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Aug. 24, 2018 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin
21:39
Colourblindness Will End Racism
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Have you ever wondered why people say, oh, I don't see color as a way to fix racism?
I know exactly why, Franny.
It's because they're not racists.
They don't judge people because of the colour of their skin, but that's not what you consider to be racism.
So we're really not even talking about the same thing anyway.
Wow, this feels like old times, doesn't it?
But let me pip you up the post with this one, Franny.
Being colorblind is the only way to fix racism.
Yeah, that doesn't work.
Yes, I'm sure that top-down control of society based on the categorization of people around the category of race, which as you will tell us is not real, but in fact a social construct, is in fact the way to solve racism.
Good job, Franny.
You've done it.
On this show, we talk about race all the time.
Yes, it does seem somewhat pathological at this point.
Biologically speaking, race doesn't exist.
Oh my goodness, we've all been lied to!
Wait, why am I hosting this show?
Well, that was a quick way of admitting that all you do is race bait over a fictional issue, but good job.
Carry on, Franny.
Oh, so race isn't biological, but the social construct of race and racism still have a very real impact on everyone's lives.
Francesca, this is why you are the equivalent of a flat earther when it comes to this discussion.
If you think there is no biological component to what people usually describe as race, I don't know how you explain that black parents produce black children and white parents produce white children and Asian parents produce Asian children and so on and so on.
If race is not biological, how is it that there is a common threat of ancestry in my country, say for example Britain, where something like 82% of all of the genes in this country have been here since the Ice Age for about 10,000 years.
How do you explain this collection of genes that produces a fairly reliable and predictable range of expression?
It's amazing how Chinese people are not indigenously produced in Britain if race is not connected to biology.
It's not just random pot luck.
There is a predictable biological process that determines what kind of genes you can potentially have.
That's what people are usually talking about when they talk about the word race.
They're not suggesting that these gene expressions can't be found in other races.
They're saying in certain combinations in certain areas, for a process of inheritance, there appear to be patterns that can be picked out.
And this is what we describe as races.
Not subspecies, not inferior or superior, just observable differences in patterns between different groups of humans.
And from these observable differences, we have derived the social construct of race.
Because there are two uses of the term race.
And the second one is the modern incarnation for people like you.
You wish to describe everything as a social construct.
Well, if you look at this through a postmodernist lens, you can actually determine that.
You can say that the things that people have picked up on, the noticeable variations between humans, the perceivable differences, can be categorized.
Humans, being the pattern-seeking creatures that they are, have discovered that there are certain patterns to this.
And so the social construct of a race, as in what people hold in their mind when they think of a black person, a white person, a Chinese person, the physical features and sometimes cultural and behavioral expressions are indeed another use of the term race.
But I'm afraid you cannot divorce the genome of a human from the outward expression of that genome in their person and the perception of this that other people have.
It's just too far, especially when you are misrepresenting a scientist.
Modern genetics has shown that the lines around race are so arbitrary that they're actually meaningless.
And since I'm not a scientist, I'll take a quote.
Francis Collins, the director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, said it himself, those who wish to draw precise racial boundaries around certain groups will not be able to use science as a legitimate justification.
Yes.
Precise racial boundaries.
I agree.
There are no precise racial boundaries.
But at the end of the day, Francesca, I'm still white, you're still black, white people come from Europe, and black people come from Africa, even if we don't have a precise racial boundary.
Now, do we need to do anything with this information?
No, of course not.
In fact, I don't think that the problems we're having actually stem from the fact that people are of different races.
As you can see with the United States, Jewish people and Asian people are doing spectacularly, as you can see in the United Kingdom.
Indian people are doing just as well.
The reason that broadly defined these quote-unquote races are doing so well is because of a certain pattern of behavior that they exhibit.
Now, I don't think that these patterns of behavior are inherent to these people because of their race.
I think that they're socialized to behave this way.
I think this is a process of learned behavior based on their culture, based on their history, based on their religion, and based on the context that they find themselves in.
And really, that's what makes your definition of racism very, very interesting to me.
It makes me wonder why you are unable to account for the things that I've said, whereas I can account for the things that you have said.
And this isn't just about feelings.
Race is all about the structural foundation of social power.
The structural foundation of social power.
What could that possibly be?
The answer is obvious: it's the individual.
Social power is based on groups in society of freely associating people.
