Racism, the Culture of Insecurity

The Paradox of Scolding Philosophy and Exacerbating the Perceptible Contempt

Racism is wrong. It is evil and rejected by every rational person with the right mind. Nevertheless, it is not a new happening, as always prevails to hit the news headlines. Despite its historical presence, it is still perceived and dealt with differently by the populace because of the varying point of reference to a particular situation at a given moment in time. “Indeed, we are living in the realm of a cultural affair.”

Racism, too, like many others, has turned into a bandwagon. For instance, if someone dislikes a color, way of life, or even somewhat feels insecure simply because other people believe the same way, then everyone else will follow. Or on the other end of the spectrum, once people are threatened by knowing that someone or a group of people don’t grasp them as fellow humans, then they create their own assembly to counteract the other’s thoughts or initiatives. Such discriminatory behaviors are independently morbid, not necessarily for the context; they are nourished, but merely because of their potential consequences.

Racism also transpires when something or someone holding an explicit form of profile suffix that gains widespread popularity, feeling a sense of preponderance. The concluding is entrenched in the extreme depth of a persons’ ethnic profile. We all know such a notion is erroneous and has no basis, particularly in ways to which a person is allied. Since, if one has a developed intelligence or has an advantage- it is merely because of individual factors and not the suffix they care, such as white.

We condemn racism and fascism to the extreme, notwithstanding where to draw the line between counter discrimination and maintenance of freedom of expression is the space where is an extremely delicate topic.

The inquest is- do we outlaw racist philosophy and even speech- or that of the conviction to a crime spurred by the racist viewpoints? Or let the vulgar, prejudiced mind vent itself through freedom of expression, then instead we punish committer based on the wicked act?- Before we answer the questions, let’s foremost recap the chronology of racism.

So, What is Racism?

Racism stands for the assumption that a distinct human race is superior or subordinate to another. A racist person is a somewhat genetic reductionist trusting that the social and moral attributes of a person are predestined by a set of inherent biological traits. Racial separatism outlines that different races should remain segregated and apart from one another.

Racism is a comparatively new concept, ascending in the European age of colonialism, the ensuing growth of capitalism, and especially the Atlantic slave trade. As the significant driving force, racism originates from the underlying dark side of the human ego, the ethnocentrism. However, during colonialism, It became a momentous vigor behind the creation of racial segregation, with more emphasis in the 19th century’s the United States and South African apartheid.

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Racism has played a unique role in atrocities and massacres such as the Holocaust, the Armenian genocide, and killing of Serbs and colonial projects, and the European colonization of the Americas, Africa, and Asia.

Racism is Rooted in Cultural Profile

Racism is frequently interpreted as individual prejudice, but in reality, racism is beyond “individual diversity,” every individual irrespective of the perceived profile is different. In fact, racism is a systemic cultural emblem that exists in the “profile” of cultural artifacts, ideological discourse, and institutional realities that work collectively with individual likings.

According to some scholars, three key insights on the psychology of racism have derived from utilizing a cultural-psychology framework.

· First, Racism is rooted in everyday human environments.

· Second, through our partialities and choices, people often support racialized contexts in their day to day activities.

· Third, we occupy cultural realms that promote racialized customs of seeing, being in, and acting in the world.

Racist yet cultural perspective directs efforts at activities that are distracting to the individual tendencies and alternatively converges on changing the structures of mind in a context that reflect and portrays a given profile or prefix such as racial domination.

Culture is the Root of Populism and Ethnocentrism

The customary dogmas, social schemes, and material traits of a racial, religious, or social group

Carrying the characteristic features of everyday existence in a society is the driver of the populace, hence ethnocentrism. Ethnocentrism plays a fundamental part in the wave of populist views. For example, About sixty-one percent (61%) of the German populist party, AfD, 56% of National Front backers in France, and nearly half of the Party for Freedom (PVV) supporters in the Netherlands believe their people’s culture is “superior to others.” This sense of national cultural pre-eminence is far less accepted among the rest of the public in their countries.

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Ethnocentrism is the Core Ingredient of Populism

Ethnocentrism is a significant player in dividing different ethnicities, races, and religious groups. It’s the belief that one’s ethnic group is superior to another. Ethnocentric individuals gather they’re better than others for reasons based wholly on their heritage. Base on that assumption, there comes the concept of “protectionism.”

