The Self Delusions of Modern Racists

The complex mental gymnastics involved in retaining a racist worldview

I recently had an argument with racists online, which gave me food for thought. What I find interesting is that racist ideas are quite widespread, but almost no racist I have ever debated will actually admit to being a racist. They will admit to holding all the ideas which according to most generally accepted definitions of racism would make you a racist, but they maintain that "I am not a racist".

So, what exactly is the definition of racism? Here is one definition given in the Oxford Dictionary:

The belief that different races possess distinct characteristics, abilities, or qualities, especially so as to distinguish them as inferior or superior to one another.

Your typical modern-day racist will eagerly show you their favorite statistics on how black people score lower on IQ tests and are overrepresented in crime statistics or pretty much any negative statistics. They have also convinced themselves that us on the political left are living in a rejecting objective reality. They see themselves as so-called "race realists." Except, most of us are not rejecting the studies that find blacks to score lower on IQ tests or be overrepresented in various bad statistics.

Our pushback is against the idea that these differences are caused by genetics rather than environmental factors, such as having been given fewer opportunities to succeed in life or growing up impoverished or disadvantaged in other ways. Let me qualify that answer a bit better. I don't entirely rule out that there might be genetic factors at play which cause some differences.

What I take issue with is that "race realists" claim that the group differences observed are almost entirely caused by genetic differences and environmental differences play almost no role. That is quite a stunning claim, giving the centuries of discrimination and marginalization African Americans have faced in the United States.

Institutional Racism

The claim often heard is that while there might have been discrimination in the past, that is no longer the case. The concept of institutional racism is completely rejected on the right. Pundits such as Ben Shapiro claim there is no institutional racism because there are no laws explicitly mentioning black people. Except that is not what institutional racism is about. To quote wikipedia:

Institutional racism, also known as systemic racism, is defined as policies and practices that exist throughout a whole society or organization and that result in and support a continued unfair advantage to some people and unfair or harmful treatment of others based on race. It manifests as discrimination in areas such as criminal justice, employment, housing, health care, education and political representation.

In other words, the definition isn't even talking about what is written in the law. It is much more broadly defined.

In fact, it has rarely been the case that discrimination against African Americans has been encoded in detail into the laws and regulations of the United States. Even in the time shortly after slavery ended in 1865, African Americans were widely discriminated against, using laws that rarely if ever mentioned black people specifically. However, plenty of laws did get deliberately engineered to target African Americans. All you needed is a law which the police could choose to utilize against African Americans but refrain from applying to white people.

This is a popular tactic of abuse in every society. For instance, companies know they cannot fire people because they don't like them. So, instead, they create a long list of rules that can get you fired. They make sure this list is so extensive that pretty much every employee would be breaking one or more of these rules. Whenever they find a person they don't like and want to fire, it becomes trivial to get rid of that person because one can always pull out a list of arbitrary rule breaking to post-rationalize firing that person. Authorities and unions cannot really complain, as the corporation can show actual rules broken and supply proof.

The problem is the long list of other employees who broke equal or more rules and who didn't get fired. Unions and authorities don't get to know about them. Many countries use the same tactic to get rid of political opponents. In many corruption ridden countries, some level of corruption affects nearly every politician. If it wasn't something they did themselves, it happened under their watch.

Thus, excessively strict corruption laws risk undermining democracy and law and order because it gives political hacks the opportunity to persecute almost anyone they don't like. It is not unknown that politicians who did minor crimes get prosecuted and imprisoned to serve a political agenda, while politicians who are in with the right group and committed far more serious crimes never get prosecuted.

Russia and the Soviet Union have a long tradition of something similar called Kompromat:

Kompromat is part of the political culture in Russia, with many members of the business and political elite having collected and stored potentially compromising material on their political opponents. Kompromat does not necessarily target individuals or groups, but rather collects information that could be useful at a later time. Compromising videos are often produced long in advance of when leverage over people is needed.

A variant of this was used by Putin to help Donald Trump win the American elections when the Kremlin strategically leaked info about how the Democratic Party had undermined Bernie Sanders. It wasn't fake news. Kompromat is usually not made up, rather it is about strategically releasing info that hurts your opponents when it benefits your agenda. You don't release damaging info about your allies. Or at least not until they step out of line.

The point I am trying to get across is that what is written in the law-books is in no way a guarantee for a fair and just society. Laws can be abused to no end. Ultimately, fairness relies on those tasked with upholding the law. Are they unbiased and honest?

Are African Americans Facing Discrimination Today?