Society is made up of overlapping groups filled with individuals who freely associate to those groups through spontaneous choice.
What we call society is the totality of those associations and their concurrent expressions.
Social power is those groups expressing themselves in their daily lives, doing things that it's perfectly legal for them to do, operating in a manner that they see fit within the bounds of the law.
If race is the structural foundation of social power, then you are saying that race is the local community.
I'm not even necessarily against that definition.
That's basically how Falgooni Sheff would probably define it as well, in not such a roundabout way.
I've gone through English philosophy to get to a definition that explains your definition, so we can have a concordance on this issue.
And speaking specifically of Roger Scruton and his work, Where We Are: The State of Britain Now, it seems, Francesca, that you're complaining about the somewheres, because you are in anywhere.
Scruton suggests that the advent of globalism has created broadly two kinds of people: the anywheres and the somewheres.
The anywheres are the cosmopolitan global elite who feel at home in any progressive city as long as it panders to their sensibilities.
The somewheres are people who have a distinct geographic location that they feel personally tied to and feel to which they belong.
You are speaking directly to this sense of belonging.
If race is the structural foundation of social power, you are talking about the people who are the somewheres, who make up the local communities.
They, in your consideration, are the foundation of structural power and therefore they are the concept of race.
So, if race doesn't exist biologically, why do we keep talking about it?
Sound the alarm!
We keep talking about race because we created it!
Francesca, by your definition, we keep talking about race because we are it.
That's what you've defined race to be: us.
Just regular people living our lives.
That's your conception of what race is.
Yay!
Us!
That's right!
Race is a social construct.
A social construct is a category, perception, or idea created and developed by society and then applied to individuals or groups.
I completely agree.
That's a perfectly fine definition of what a social construct is, and it makes perfect sense.
And in fact, life couldn't be any other way.
Because humans are social animals, and we operate in groups, and we are individuals ourselves, and we can only act on the things that we perceive.
Things that we don't perceive are beyond our understanding and we can't act upon those things.
We don't know that they're there to act upon them.
So this is a perfectly fine example.
Why do you then act like social constructs don't actually exist?
But social constructs are still very real and have huge impacts on our lives.
Of course they do.
The world of human thought is formed through social constructs.
That doesn't mean there's no connection to a biological reality, which spoiler alert there is.
You just happen to be a blank slater.
Again, if you'd like to explain to me how we have different skin tones and in fact how we turned out to be differently organized down below, that would be fantastic.
Because that would mean you would have to identify the biological markers through which you create the social construct of what a white man is, as I do to you to determine you as a black woman.
So when you say these are social constructs, A, of course they are.
B, they're not divorced from reality.
C, you don't have to make them sound like they're real.
Everyone knows that they're real.
They are necessary.
This is how humans operate in the world.
Social constructs are not rootless.
They are based in observable reality.
They are formed using empiricism.
And we are not, just because you are blank slaters, going to sever the connection between reality and our model of reality that we operate on when we're making our daily decisions.
It's not going to happen, Francesca.
Here's what I know.
Talking about racism just creates more racism.
Uh, no!
I'm afraid it does, Francesca, and you outlined it exactly in your race and social construct definitions.
Let me give you an example.
You are probably not prejudiced against left-handed people, but there will have been a time in history where you quite likely would have been.
I, a left-handed person, may well have been persecuted by right-handed people because of my left-handedness.
The Catholic Church vigorously oppressed left-handedness in medieval Europe.
Left-handers were routinely accused of consorting with the devil during the excesses of the Inquisition and witch hunts of the 15th and 16th centuries.
Left-handedness was sometimes considered sufficient to identify a woman as a witch.
I'm sure you don't think that we still have any witches around, do you?
It's not that you don't perceive that people have hands, it's that you don't perceive there is any value to be attached to using one hand over another.
You have become colourblind to left and right-handedness, as I'm sure almost everyone is now.
If you want to become colourblind towards race, the same effect will occur.
If I were to look up various statistics about left and right-handed people, and I found that left-handed people suffered from a disadvantage in a predominantly right-handed society, would I be able to accuse wider society of anti-left-handed bigotry because of my disadvantage?
The answer is no, because wider society doesn't even perceive the handedness.
Therefore, any discrimination that's happening to me or any disadvantages I suffer isn't because of bigotry on their part.
It's simply not perceived by them.
There must be another explanation.