Protectionism is the economic strategy of curbing imports from other nations through methods such as tariffs on imported goods, import allowances, and a variety of other government regulations. The idea is supposed to protect the interest and reduce competition for ordinary people. Consumer protectionism and ethnocentrism can be examined as a winding formation of mutual relationships, individual preferences, and stances built from one`s comparative self-identification and stemmed from a collective dogma that a distinct cultural, national or religious assemblage is different or superior to others.

Populism is an impetus for Racism

The Princeton political scientist Jan‐ Werner Müller once said- “In addition to being antielitist, populists are evermore antipluralists,”

Populists claim that they are the only representative of the people. But, the opener to understanding the real populist ideology is that the people, according to the populist vision, does not incorporate all the people. In fact, It rejects “the elite” or a particular group of public profiles, also referred to as the enemies of the people. The enemies of the populace may be specified in many guises depending on the cultural or social sphere, such as foreigners, the press, minorities, religion, businesspeople, the “1 percent,” or others seen as not being part of them or are from a different ethnicity. As evident as it is, Populism is discriminatory and apartheid.

Profiling is Discriminatory and Wrong, but it is Widespread

Profiling is the practice of categorizing people or things based on specific traits or physical characteristics. It applies to human beings as the tool for prognosticating their behavior based on particular qualities. Humans are profiled all the time, whether we like it or not!

For instance, People are profiled every day by businesses and insurance companies. The information on some one’s profile is an agent of sign to the person’s lifestyle. It helps insurance companies assess the probability that we will be involved in collisions. A proxy is a trait such as race, or sex, or religion, used as a short cut to judging something otherwise.

Groups in socially and politically and economically vulnerable positions will recognize profiling as not just wrong but embarrassing. If a person profiled based on their horoscope sign, as Virgo or a Sagittarius and etc., they may perceive that as idiosyncratic and even unfair. They probably won’t feel it’s demeaning. But we classify ourselves more intimately with our ethnicity, religion, and sex, so when disadvantaged people are profiled based on these characteristics, it tends to have a far more deleterious impact.

Obviously, the impact of profiling will be contingent upon what is at stake. If a person’s job prospects are affected by profiling, that really matters. If profiling only modifies the plausibility of facing additional inspection at the airport security checkpoint, that is not as bothersome, especially if that someone does not travel too often. However, the latter makes the frequency a relevant consideration. Innocent African-American males who are regularly stopped and questioned by police naturally precipitate a powerful sense of outrage.

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Reduced Self-Confidence, Insecurity, Profiling, and Racism

Racism, and xenophobia, in general, do not have a genetic or evolutionary basis but are primarily a psychological feature, more particularly, a psychological defense mechanism generated by perceptions of insecurity and fear. Research has revealed that- when people are reminded of their own mortality, they exhibit a sense of anxiety and uncertainty, which they respond to by growing more prone to status-seeking, materialism, greed, prejudice, and aggression. They are more likely to conform to culturally accepted beliefs and to conform with their national or ethnic peers. Such an attitude would potentially marginalize racists, populists, and their ideological enemies and hence place them in the vicious circle of anger, despise, hate, and ultimately criminal actions. The cycle above is what we are witnessing today involving racially inspired police brutality on George Floyd in Minnesota. The atrocities we see are nothing more than the power struggle between two or more populist principles in a very diverse society, i.e., the United States.

Modern Racism is more Complicated

Racism is not a system to indict white people for everything and make them feel condemned. It is about stereotyping and overgeneralizing and oversimplifying image, idea, belief, or judgment about a group that is then applied uncritically as possible to all individuals within that group.

Racism diminishes, demoralizes, and dehumanizes one and all. It is a slice of the multifactorial etiology of health inequality, habitually covertly affecting everyone in startling and unforeseen ways. Racism slithers silently undercover, lessening our ability to love our neighbors as ourselves, can be referred to as implicit social cognition, bias.

Implicit bias or people acting based on prejudice and stereotyping without meaning to do so is the oblivious attribution of distinct features to a member of a particular social crowd. Implicit bias is frequently inspired by experiences and can affect expectations, performance, and judgment. It is comparatively spur-of-the-moment, arising from past encounters that are not available for recall, self-report, or thought. Almost every human being shows some kind of prejudice at some point in time as part of their survival intuition. It pertains to the type of thought process that is fast, automatic, habitual, emotional, stereotypic, and unconscious.

