liberal ideology that allows them to fulfill their project of equating all their enemies (feudalism, fundamentalism, fascism, and socialism) and defining them in definition to their fictitious doctrine of individualism. The choice between socialism and liberalism isn't a choice between freedom for the collective (whatever the hell that means) and freedom for the individual, but for freedom of the majority (to self-determination) vs. freedom of the minority (to exploit the majority).

When you examine these libertarian dogmas you will find that to them all freedom reduces to the freedom to own private property and use it as one sees fit. That is why to them even Keynesian capitalism is oppressive, because it empowers the state to execute economic policies to strengthen the capitalist system as a whole.

The idea that there is any relationship between socialism and racism mediated through "collectivism" is typical of liberalism's idealist approach to social problems. A pity for them all the proof seems to point to the opposite relationship.

[Decolonize The Left]

I've been having trouble with an argument against collectivism lately that:
"Racism is inherently collectivist. It judges people based on their being part of a group (race) rather than as individuals."
Just wondering how to respond to this?
All I can think of is that certain individual "freedoms" can be used to propagate racism..on the part of employers, for instance.

Other members have already correctly noted that this is an improper use of the concept "collectivism." They are correct in their critiques.

I will attempt to answer the other part of your question, that regarding race.
Firstly, racism does not mean that an individual is not judged as such. Quite the contrary - it is the individual that is discriminated against based upon prejudices and/or beliefs that they are 'inferior' due to the melanin count in their skin. You can see how this is entirely focused on the individual.

Secondly, arguments can be made that one was not speaking about any specific individual, rather about a whole race, but this is simply playing semantics. Because the logical consequence of "speaking about a whole race" is "speaking about a whole race of individuals."

We can see that while the reactionary person is referring to racism as an argument against collectivism, they obviously (a) do not understand collectivism, and (b) do not understand racism. Hence you must explain to them the realities of these issues and how their argument is entirely illogical.

- August

[JimmyJazz]

"Racism...judges people based on their being part of a group (race) rather than as individuals."

Here is something I wrote on another discussion board against the claim that that leftists are more "race-focused" than conservatives:



As far as I'm concerned its a economic issue and not a race issue. I don't particularly care what "race" someone is (whatever "race" means).

Right. The part in bold is a basically leftist/liberal position: that "race" is made up construct. In the past it has been a socially useful way of categorizing humans, but always a scientifically sketchy one. It's based on a phenotype (skin color) that is highly visible but is not really representative of major underlying differences in genetics. Thus, today, we should really just ditch the whole concept of "race".

And most politicos are aware that this position on race belongs mostly to the political left. That's why I think it's usually dishonesty that motivates them to accuse leftists/liberals of racism. They know that the real leftist position is not that "race" matters or even exists in objective terms, but that historically it played a massive role, however stupid and scientifically invalid this may have been. Socially, it was significant.

Yet while leftists and liberals argue that historically race has mattered hugely but today it no longer should--and prescribe many purely economic solutions to correct it--others want to forget about how much race has mattered historically, and if they are race conscious at all, they are conscious of the role that "race" plays in the present (blacks are more criminal, mexicans are lazy, blah blah). More and more, though, they're willing to be at least somewhat colorblind with regard to the present if it gives them leverage to argue that we should be colorblind about the past. Obviously, this is not a fair or acceptable trade off. So predictably, the lefties argue with it, and then are branded as "racists". :urr:

Basically, like a lot of strawman representations of the left, this line of so-called argument deliberately puts things on their head. To remember that oppression occurred along skin color lines is racist; even more racist than continuing to perpetuate the myth of "race" by our political rhetoric today.

As far as why race is important, it isn't a matter of objective reality, but of social history. Injustices were done along the lines of "race" whether it is even a scientifically real concept or not. To talk about justice for victims of the Nazie is not to say that Aryan/non-Aryan is an *objectively* significant distinction! In fact, it's sort of the opposite. If the Nazis were right about their racial theory, or if the slaveowners were about theirs, then justice *wouldn't be* as strongly required. It is precisely because they were both wrong that they were both such gross injustices.

