Racism: What It Is and What It Isn’t

Abstract

Productive conversations about racial matters are too infrequent, both inside and outside classroom settings. Confusion about the meaning of “racism” contributes to the problem, and some guidelines will help. First, within a given category (actions, jokes, stereotypes, remarks, stereotypes, persons), we should confine “racism” to especially egregious wrongs in that category. Not every racial stereotype is racist. Not every racially insensitive action is a racist action. The distinct opprobrium attached to racism and racist can be retained and protected if we recognize that racism refers to racial inferiorization or racial antipathy, and that the different categorical forms of racism can all be related to either of those two definitions. Second, we should not confuse racism in one category with racism in another. A person who is prey to a racist stereotype is not necessarily “a racist”; nor does he or she necessarily operate from racist motives. Finally, racism by no means captures all of what can go wrong in the domain of race. There is a much larger terrain of moral ills in the racial domain than racism itself, and we should draw on our manifold linguistic resources — racial insensitivity, failure to recognize racial identity, racial ignorance, racial anxiety, racial injustice, racial homogenization, and so on — to express and describe moral disvalue in this domain.

Much of the material in this lecture is drawn from chapters 1 and 3 of my book, “I’m Not a Racist, But…”: The Moral Quandary of Race (Blum, 2002).