One is that for all the current talk about race, many scientists believe it to be an artificial category or social construct. They've concluded that there are, actually, no distinct racial types.
For example, University of California professor Tanya Golash-Boza writes that the notion of race has no basis in biology. To be sure, there are obvious physical differences between Kenyans, Swedes and Chinese, but it doesn't follow that the world can be divided into discrete racial groups. There's actually a continuous series of incremental gradations between these groups, and this fact makes it difficult to tell where to draw the line between one group and another.
Even the genetic differences between Kenyans and Swedes are not as great as the genetic variation just among Kenyans. Thus, the claim that race is a social, rather than a biological, construction.
As much as I'd like to accept this myself, preferring as I do to think of humanity as a single "kind" created in the image of God, I'm not sure the gradual gradation argument holds up. It's like arguing that because the color red shades imperceptibly to orange and then to yellow and so on to violet across the spectrum making it hard to know where to draw the line between the various colors, that therefore red, violet and the others are really not distinct hues.
It's also difficult, for that matter, to know where to draw the line between childhood, adolescence and adulthood, but it doesn't follow that there's no significant difference between these stages of life.
And biologists have difficulty knowing where to draw the line between life and non-life, but surely there's a difference.
With regard to race, perhaps it's more reasonable to say that humanity is all one biological species manifesting a spectrum of characteristics that tend to cluster around what we might call discrete racial types than to say that because it's hard to draw the line between one racial group and another that therefore there's no basis for distinguishing between them.
In other words, as much as many of us, myself included, would like to get beyond thinking of people in terms of race, the concept of race is admittedly useful even if it's not grounded in any significant biological distinctions.
A second complication in our discussions about race is the promiscuous use of the word racism.
The word is tossed around rather freely, but its users rarely do us the favor of defining what they mean by it. Perhaps there's a reason for that. It's very difficult to give a clear definition that does the work that many who wield the term want it to do.
In their textbook Philosophy the Quest for Truth Louis Pojman and Lewis Vaughn write this:
Racism begins with the belief that races exist and can be differentiated by significant moral, intellectual or cultural characteristics. This supposition ...however, is not itself racism.Blum labels these two factors inferiorization and antipathy.
According to philosopher and race scholar Lawrence Blum, what transforms the assumption about race into racism is the addition of the belief that 1) some races are inferior to others in important respects or 2) some races deserve disdain, hatred, or hostility.
Pojman and Vaughn go on to state, "But if inferiorization and antipathy are the heart of racism, then many actions, attitudes, institutions, and people that are being called racist don't deserve the label."
Indeed, as helpful as Blum's criteria are, the inferiorization criterion raises the question of what constitute "important respects." Clearly, moral and intellectual differences would qualify, but why not physical differences? What grounds do we have for saying that a race of pygmies is not inferior to a race of giants?
Does it not depend upon the context in which physical differences are relevant? And if the context matters is it not fair to say that whites and Asians in the U.S. are physically inferior to blacks in ways that suit people for athletic activities like basketball, football and Olympic sprinting?
What grounds do we have for saying that those forms of inferiority are irrelevant, and if they're not irrelevant is it racist to recognize that kind of racial inferiority? And if physical differences are relevant then anyone who's aware of the dominance of blacks in some American professional sports would be a racist according to Blum's inferiorization criterion, because they believe that whites and Asians are physically inferior to blacks in ways that are clearly significant in American culture.
Blum is no doubt correct that racism often does involve inferiorization, but a belief that, generally speaking, one race is superior to another in some relevant respect doesn't necessarily entail that the person holding the belief is racist. If it did, then everyone - black, white and yellow - who acknowledges the physical superiority of blacks on the basketball court or on the track would be a racist, which would render the term useless.
For his inferiorization criterion to be helpful Blum needs to specify what forms of inferiority are relevant in assessing racism, and which aren't, without simply making arbitrary judgments.
Blum's second criterion, antipathy based on race, is perhaps less problematic. He writes that racial antipathy "encompasses racial bigotry, hostility, and hatred" toward a racial group, based on a "faulty and inflexible generalization" about that group.
This, though, presents an irony since much of the race-based bigotry, hostility and hatred we see in our current culture is found in the black population and according to the shibboleths of the day, black people cannot be racist. Nevertheless, pace those who would absolve blacks of the stain of racism, there's no good reason to think that blacks, or any other group, are somehow exempt from this particular human sin or that whites are uniquely afflicted by it.
Surely, when a black theologian prays that God will help her to hate white people she's indulging in racism. When a black murderer tells police he wanted to kill white men surely that's racism. When black speakers tell their audiences that "all white people are racists" that's surely an expression of racial bigotry that rises to the level of racism.
This is the kind of racism often found among liberals who seem to believe that blacks are helpless unless assisted by white benefactors. it's racism, but it's hardly the virulent sort of racism we normally think of when we hear the word.
"Conversely," he writes, "not every race hater regards the target of her hatred as inferior." In the United States, for example, at least some of the current hostility toward Asians and Jews is driven by resentment spawned by a belief, perhaps subliminal, that the hater is actually in some way inferior to those he hates.
Nevertheless, despite some caveats, Blum's analysis is helpful overall. Inferiorization is often, though not always, a sign of racism, and racial antipathy almost always is.
We'll look at more of Blum's analysis tomorrow.