Here's something else I wrote after getting in some heated disagreements over racism:


I don't want to derail the Black Hole thread onto big race issues any more than I already have, but the discussion in there did get me thinking.

Almost always, heated discussions about race, like the one that happened in certain parts of that thread, happen between two people who have totally different ideas about what "racism" refers to. On the one side, people think racism refers to bias in the daily operation of our society, the legal system, hiring processes, etc. For the other side, it means historical oppression and the lingering effects of that oppression--the fact that blacks have never, as a group, come even moderately close to catching up to whites in terms of money, life expectancy, or any other metric of a good life. In the discussion I had in the Black Hole thread, I was definitely coming at it from the latter perspective.

I don't really think that there is rampant racism in the legal system and in hiring processes. I don't think that most people in our society secretly hate the color black. Some of all of this stuff probably does take place, but not nearly enough to create the disparities that actually exist between blacks and whites. The thing is, there doesn't need to be ongoing discrimination to create disparity--the disparity is already there, and it is the result of a history of truly brutal racism. If you read even a little bit on the slave trade beyond the grade school knowledge we all have of it, you can't help but realize this. How many people know that American slavery was just a tiny part of the slavery of the period? That tens of millions of slaves were shipped to every corner of the New World (about 12 million actually arrived alive), continuously, for hundreds of years? And on the flip side of the coin, that as recently as 1943 there were riots by white shipyard workers in Alabama over a *rumor* that a single black man was going to be promoted to work in their area of the shipyard?

To the extent that white people look down on blacks, it's not a result of hatred for the color brown, its because people of on-average higher social status always look down on people of on-average lower social status, regardless of color. Sure, some people may want blacks to stay in their place, but for the most part just Southern hicks. Most people do really wish blacks could be equal...but in the meantime, goddam, they really can be dipshits sometimes.

The person who thinks of race in terms of daily discrimination assumes that an anti-racist is advocating for more big brother-type monitoring over everybody to try and sniff out even a hint of anti-black discrimination. In reality, what the other person is usually thinking about is the fact that blacks have never been equal, and will never be equal without affirmative action being taken to catch them up. They can work real hard and do everything Bill Cosby says; meanwhile, whites are working real hard and following everything their self-help gurus (Jack Welch or whoever the fuck) says. The gap is not going to close itself.

You know what? Affirmative action as practiced is not just in my opinion. Poor white people can lose jobs to to a racial quota, and rich black people can benefit from one. My grandmother claims that when she was a dirt-poor single mother of three, she didn't get the high-paying postal job she desperately needed because of a racial quota system. Whether she's right or not I don't know, but by the nature of a racial quota it is something that could happen. Which is not only unjust in my opinion, but it's unjust in most people's opinion, so whether I personally like it or not doesn't matter, because it isn't politically feasible on the level that would be required to actually close the racial gap. The only good solution in my opinion is to reduce economic inequality in general: if there are more poor blacks than poor whites (in proportional terms there are), then fixing economic inequality will also close the racial gap.

But the main point I'm making is that few people who feel strongly about racism got that way by being being *so outraged* :whyyou: at stories of a white cop pulling over a black driver or a white shop owner passing over a black applicant or a white judge giving a black guy fewer chances. Daily discrimination is small fries. The real issue, for almost all people on that side of any racial debate, is the historical oppression whose effects have never, for one second of our history, been wiped away or even close to wiped away. Iow, the slate has not been wiped clean.

I do not actually think affirmative action is totally "unjust", as I said in that post, although I do think it's a matter of taking from poor whites to give to poor blacks, and therefore is a wrong solution. I believe that any race-based solution is a bad idea, since you can't quantify in dollars the amount of damage done by slavery and apartheid. The only genuine solution, imo, is a purely economic one--one that closes the gap between everybody, and in the course of doing so, closes the gap between the races.

[The Intransigent Faction]

Thanks for that.
Knowing about this misconception about collectivism will really be helpful as far as getting somewhere in a discussion about "individualism".
I would have to agree whole-heartedly that an economic solution is what is needed to close the gap.