I want to get back to the question of what defines a racist. It was when discussing present day discrimination against African Americans that the self-delusions of modern racists became so clear. Two of my debate partners discussed a case at a workplace. A boss had told one of them, responsible for hiring, that they had to be careful about hiring African Americans because they were so hard to fire. The claim was that black people make a much bigger ruckus and headache for the company whenever they get fired. The boss wanted to avoid that.

Both my debate partners agreed among themselves that this could not be called racism. In their view, the boss was simply acting upon objective facts. If blacks were harder to fire, then it would be rational to not hire them in the first place.

I pushed them on this point to clarify. It became clear that they saw it as no problem extending this principle to situations and circumstances. I was reminded by the famous speech by Martin Luther King:

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. –– Martin Luther King, August 28, 1963

We had here a situation where two people argued that it is entirely fair that a man is judged by the color of his skin rather than the content of his character. It doesn't matter how easy or hard you as an individual is to fire. What matters is experience with people sharing skin color with you. In other words, the same person not getting hired could walk in again to the same job seeking employment and get the job if he was able to change only one thing about himself: His skin color. No other trait would need to be changed, assuming he was otherwise fit for the job to begin with.

What made this conversation, so bizarre was that both of them had loudly railed against affirmative action. Their claim was that affirmative action was not needed as it discriminated against whites, blacks, according to them, didn't face racism in modern America. Completely un-ironically, they then continued to argue that discriminating against blacks was totally fine and even giving me the sense that this was quite normal to do.

The excuse seemed to be that this was okay because it was "rational". One of the participants tried to use an example of being out late at night and moving over to the other side of the street if encountering black people. A rational choice given that African Americans are overrepresented in crime statistics.

But, here is the point I never managed to get across to them. I actually agree that individuals were making rational choices in all of these cases. I do the same if some big gang of minorities are out late at night, I will likely cross to the other side of the street. Some people are also overrepresented in crime statistics in Norway. But here is the key point they are missing: While these choices are rational, we cannot claim those choices don't negatively affect minorities and diminish their opportunities.

I notice that a core mental block for many conservative Americans is that they always need to find somebody to blame for something. If there is nobody to blame, then a problem in their mind isn't real. Because you cannot necessarily blame a person for choosing not to hire an African American, they conclude that nothing wrong was done. The point many of us on the left are trying to make is that a group can be discriminated against through a myriad of small actions like this, which by themselves may be rational and not explicitly racist.

For instance, I don't think any minority in Norway is genetically coded to be more criminal. In so far as various minorities are overrepresented in crime statistics, it is an outcome of environmental factors. If you come from a poorer country with poorly educated parents to a modern Western society you don't understand very well and need to integrate into, then you are naturally not going to do as well as the natives. Thus, my negative reaction to a group of minority youth isn't based on a belief in racial inferiority, but simply an observation of current but temporary reality.

But regardless of reason, that still has an impact on people, and that is why I believe extra efforts typically have to be spent to integrate minorities or other marginalized groups. Otherwise, we create a form of circular logic where negative outcomes of the past become a rational to discriminate in the future and thus perpetuate those negative outcomes.

Positive discrimination or affirmative action is simply a way to counter a heavy bias which is naturally there in all facets of society. Otherwise, racism becomes it's own rational. None of my debate partners ever stopped and asked themselves whether the claims about African Americans making a stink when fired were true or not. They simply assumed it was. But let us assume it was, then the next question ought to have been: Why would African Americans create more problems when fired than whites? Why do they have to be so uppity? Don't they know their place? Can't they get on with the program?

I am obviously being ironic and using the type of responses long used by whites in America about African Americans who dared stand up for themselves and challenge the system. If you are used to being discriminated against due to your skin color at every juncture in your life, why would you not assume that a firing was racially motivated when it happened? After all, my debate partners had just admitted that discriminating against black people in hiring was totally fine. In fact, they argued it was fine in any other circumstance as long as some kind of statistics rationalized it.

By that token, we should not hire disabled people or women either. Women could get pregnant and be away from work for a long time. I guess not hiring women is perfectly rational, then. Disabled people require more accommodation and may not be as productive. Let us not hire them, either. These may all be rational considerations from a company, but it has the net effect of reducing opportunities for anyone who isn't a straight white male. To then go on and suggest we don't' need laws to even the playing-field for these groups then makes no sense.

It doesn't matter that there is nobody to blame. Nobody can really be blamed for blind people existing in society. But when a politician suggests we build paths for blind people should the response be: "Not my frickin problem, I didn't make them blind!"

But, for there to be an obligation to help our fellow disadvantaged citizens, we don't need there to be somebody to assign blame for that disadvantage. It is enough to establish that the disadvantage exists.

