Lecture 22 Racism II: Kwame Anthony Appiah

Lecture 22 Racism and Racialism:

Kwame Anthony Appiah

22.1 Introduction

Kwame Anthony Appiah’s essay in the Rachels anthology, “Racisms,” is a good example of the Principle of Charity. The principle is to formulate the strongest version of your opponent’s argument so that you can attack the best version of it. If you deliberately use a weak version of the argument, you are committing the straw man fallacy.

22.2 Problems in Defining Race

Race, as a coherent concept (whether as ethnic identity or biological category) is unsound, and race, as such, does not exist. Racism does exist, however. What does this tell us? The importance of an idea has nothing to do with how good it is. Bad ideas are lethal.

Ashley Montague defines race as a “group of human beings which exist in nature and are comprised of individuals that possess a certain aggregate of characters which individually and collectively serve to define the individuals in all other groups.” More recently, sociologists have defined race as “a concept which signifies and symbolizes social conflicts and interests amongst different types of human bodies.” The Encyclopedia Britannica defines racism as “the theory or idea that there is a causal link between inherited physical traits and certain traits of personality, intellect, or culture and, combined with it, the notion that some races are inherently superior to others.” (All cited on p. 21 B. Isaac The Invention of Race in Classical Antiquity).

Note that few racists would bother or be able to articulate what they actually mean by race. To critique racism (like other malignant ideologies) it is often necessary to define the terms ourselves. (But even anti- racist discourse can be confused. Many anti- racism advocates, for example, will insist that racial differences exist, yet will discuss particular ‘racial’ groupings). Benjamin Isaac writes:

A major, but misguided effort was made to define and explain race in nonracist terms by the UNESCO in its "statement on race."⁸⁴ It is misguided because its basic assumption is the existence of races.⁸⁵ Numerous modern authors do not believe in the reality of race themselves, but they still proceed from the assumption that race exists for racists, in the sense that racists are believed to respond to real physical traits of the targets of racism.⁸⁶ Here we are back to the serious consequences of an insufficiently lucid understanding of the essence of racism. I repeat once more, although it should be superfluous to say so, that racism is never caused by the physical characteristics of the other.⁸⁷

http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/i7737.html

p.265: Affirmative Action (defn) Affirmative actionis a policy or a program whose stated goal is to redress past or present discrimination through active measures to ensure equal opportunity, as in education and employment

p.265. The methodology of this essay is reconstructivist; Appiah aims to give an account of racism as if racists were rational beings. “My claim is that these theoretical claims (of popular racism) are required to make sense of racism as the practice of reasoning human beings.”

22.3 Racism as a Cognitive Problem

p.266 Appiah concedes that racialism is a cognitive, rather than a moral problem.

(Discussion: are people responsible for any cognitive problems that they may have?)

22.4 Intrinsic vs. Extrinsic Racism

Intrinsic racists are, according to Appiah,

…people who differentiate morally between members of different races because they believe that each race has a different moral status, quite independent of the moral characteristics entailed by its racial essence. Just as, for example, many people assume that they are biologically related to another person…. gives them a moral interest in that person, so an intrinsic racist holds that the bare fact of being of the same race is a reason for preferring one person to another. (TRTTD:267).

Call this the family model of racism.

Extrinsic racists, by contrast, point out to alleged racial differences to justify their beliefs in inferiority of other groups of people. Such beliefs require the attribution of characteristics to entire populations. Appiah discusses the family model at length on pages 276- 278.

He argues that it is a bad analogy.

A rational defense of the family ought to appeal to the causal responsibility of the biological parent and the common life of the domestic unit, and not to the brute fact of biological relatedness, even if the former pair of considerations defines groups that are often coextensive with the groups generated by the latter. For brute relatedness bears no necessary connection to the sorts of human purposes that seem likely to be relevant at the most basic level of ethical thought. (Appiah p. 277).

22.5 The Taste Analogy

Appiah considers the idea that racism is simply due to an innate cultural prejudice, like food preference. He gives this short shrift: “a proper analogy would be with someone who thought that we could continue to kill cattle for beef, even if cattle exercised all the complex cultural skills of human beings.” (Appiah p. 275).

22.5 Self- Serving Rationalizations

Many people who express extrinsic racist beliefs are beneficiaries of social orders that deliver advantages to them by virtue of their race…(Appiah p. 268)

Discussion: Could this be true of Aristotle? Hume? Kant?

22.6 Cognitive Incapacity, Narcissism, and Personal Responsibility

An inability to change your mind in the face of appropriate evidence is a cognitive incapacity; but it is one that all of us surely suffer from in some areas of belief: especially in areas where our own interests or self- images are at stake. Appiah p.269

The following is the one clearly moral problem in the essay (racism is not in itself a philosophical problem, for it is so obviously immoral):

we may wonder whether it is right to treat such people [racists] as morally responsible for the acts their racial prejudice motivates, or morally reprehensible for holding the views to which their prejudice leads them. It is a bad thing that such people exist; they are, in a certain sense, bad people. But it is not clear to me that they are responsible for the fact that they are bad. Racial prejudice, like prejudice generally, may threaten an agent’s autonomy, making it appropriate to treat or train rather than reason with them. (Appiah p. 271)

Discussion: Is this correct? Keep in mind that Appiah’s strongest argument against racism is Kantian.

WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW

You should know the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic racism

You should know the distinction between empirical and essentialist theories of racism

DON’T PANIC