America is Not a Racist Country, They Say
If you listened to RNC speeches last night, you learned that the United States is not a racist country, but you did not learn why this is so. Anyone who follows politics or studies propaganda likely knows the claim was left hanging on purpose. If you believe the nation isn’t racist or not racist, you can find plenty of facts and stories to back you up.*
What Racism is, and What it Isn’t
Racism used to be defined as simply the belief that one racial group is superior to another, or inferior to another. (from the 1993 Penguin Dictionary of Sociology). Believing that white people are better than black people is logically the same as believing that blacks are inferior to whites.
Some dishonest activists have tried to redefine racism, so only those with power can be racist. It is true that the less political and economic power a race has, the less discrimination they can get away with. But, racism is still just a belief in racial superiority. Discrimination is what needs power.
Is discrimination the same as racism? No. Yet, when people argue the country is or isn’t racist they can easily list behaviors that support their claim. Racism is a belief; discrimination is a behavior. You can rent to blacks while still thinking the black race is inferior. You can do business with Chinese people while thinking the race is full of liars and cheats.
Measurement is the Problem
How do actually measure racism in America then? In a fantasy world, we could encourage people to honestly answer survey questions on race. If more than half of all respondents stated their belief that whites are superior to blacks…well, that would be a pretty good indicator that the country is racist.
We’ll never have such a neat and clean indicator of how racist the country is. What we can do, is to find out how much discrimination goes on, who does it, and who they are discriminating against. YouTube probably hosts 349,000 videos of people saying racist things. This doesn’t prove anything, though the logic of that claim deserves a separate article.
So, you can’t learn useful things from YouTube videos of racist people, but you can try to measure discrimination by studying society. Here are a few ideas for how you do that:
- What percentage of people of a given race experienced racist insults in the past year? You can define “racist insult” clearly enough that we could readily agree if someone experienced a racist insult or not.
- Does a person’s name influence how often their rental application is accepted? Names associated with Asians, blacks, or whites should not have any effect. Is that true? Is someone named Tamika less likely to get the apartment than someone named Ellen, if the applications are the same?
- As with #2, getting an interview should not depend on your name. In a non-racist society being named Weijia or Robert or Natrone would be meaningless. Equally qualified applicants should have the same odds of getting an interview. Do they?
- Are “hate crimes” directed at different races in proportion to their proportion of the population. If the population is 14% black, are 14% of hate crimes directed at blacks? If whites are 64% of the population, are they victimized in about 64% of hate crimes? The percentages would never match up in real life, but I think the logic is clear.
Of course, Republicans aren’t going to offer anything related to those four points. Neither are Democrats. Republicans may, however, continue to scare us with claims that blacks will invade the suburbs, burn down our cities (with help from white Democrats), and run wild in general because the Democrats disarmed regular Americans. Watch for that imagery in upcoming RNC speeches.
Related to the measurement problem is the time problem. Do we focus on policies and attitudes today, or do we look back decades? How many decades? Sure, we were slowing in letting black people vote, but does something that was corrected over 50 years ago, really make the nation racist now? Inf we’re going to call the nation racist or not racist, we have to present evidence not stories or isolated statistics.
Dismiss Claims without Evidence
As we head into the middle of election season, it would be well to pay attention to claims politicians make about topics like racism, socialism, and crime. Are the politicians and their mouthpieces making fact-based claims? If they don’t offer supporting statistics, they are not. Instead, they are serving up empty rhetoric designed to make you scared of black people, capitalism, anarchy, and socialism.
*This is a thinking error known as ‘cherry-picking.’
