Someone asked a question the other day about Islamophobia and why that would be counted as racism, and also discussed racism as such, so I thought it might be worth talking about it in a little more depth. I’m aware I’ve done this before, but probably not from this angle. It’s also on my mind a bit after an exchange with a White acquaintance a week or so ago which is worth revisiting.
Last week, then, some people from here went to Carlisle for a counter-demonstration to the racist protest there, including my acquaintance. I made a very common statement which I expected him to agree with, that all White people are racist. He challenged me on this and I realised I didn’t have a ready answer, so it’s worth going into more depth on this matter.
I am an extremely lucky person. I was born in the developed world in just about the mid-twentieth century CE, I’m human, White, able-bodied, my first language is English and I’m middle class. I’m privileged in most of the ways anyone can be, and it’s important to remember this because of the “let them eat cake” (yes, I know nobody said that) obliviousness this gifts me with. I’m at the top of almost every pile. I’m even from the English Home Counties. Being in such a position means that to me, many issues are abstract and have little to no effect on my quality of life. I’m out of touch in ways which may very well harm others. This might sound like self-flagellation but it isn’t. It simply means that I am as valuable and worthwhile as any other person while also having the luxury of privilege, and of course many people in other categories rightly envy my position and might want to swap if that was possible. People who are less privileged than me might find it hard to understand how someone like Oprah Winfrey or Michelle Obama lacks privilege that they might have, and they do have a point because past a certain line sheer wealth cushions one from the effects of prejudice. However, a poor working-class White man is unlikely, for example, to be transvestigated to the extent Michelle Obama has been. In case you don’t know, there are probably thousands of people who see Barack and Michelle Obama as a gay male couple and Michelle as a trans woman, partly because White ideals of femininity refer to a White ideal female body. It’s very likely that Michelle Obama is protected from potential assassins, but she has to be protected like other powerful figures, and in her case the risk is greater than it would be for someone like Bill Clinton, or for that matter a poor working-class White bloke in England. Hence White privilege, and for that matter fragility, do exist.
This bit is going to be a rehash of a previous post I’ve now lost on ethnicity. The San people, also known as the “Bushmen”, of South Africa and adjacent states, are genetically unusually diverse for a human group. Interestingly, they’re more likely to be albino than any other such group, and although people always intermarry they can be thought of mainly as the sister group to the rest of humanity. One way in which this has been expressed is that it’s easily possible for two San individuals to be as different genetically as an average Irish person is from an average Sri Lankan. There’s nothing special about those two selections incidentally. I could equally well say the average Fuegan and the average Australian Aboriginal. There is also more variation within Afrika than outside it, genetically, so if we are going to divide people into ethnicities genetically, they may as well consist of a number of Afrikan races plus a single race comprising the people of the Sahara and everyone else. This is a bit of an oversimplification though, because Central Asia also has a lot of variation compared to the rest of the planet. Speaking of Central Asia, however, there is a small group somewhere in the Himalayas, if I remember correctly, which is considerably genetically distinct from others but is never regarded as a separate ethnicity in spite of the fact that the average difference between it and other races is as big as between White people and Native Americans, for example. I’ve seen a claim that it’s the Tajiks. If it is, the Tajiks to most people are basically slightly different from Persians in a similar way to the French and English being different. But I don’t know.