Any generalized expectations a person has before communicating with another person stem from implicit biases. For an example of such expectations include thoughts like- All White people from the midwestern United States are republicans, All black people are democrats, all Asians are good students, etc.

Racism has become the Stick of Punishment

One of the most unnoticed spectacles in the realm of racism is the topic of “Race Card.” The phrase is generally used to assert that someone has intentionally and unjustly blamed another person of being a racist to gain some sort of advantage.

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As much as racism is a real concern, not only in the United States, more so across the world, nevertheless not every country deals with the problem the same way. Parallel to that, not every society can be impacted by players of the race card. Accusing someone of being racist is nothing short of the words coming out of someone’s mouth, but what to do with those words has become the weapon of many politicians and special interest groups.

The vicious circle of prohibiting expression, implicit bias, especially of ethnocentric quality, the race card is the nidus for building tension amid factions with diverse profiles. Thus one can expect, inadvertent prohibition and punishing of expression irrespective of how vulgar it can be is not the solution but an independent problem by itself.

Historical Fight against Racism

Throughout history, there have been many efforts to eliminate racism and bring racial equality. For example, In December 1511, a Dominican friar, Antonio de Montesinos, was the first man to reprimand the Spanish powers that be and administrators of Hispaniola for their “cruelty and tyranny openly” in dealing with the American Indians and those enforced to labor as slaves.

Before the American Upheaval, a small assembly of Quakers, including John Woolman and Anthony Benezet, successfully convinced their fellow members of the Religious Society of Friends to free their slaves, divest from the slave trade, and create unified Quaker rules against slavery.

Before and during the American Civil War, racial egalitarianism in the North became much more robust and more generally scattered. The victory of black troops in the Union Army had a dramatic influence on Northern sentiment.

In 1836, Friedrich Tiedemann using craniometric and brain measurements, he disputed the belief of many simultaneous naturalists and anatomists that black folks have smaller brains and are thus intellectually lower to white counterparts.

In 1919 Japan first proposed articles dedicated to the elimination of racial discrimination to be added to the rules of the League of Nations. This was the first proposal concerning the international abolition of racial discrimination in the world.

Hate speech is a Relative Phenomenon

Free speech and hate speech are facing overwhelming social engineering and semantic manipulation. This is particularly more prevalent amongst politicians who are trying to take advantage of the “Murky waters.”

The particular controversy is whether a free speech breaking point exists, a line at which the hateful or destructive or contentious nature of speech should prompt it to suffer constitutional protection under the First Amendment.

Surveys traditionally show that the American people are strong supporters of free speech in general, but that those numbers tend to drop when the review concentrates on distinct forms of controversial statements, such as race and racism.

The controversy over what defines “hate speech” is not novel, but it is reiterated as the experiences of the Black Lives Matter movement and the Me Too movement. These movements have heightened awareness and expanded national conversation about racism, sexual harassment, and more. With the heightened perception come intensified calls for legislation punishing speech that is racially detrimental or that is belligerent based on gender or gender integrity.

Currently, antagonistic to widely held misimpressions, there is not a class of speech known as “hate speech” that may consistently be prohibited or penalized. However, Offensive expression that endangers or incites lawlessness or that contributes to the motive for a criminal act may, on some occasions, be castigated as part of a hate crime, but not merely as offensive language. The foul language that creates a hostile work environment or that disrupts school classrooms may be forbidden. Yet, again, it is hard to draw the line as to what indeed pertains to hate speech, as one may see the statement differently than the other, even within the holders of the same racial profile.

Every Phenomenon must be Defined within its Exclusive Context

Racist philosophy is unethical and unfair, however persuasively speaking, it is not a crime. Racists don’t commit crimes day in and day out. Just like those who are not racist are innocent of everything. Nonetheless, those who act upon their evil thoughts, very often legitimize their actions without weighing on the consequences. So, Racism is not beyond a racist belief. But, today, it seems like racism appears equal to a crime, just like someone watching crime movies or contemplating to kill an enemy without doing so!

Similarly, it is the typical rhetoric today as the hate speech is not a free speech, or racist remark is, in fact, considered hate speech, and as pointed out earlier, some are pushing to criminalize the racist comment.