It would be one thing if we were just dealing with an anecdote, but the system racism shows up clearly in countless pieces of statistics. I got so tired of arguing with people who claimed there was no proof, that I started collecting things I encountered in one article.

https://erik-engheim.medium.com/proof-of-systemic-racism-in-america-b8b93c0091d2

Here are some of the topics I covered in the article:

• White lawyer getting himself arrested

• Drug charges against non-whites study

• Blacks more likely to be shot than whites, even when holding harmless objects.

• Racial profiling of drivers

• Unusually low hit rates when searching black drivers

• Stop and frisk negative bias towards black neighborhoods

• Systemic dehumanization of black children by police

• Crack cocaine sentencing is much higher than for powder Cocaine, despite not being any more dangerous

• Jury selection favors whites. Black Jury members are far more likely to get removed.

• Health care for black people is often much worse due to deep held stereotypes about blacks somehow being more robust and requiring less treatment or pain medication.

• White convicts as likely to be hired as blacks without criminal records

• Far more African Americans are arrested for drug crimes than whites, despite no higher usage of drugs overall.

And honestly, anyone can just keep going with this, as there is an almost inexhaustible supply of studies and surveys showing the effects of systemic racism. The presence of systemic racism in America really shouldn't be a controversial topic, yet I find that on the American political right this idea is commonly flat out rejected.

The irony here is that "race realists" will claim that the discrimination is entirely rational and logical, and yet dispute that such discrimination is widespread. If many people think exactly like them, why would it not be widespread?

Thus, we are in a situation where they demand that African Americans "fix themselves" and get ahead, while they reserve their right to actively discriminate and deny them opportunities.

From Cartoon Racism to Mass Murder

Present day racists reject that they are racists on the ground that they believe that their conviction that African Americans are intellectually and socially inferior is rooted in objective reality.

This, of course, begs the question, who actually qualifies as a racist, then? The claim is that you need to hate others to be a racist. Merely thinking somebody is inferior isn't enough to qualify as hate.

By that logic, most Southerners in the Jim Crow area and the time of segregation were not racists at all. After all, they believed that segregation was just the best way for both races. They did not necessarily hate black people. What angered them was when black people tried to challenge the system they had put in place.

That is the problem with claiming racism without hatred isn't racism. The people who are marginalized and discriminated against are not going to just accept their position. They will fight it, and in challenging their marginalized lot in life, they will spur the anger of the supposedly non-racist racists.

You hear similar ideas from modern day Neo-Nazis. They claim to hold no amniosity towards other races. All they want is to have their "all white" utopia. But history should be a lesson. Hitler's Nazi leadership did not start mass murdering of Jews upon taking power in 1933. The so-called Final Solution didn't happen until way into World War II in 1942.

From gaining power in January 1933 until the outbreak of war in September 1939, the Nazi persecution of the Jews in Germany was focused on intimidation, expropriating their money and property, and encouraging them to emigrate.

In fact, as late as 1940, Germany was exploring numerous other plans. Straight out mass murder was not the original preferred choice:

In 1940, following the Fall of France, Adolf Eichmann devised the Madagascar Plan to move Europe's Jewish population to the French colony, but the plan was abandoned for logistical reasons, mainly a naval blockade. There were also preliminary plans to deport Jews to Palestine and Siberia.

My point in mentioning these facts is not to make the Nazis sound better than they were, but for you to understand the ultimate consequences of racism. Plenty of racists and anti-immigrant right-wingers today will claim that all they want is to deport the foreigners, or whatever minority they don't like. Except deporting hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of, people is not easy. Nazi Germany failed to get Jews out of Germany, despite straight out terror campaigns against the Jewish population to scare them out.

Why did they fail? Because the world around simply wasn't willing or ready to accept millions of Jewish refugees. The world of the 1930s wasn't all that different from the world we live in today. Just look at the massive opposition to Syrian refugees across the West and elsewhere. Jews were not exactly a popular people back in the 1930s. We like to sweep that fact under the rug and pretend only Nazis hated Jews, but hatred of Jews was everywhere. Donald Trump's hero, General Patton was a Jew hater on an epic scale, and he was charged with saving Jews from the concentration camps. He saw the horror and yet sympathized more with the Germans. Patton referred to Jews as sub-humans, just like the Nazis:

So far as the Jews are concerned, they do not want to be placed in comfortable buildings. They actually prefer to live as many to a room as possible. They have no conception of sanitation, hygiene or decency and are, as you know, the same sub-human types that we saw in the internment camps.