Some species are more diverse than others. Cheetahs and Beluga whales are known for being particularly genetically similar within their respective species. On the other hand, there’s a species of roundworm, Caenorhabditis brenneri, whose genes are the most diverse of any known animal species, being as different as lions and tigers even though they’re in the same genus as the famous Caenorhabditis elegans and in a whole phylum of animals which are very difficult for non-experts to tell apart. Humans nowadays are very genetically homogenous because of an incident, possibly the eruption of the Mount Toba volcano seventy-four thousand years ago, which by fifty thousand years ago left fewer than a thousand humans alive outside Afrika. There are some other species similarly affected at the same time such as the other great apes, macaques, the aforementioned cheetah and tigers (which I understand to be several species so I’m not sure what that means). On the whole, species are a lot more diverse than these, so we as humans, or rather Homo sapiens, are starting out from being remarkably similar to each other compared to most other species. Other species, ourselves included, can sometimes be thought of as having subspecies. As far as we’re concerned, that’s probably what Neanderthals were compared to us. That’s not the case for us any more, and hasn’t been so for many, many millennia. I have in my life been able to identify one person who was most genetically different from myself in that she probably had significant numbers of genes from Denisovan ancestors, and so far as I was concerned she was an Indonesian woman whose ethnicity as an Indonesian was more significant to her and others than her genetic makeup, even though she would’ve been dramatically unlike nearby neighbours in that country. It just didn’t matter, and in human terms the differences were really extreme.
My point, of course, is that we’re all mongrels. We’re all mixtures genetically. Moreover, the features on which we tend to focus as White people such as eye shape, skin tone, hair texture and shape of lips are not significant and don’t mean anything in terms of other features. It would be as easy to divide people up by other genetic characteristics such as blood group, tissue type or ability to digest various different compounds in food, which would have more important implications for everyone but would show groups of people which wouldn’t mean very much at all to us. There is basically no biological significance in what White people think of races. It may be true that dark skin protects it from sunlight damage but there are other inherited traits with other benefits elsewhere. Some people might have a genetic propensity not to be able to digest a particular species of caterpillar, which could be very significant in communities where they’re regularly eaten but we don’t use that to divide people up. We do do that with gluten intolerance but we don’t usually think about that in racial terms.
Hence there is no biological basis to race, or rather, its biological basis is arbitrarily decided from a biological perspective. What there is, and this is a social phenomenon, is racialisation. White people have decided that there are separate races, including White people who are in some way the “neutral” race and therefore usually have the privilege of not being aware of their own ethnicity without that being a potential problem for them. Hence we tend to be unaware of racism. It doesn’t quite work that way because, for example, English people tend to view the Irish as somewhat different and there can be prejudice against Ashkenazic Jews and White Eastern Europeans. Groups which are racialised basically have no choice but to be aware of racism. This means that our White privilege makes us able to be oblivious and therefore ignorant of the very real phenomenon of racism.
It often makes more sense to think of racism not as something people do so much as a structural and institutional problem from which White people benefit and racialised people suffer. One way this might help White people to accept our racism is to recognise that racist is simply something we are without seeing it as something which we accuse other White people of and of which we’re innocent. Apart from anything else, whether or not we’re actively racist, the point at which we decide other White people are racist and we aren’t is the end of us working to reduce our own racism and pursue anti-racism, which as White people is more our responsibility than that of racialised groups. It isn’t really the job of Black people to educate us about how we’re racist because we’re responsible for our ignorance and they suffer from it. It’s foisted upon them, and we do it to them, however passively, and passivity is tacit compliance. And again, this might sound like a guilt trip placed on myself and other White people, but it isn’t. It’s simply the recognition that we are racist and we need to do something about it.
A related feature of Whiteness is our fragility. This is also called White defensiveness, and describes our reluctance to talk about the Atlantic slave trade, European colonialism and downplaying the seriousness of racism. Another claim is of reverse racism, i.e. that White people also face prejudice. Accusations of this based on diversity-related affirmative action were once compared to the idea that having a wheelchair ramp into a building which occupies most of the width of some steps is prejudiced against able-bodied people. There clearly does seem to be “pulling the ladder up”-style racism, as with a group of a certain ethnicity then denying fair consideration to members of other, or even the same, minority groups. The Conservative cabinet in Westminster is notorious for doing this. Some research has been done into whether reverse racism exists, and it appears that it doesn’t in this respect, in the sense that it doesn’t impair opportunities to implement such policies. The idea that racism operates equally significantly or comparably between ethnicities is related to the idea that there are clear-cut biologically-based major categories of human populations between which prejudice occurs rather than the more accurate model that there are those able to escape racialisation and those who have been racialised. One thing which does happen, though, is that there can be prejudice between ethnic minorities, which serves White supermacists well through divisiveness.