Once again, in confirmation of what I mentioned earlier in this piece, a well-educated person in a sound mind would concede to the fact that racism in any shape or form is unethical and evil. Yet, many people day in and day out may think, fantasize, and even have a firm conviction to their apartheid tenet; however, they rarely act on them unless they feel that their freedom of expression (No matter how unacceptable to the mainstream) is being jeopardized. The latest is something that we need to be on the lookout!

Prohibiting free speech transpires as the source of all conflicts and spinning wheel of the vicious circle of prohibition, breach of the first amendment, anger, hostility, hate (and yes- Not Hate speech or racial hatred), and ultimately “Crime.”

Racially motivated speech riddled with hatred is just another hateful speech, and any prefix associated with it is absolutely redundant with the potential counterproductive outcome. And yes again- Free speech is and always be a free speech, as we can stop listening to others, but we can’t shut their mouth. Same, we can’t change the way people think.

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Lately, we can’t circumvent hearing terms like a hate crime, or crime against humanity. When I hear these words, then I ask myself, is there such a thing as a “good crime” or an evil crime?

To the same extent, I ask again- Do we really need to categorize the offense, other than trying to establish the level of punishment?!

Plus- don’t the punishment level is merely reflective of the lethality and level of intention versus the motive?

Racially motivated hate and speech associated with it is the belief. Crime is committed by someone against another human being that is motivated by hatred towards the same victim is just another crime, only with its own particular motive, just like killing a rich person for his money. So would there be racism and fascism against rich people? (Which exists, by the way!)

Are there laws against crime against Elites? — Of course not! That is called a homicide, just like any other crime.

Race Crime or Hate is the Reflection of Perception and Poor Morale

Crime is an objective phenomenon and is determined by society and its governing laws. Hate, on the other hand, is the reflection of subjective perception as to how someone feels about something, someone, or an idea. Unfortunately, there has been a significant misconception of what semantics are behind these words.

Again, radical racist ideology may indeed result in a crime, if not addressed beforehand, and an effective manner. Nonetheless, that is ideally achieved through communication, education, improved perception, and rehabilitation of morale. The latter is something that will never be achieved through suppression of free speech, even racist speech in particular.

Politicizing Racism will not do us any Good

People need to learn about the consequences of their actions and not the results of how they see things.

Politics does precisely the opposite!

Going back to the beginning of this writeup, racism is a cultural, social phenomenon with ethnocentric roots, and it must be dealt with accordingly. Politicians, especially in our lifetime, are indiscriminately using the “race card” way too often to smear their opponents and or gain the support of their base. This not only undermines social harmony but also is perpetuating the vicious circle of crime and hindrance of individual autonomy.

“One can’t change how people think, but we all can make mastermind accountable for what they do!”

“One can contribute to the hate and thus the crime even with or without intention to do so!”

Transparency is the first step to fight Racism, then comes Accountability

One can’t solve a problem without recognizing it.

Racism is a problem, and it will always be a problem, but eliminating transparency via prohibition and criminalization of its expression is never going to help its resolution.

Transparency requires the trust of its constituents, and establishing trust comes with respecting their individual autonomy. Once we create clarity, then the time comes to develop tolerance, something which is hard, if ever, achievable through prohibition and outlawing of the specific profiles of expressions. By way of optimal transparency, accountability is less burdensome to the system and the people, and it can only improve by way of building tolerance. And building tolerance requires a multifaceted approach of education, media, discussions, and at times calculated debates.

Take-Home Message

Racism is a cultural happening embedded in the sheer depth of ethnocentrism. It is a double-edged broadsword. Prohibiting its expression drives furtive resentment, thus once admitted, the racist idiom would only flash the foolishness of its partakers.

“Let the odious racist mind vent itself through freedom of expression, and instead, we punish the wrongful action of a person.”

Punish the crime, not the ideology. Improve communication, not prohibit it, no matter how uncomfortable it is to listen. Minimize profiling (Eliminate if possible), as it is by itself discriminatory.

“Diversity is the diversity between two individuals and not the profile of a person he or -she belongs to.”

Change the culture of ethnocentrism, Populism, and racism at its root; thus, “The individual.”

This article was originally published by Illumination on Medium