Thus, if we try to think like racist Nazis, there was a logic to the Holocaust. They wanted to get rid of Jews from the Third Reich, but they had failed in all attempts to do so. The "final solution" was thus simply mass murder.

I believe that is ultimately where all racism ends. If racists are put in charge of the government and unable to purge their lands of the unwanted people, they will either create an apartheid regime or resort to mass murder. It doesn't matter that their intentions had been better before. A failure to achieve what they thought would be a simple solution would gradually radicalize them to do ever more horrible things.

Thus, racism without hatred isn't harmless. Those are the people who will be the enablers of the likes of the Nazis. When racists don't get their way, they will eventually resort to violence. Fellow countryman and right-wing terrorist Anders Behring Breivik did for some time attempt to push his views in the political system but became frustrated when even the populist right-wing parliamentary party in Norway found him too extreme. Pushed out of mainstream politics, he decided that violence was the only option.

Breivik happens to be one of the reasons I care about racism and write about it. When reading his manifesto, I realized that far too many crazy racists live in echo chambers, never getting challenged. Most of us cannot be bothered. And thus they get to keep spreading half-truths and lies without many people ever calling them out. These people seem too crazy, too cartoonish to even bother with.

Why Care About Race in the First Place?

A cop out I often see among people who claim to be "color-blind" is that they insist that there should be no such thing as affirmative action. We shouldn't even talk about race. In their view, much of the problems stems from talking about race rather than dealing with people as individuals.

In an ideal world that would have been great, but we don't live in an ideal world. People of color would want nothing more but to be treated like any other person, but that isn't the reality they live in. Thus, you cannot solve a problem by simply ignoring it and not talking about it. Measures targeting particular groups, whether quotas for women in politics or boardrooms or affirmative action in the workplace, are not the policies who made the problems. They are measures to counter the problems that exist.

The comedian John Steward made a great point about this: A lot of the superficial policies that people hate to deal with race exist because the real changes needed aren't happening. Affirmative action is but a bleak substitute for a society where you are not judged by the color of your skin. It is claimed that it gives an unfair advantage to non-whites, but as the studies I linked to earlier show, it actually doesn't make much of a difference. White people are still getting preferred. If white ex-convicts are getting preference in hiring over blacks with a clean record in modern-day America, then affirmative action clearly hasn't evened out and undone the privilege white people enjoy in all facets of society.

I talk a lot about skin color here, but the debate is of course broader than that. I my native Norway, Northern Norwegians and Sami have both been discriminated against without looking different. Landlords in Oslo in the 1960s would explicitly state that they did not want to rent out to Northern Norwegians. The Nazis of the 1930s placed Jews and Slavs at the bottom of their racial hierarchies. Japanese and Chinese were ironically deemed Aryans and thus above Slavic people and Jews. Thus, racism doesn't always need to be a simple as anyone looking the mostly white has preferential treatment. One must realize that the race and racism debate is different in every society.

What I am writing about here is of course heavily based on the American perspective because it so dominates all types of media. We live in an Americanized world. Thus, the American perspective will become dominating and seen as the norm. But every so often it is worth getting reminded that it isn't universal, but an outgrowth of the unique history America has regarding slavery.

Personally, I have found it very enlightening to listen to South African Trevor Noah share his experience of growing up under Apartheid in South Africa. In many ways, it is a form of racism easier to deal with as it was so explicit and obviously racist. So many societies hide their racism much better behind layers and layers of dog whistles. He also discusses racism in a way that I find much easier to relate to as a European because racism and prejudice in South Africa is not all about skin color. It is an amazing complex and diverse society with countless ethnic groups which not only look different but also speak entirely different languages. Trevor Noah, as a half-black, half-white kid, learned to navigate this world by learning multiple languages and culture to blend in with different groups. He discovered how language often was a key to blending in and getting accepted in different groups, even if you don't look exactly as you are supposed to.

I see this in my native Norway as well. I remember traveling with a Tamil family once. They stick out because of their dark skin color. The father had gotten this habit of speaking really loud Norwegian around his family in various contexts where your skin color could end up being an issue. He knew a simple truth that once you sound like the natives, your skin color half-way disappears. I know that very well myself. We all have our prejudice at some level, but I notice I tend to forget people's skin color the more people sound and act like me or other pale Norwegians.

It isn't fair, but it is how the world works. It can, of course, work opposite. Somebody may look like you, but once they open their mouth you realize they are culturally entirely different from yourself.

I don't think we will ever get entirely rid of prejudice, but we can put policies in place to minimize the effects of that prejudice. That is better than actively doing research to find reasons to excuse differences between people.