Before I get to Islamophobia, I want to talk about anti-semitism as it informs the way Islamophobia is rightly understood as a form of racism. The Jewish people as an ethnicity have at least three aspects to their identity: genetic affinity, culture and faith. Jewish people are generally understood as people whose mothers are Jewish, but many people in that category don’t identify as Jewish. There are rarely also converts to the Jewish faith, which would make them Jewish, and people who marry into the faith are kind of “Jewish-adjacent” and may or may not have Jewish children. Not all Jewish people are White, and in fact it could be argued that being Jewish entails not being White, something worth analysing. First of all, skin tone varies a lot between people who are genetically 100% Jewish, such as the Beth Israel originating in Ethiopia, the Ashkenazim, Sephardim and Mizrahim. These people are subject to racism within their communities. There are also straightforwardly Black converts to Judaism such as Sammy Davis Jr. Secondly, there is a sense in which they are non-White in a similar way to the Roma and the Irish are in England, i.e. there is plainly explicit and conscious racism against them because they’re not White Anglo-Saxon Protestants. Their skin tone in this situation is no protection against racism. Nonetheless, there may be no genetic difference at all between them and White people. Imagine two identical twins, one of whom converts to the Jewish faith. These two people would be of different ethnicities.
It doesn’t take much thought to see parallels between anti-Semitism and Islam here. Anti-semitism can be prejudice against people who are physically identical to Gentiles. These are in a small minority but they exist. Thinking back to my time in the English East Midlands, I knew at least three White English converts to Islam and a family of Albanians who to me just looked the same as White English people and were Muslims simply because Albania is an Islamic majority country. Nonetheless these people would’ve met with prejudice because of being Muslim. Many Albanians are culturally Islamic as opposed to being practicing Muslims, so they’re Muslim in the same way as Richard Dawkins is, in his own words, “culturally Christian”. Islamophobia can operate against Albanians even in their own country. Ethnic cleansing against Albanians has been called for by Albanian far-right groups, the state sponsors the promotion of Christianity over Islam and there have been attacks against women in hijabs, who have been called “terrorists”. I probably don’t need to mention what happened in the Balkans in the 1990s CE. There’s also often equation between Muslims and Arabs. Indonesia has the largest number of Muslims anywhere in the world and is not part of the Arab world. But like anti-semitism, Islamophobia is clearly racism. Besides this comparison, when you also consider the unfounded idea that racism other than these examples is based on biological differences in any significant way, then yes, Islamophobia is a form of racism. It isn’t so much co-opted in as that other forms of racism are more similar to it than often realised.
The other thing I want to stress is that racism is something which exists in White people without us needing to commit any voluntary racist acts. We’re able to operate in the world as if racism doesn’t exist, and that obliviousness is a luxury others lack and don’t owe it to us to explain, but we do owe it to them to identify how what we do is racist and what we can do to oppose racism. For instance, a job application might enable someone’s ethnicity to be identified simply through their life history and addresses, which have then been picked up by AI and used to profile a typical successful applicant, and even though the AI may be oblivious of their race, it bakes in and perpetuates racism. There are micro-aggressions, such as praising someone on their language because one assumes their first language isn’t the same as yours. That’s absolutely not intentional but it is insensitive. You might look at a photo of, say, a church website or an environmental conservation or country rambling group and only see pictures of White people without being aware of what that might imply or questioning why that might be. There are all sorts of things.
In conclusion, although there clearly is such a thing as malicious and conscious racism, the more insidious aspects of White racism that I’ve mentioned here may have a bigger impact, and this is something which disadvantages us all because we need diversity. Otherwise, we may have something like the banana plant cultivation problem: homogenous similar strains of bananas subject to being wiped out all at once by infectious diseases to which all of them respond in the same way. Monoculture is dangerous and needs to be avoided for all of us. Diversity is a strength which racism works against.
A Box Of Chocolates 