Racism, Prejudice, and Discrimination

The term "racism" gets thrown around so carelessly these days that many people may have forgotten that it has a specific meaning. Racism is the doctrine that members of one racial or ethnic group are intrinsically superior or inferior to members of another or others.  Racists are people who hold such opinions. Example include Nazis, Ku Kluxers, and members of some so-called black or white supremacy groups.

Racial prejudice  is the belief in and practice of judging people’s individual character and qualities on the basis of their race or ethnicity.  Examples would include holding  such opinions  as “all black men in big cities are brutal thugs”, “all Mexicans are dirty and lazy”, or “all Germans are still closet Nazis” or holding those opinions with the “all” only implicit.  

Racial discrimination is the act of deciding how and under what conditions  one wants to  associate or not with another person at least partially on the basis of his race.

These three things are different, and it is worthwhile to keep them separate. While one may assume all racists would be prejudiced, not all prejudiced people are racists.   Similarly it is likely that a prejudiced person would want to practice discrimination, but people can discriminate for pragmatic or other reasons different from the broad conclusions of racial prejudice.

Racism is dangerous. There are very good reasons for taking actual racism of any sort seriously and opposing it vigorously. Individual acts of discrimination are usually a person’s private business and  deserve only disapproval if any notice at all.  It helps to know the difference, and to do that one must first understand that there is a difference.   

It is also useful to remember that things such as telling an ethnic joke, using a taboo word, or mentioning a statistical datum such as “a higher percentage of black men than white men commit violent crimes” or “east-Asian Americans have higher average IQ test scores than white Americans” may not be instances of any of the three, depending on context and intent.

Hate Speech Defined?

Some on the left have been trying to suppress discourse in various places on the basis of a desire to prevent  what they call hate speech.   Several writers have pointed out that hate speech does not exist as a legal category of expression and is not among  the types of declarations such as shouting “fire” in a theater or inciting a mob to go down the street and murder someone which are not legally protected by the First Amendment.  These observations are true, and attempts to ban or censor statements as hate speech are clearly unconstitutional. Still it is interesting to consider what the term might mean if specifically defined  and thus perhaps to figure out  precisely what  it is these leftists want to ban.

  It could mean  any expression of actual hatred of someone or something, but most people agree there are people  and things such as, say, Soviet Russia, Adolph Hitler, Bin Laden, and slave traders (at least the non-Arab ones) which are deserving of hatred. Besides most of the people carrying on  about hate speech seem quite uninhibited about letting the world  know about all the people and  things they hate. So that can’t  be  what is meant.

It could mean being vulgarly offensive or demeaning to an individual or a group of people as with racial, ethic, religious, or sexual slurs or insults.  But many  anti-hate speech leftists do this all the time to Christians, white men, and traditionally minded married heterosexuals and  especially to blacks, Hispanics, women, Lesbians, and homosexual  men who hold political opinions they dislike. So that can’t be what they want to ban  either.

  It could mean insulting hyperbole as when one might say the secret service people protecting Mrs. Clinton had to worry about a house falling on her from the sky or that Barack Obama could not string two coherent sentences together without his teleprompter. However leftists often see nothing wrong with things such as claiming that George W. Bush was retarded or that Trump is Darth Vader without the deep voice. So that can’t be it. 

It could mean expressing wishes for someone’s suffering or demise as when a person might say the republic would be well served if Chuck Schumer fell in the Potomac and Pelosi drowned while unsuccessfully trying to save him. But again some leftists say this sort of thing all the time about  people such as Trump, Limbaugh, and Bush.  So that too is not the answer.

It could mean simple excessively bad manners and rudeness, but no one who has attentively observed recent activities around the country  since November could see much reason to think  leftists had compunction about that.

One could go on with other imagined possibilities, but the point is clear enough. What the term “hate speech” means, to the extent it means anything, is speech which strongly disagrees with the beliefs or offends the sensibilities of some  leftists. It is a textbook’s example of what the objectivists call an anti-concept and of the sort of language Orwell warned against.  It should be unmasked as such, and efforts by leftists to suppress free discourse and expression should be opposed by all liberally minded people.

There certainly is hateful speech – assertions and opinions which are  irrational, insulting and even disgusting and inhumane. The right way to deal with them is with rational disputation, refutation, and  appropriate ridicule. This  is the same medicine we should dispense to the hate speech crowd.   Then remind them it’s a free country and tell them to go to hell.

Phoniness on Campus

Many people have commented on the hypocrisy and illiberality of   faculty members and officials at universities who support – directly or tacitly – those trying to suppress the presentation of dissenting viewpoints by students and invited speakers at colleges and universities.  The hypocrisy  is surely obvious enough with professors and administrators creating so-called safe spaces to pamper students they agree with and shield them from the imagined dangers of being offended about anything while allowing  or approving of vulgar insults, racial slurs, and assorted types of intimidation  sometimes including investigation by the campus cops for students with attitudes and opinions they do not like.  The illiberality is just as obvious with the fairly explicit abandonment in some places of the liberal idea of a university as a place where ideas, hypotheses, and opinions of all sorts may be presented and discussed freely, openly, and rationally without fear of punishment or censorship and with the acceptance by officials at some universities of threats,  disruptions, and even mob violence as means to prevent speakers with unpopular views from being heard.

However there is also an interesting bit of hypocrisy  in  this that has not been noticed as much. For years  defenders of affirmative action quotas or preferences at universities have used the idea of the importance of a diversity of thoughts  and viewpoints (together with specious claims that a simple wide range of skin color somehow guarantees that) as the main argument  and justification for their policies and actions.  Lately some professors and administrators have  awkwardly revealed just how sincere that argument was.