GE Morton wrote: ↑November 30th, 2022, 12:31 pmAnother mistake. "Racial categories" have not "led to" any suffering, injustice, etc. That is also absurd. What results in suffering and injustice are
beliefs concerning those categories, and actions taken pursuant to those beliefs. That is where criticism is appropriate and might be effective. Do you imagine the bigots will cease noticing obvious racial differences and abandon their prejudices just because some airhead PMers claim races don't exist?
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"The first doctrine is the view—which I shall call
racialism—that there are heritable characteristics, possessed by members of our species, which allow us to divide them into a small set of races, in such a way that all the members of these races share certain traits and tendencies with each other that they do not share with members of any other race. These traits and tendencies characteristic of a race constitute, on the racialist view, a sort of racial essence; it is part of the content of racialism that the essential heritable characteristics of the 'Races of Man' account for more than the visible morphological characteristics—skin color, hair type, facial features—on the basis of which we make our informal classifications. Racialism is at the heart of nineteenth-century attempts to develop a science of racial difference, but it appears to have been believed by others—like Hegel, before then, and Crummell and many Africans since—who have had no interest in developing scientific theories.
Racialism is not, in itself, a doctrine that must be dangerous, even if the racial essence is thought to entail moral and intellectual dispositions. Provided positive moral qualities are distributed across the races, each can be respected, can have its 'separate but equal' place. Unlike most Western-educated people, I believe—and I shall argue in the essay on Du Bois—that racialism is false, but by itself, it seems to be a cognitive rather than a moral problem. The issue is how the world is, not how we would want it to be.
Racialism is, however, a presupposition of other doctrines that have been called 'racism', and these other doctrines have been, in the last few centuries, the basis of a great deal of human suffering and the source of a great deal of moral error."
(Appiah, Anthony K.
In My Father's House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. p. 13)
"Throughout this book, a distinction is made between
racialism and
racism. Racialism describes, distinguishes, and classifies racial or phenotypic (observable) physical difference among humans. Racialism includes scientific and ideological approaches that take notice and account of race. Racial data counted and recorded in the U.S. Census, in some medical studies, and in affirmative action profiles is racialist. Biomedical research comparing data on “blacks” and “whites,” for example, in a study of high blood pressure, is racialist, that is, it uses race as a significant variable in science. Racism takes note of racial difference but evaluates that difference, ranking it into superior or inferior, higher or lower racial types. Racial profiling of black shoppers, Latino drivers, or Arab airline passengers is both racialist—taking account of race—and racist, judging black shoppers as potential thieves, Latino drivers as transporting drugs, and Arab passengers as potential hijackers or terrorists. Racism both takes note of race and makes judgments about good and bad behavior, better or worse attributes."
(Fluehr-Lobban, Carolyn.
Race and Racism: An Introduction. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019. pp. 3-4)
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