In-Group Preference, Out-Group Hostility

Here's a theoretical question: Is it ever okay for a business to discriminate on the basis of ethnicity? No, you say? Then you're not up on the theory of in-group preference/out-group hostility. A piece by Jazz Shaw at Hot Air last spring gives us a nice introduction.

A letter-writer to the New York Times Magazine (paywall) recounts an interesting experience he had in a Chinese restaurant with this bit of Orwellian new-think.

Here's the situation as recounted by Jazz Shaw:

A Chinese restaurant the writer frequents has two menus. There’s a less expensive lunch menu with a lot of specials on it and their more expensive, fancy dinner menu. The writer (who is white) noticed that when Chinese customers showed up, the wait staff (also Chinese) almost always immediately gave them the cheaper lunch menu. But white customers were uniformly given the more expensive dinner menu.

When the writer asked for a lunch menu instead they happily gave it to them, but he’s concerned that other white customers might not know about the cheaper lunch menu and were getting overcharged. The writer wonders if he should intervene by telling other white patrons about the lunch menu.

The letter was answered by a columnist for the Times named Kwame Anthony Appiah, a British-born Ghanaian-American philosopher. Appiah responds:

In the scenario you describe, the restaurant’s Chinese staff members are partial to their Chinese neighbors. They give them special treatment. They don’t have anything against non-Chinese, as they show by happily giving you the lunch menu when you ask for it. So they’re motivated by in-group preference, not by out-group hostility.

Some people think that giving preferential treatment to members of your own ethnic kind is as bad as hostility to outsiders. Others even deny that such a distinction can be drawn. I think that’s wrong.... Partiality needn’t be prejudicial.

Granted, we’d feel very different about white servers favoring white customers. But that’s for two reasons. One is a suspicion that, in our society, behavior of that sort would in fact be motivated by negative feelings toward nonwhites — that is, by racism. Another is that whites are a majority in this country.

According to Appiah there's nothing wrong with a member of a minority giving preferential treatment to a fellow minority, that's simply "in-group preference." The problem arises when whites do it because then it's obviously not in-group preference but rather "out-group hostility."

Jazz Shaw follows up:

What’s the difference you might ask? Well, as the author goes on to explain in the next paragraph, it’s based on your skin color. It’s perfectly fine to treat white customers differently than Asian diners if you are Asian because you simply have a preference for your “in-group.”

But if you’re a white person behaving in the same fashion, you’re exhibiting “out-group hostility” which is racist. But if you’re not white, as Appiah writes, “partiality needn’t be prejudicial.”

So, once again we see that racism - whatever that very malleable word might mean nowadays - is a disease only white people are afflicted with. This is the sort of fatuous double standard that has soured so many folks on the whole subject of race in America.

If the word "racism" has come to mean "anything white people do" then the word is a tendentious absurdity, reminiscent of Alice's discussion with Humpty Dumpty in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass:

"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less."
"The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things."
"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master — that's all."