There must be another explanation, and it is incumbent on me to find it, instead of stopping at the most convenient and easy one for me, which is just to scream that the entire world just hates left-handed people.
Just to be clear, I don't know whether left-handed people are actually suffering any systemic bias or not.
That was just hypothetical.
Getting back to your point, though, the only way to solve racism is to not consider someone's race when making a decision.
Even if you think it is in the service of corrective good, of social justice, you are still being racist.
You're still making judgments based on race.
But since that's not the definition of racism you use, then we can't really go on with this conversation, because the definition of racism you use means that literally every single society that has ever been is racist, whether they were openly racist or not.
Not that you actually define racism in this video, but I've heard enough from you to know exactly what your definition of race is.
Racism is power plus prejudice, and you view the accumulation of power exclusively in ethno-nationalist terms.
Black power and white power.
Race isn't the problem.
The reason that you do this in this video is to undermine the scientific validity of racism, which is something I agree with.
I don't think racism does have scientific validity.
But the reason that you have to do that is because there is a natural causal connection between race and racism.
Otherwise, what are they even talking about?
So when you say we're not talking about race, we're talking about racism.
That's not true.
You started talking about race, and racism is apparently a consequence of race, so it's not like the two aren't connected.
First off, race isn't the problem.
Racism is.
And even if it was the problem, problems don't get worse when you talk about them and they don't magically go away when you ignore them.
Race isn't the problem.
Excessive focus on race is the problem.
And so if we keep focusing excessively on race, then we are perpetuating that problem, which inevitably is leading to racism, because racism seems to be a direct consequence of focusing on race.
In the same way that anti-left-handed bigotry is the consequence of focusing on which hand a person writes with.
It's just not very relevant.
There are behaviors we can look at long before we get to what you're proposing.
Colorblindness, while nice in theory, has no effect on structural and institutional racism.
It's not just nice in theory.
It's the only way to end racism.
Because colorblindness is the practice of anti-racism.
It is the performative nature of anti-racism.
To be making your decisions along other vectors than race means that you are not a racist.
You are an anti-racist and you are in the process of being an anti-racist.
And I suppose now we will have to get into structural racism.
Because I don't believe the US is structurally racist.
Just because one group of people that you can identify, who are apparently not a race, have a different outcome in the same society as another group of people who you can identify as distinct from the first but are still not a race does not mean necessarily that the process was racist.
It could be that there are other factors within these different communities that aren't races that we can identify that cause the different outcomes that you particularly are ignoring in this video.
Racism is a system and that system benefits certain people at the expense of others.
No, racism is an opinion.
As you will admit later on in this video, most people probably aren't racist.
Therefore we can't just explain the Western world as being inherently racist because some minorities do worse than others and some minorities do worse than white people.
It's not about race.
It's about behavior.
Frankly, it's about one's willingness to conform with the Western liberal bourgeois standards that people like you perpetuate.
I notice that you speak with a fine accent, Francesca Ramsey.
Ignoring it just lets those problems persist.
Don't believe me?
Let's take a look at some examples where colorblindness doesn't work.
Number one, preschool punishment.
Let's face a fact, preschool-aged children of every race are monsters.
As the father of a preschool-aged child, I can tell you that they are certainly not.
They are in fact amazing.
They are unbelievably adorable.
They're discovering the world for the first time, and they love you unconditionally.
They want to share every aspect of their life with you.
When they discover anything that's new and interesting, Daddy, come look.
Daddy, look at this.
It's incredible.
And I feel bad for you and other millennials who think this way.
You are genuinely missing out on an enriching aspect of the human experience by not having children.
I'm just letting you know.
According to the US Department of Education Office for Civil Rights report released in 2014, black children make up 18% of preschoolers, but almost half of all suspensions.
Half.
And I don't think anybody believes all these preschool teachers are racist out to get little black children, but the data shows that black and Latino children often face steeper punishments than their white classmates for the same behavior.
That's what we call recidivism, Francesca.
And it's because they come from broken homes.
Coming from broken homes is well documented to make children into delinquents.
They are badly behaved at school.
They underachieve.
They are more likely to be poor and therefore more likely to be less intelligent than their classmates that come from married stable households.
And 72% of black children are raised in single-parent households.
The white man did not do this to the black community.
This is a problem that comes from within the black community and can only be solved by the black community.
No amount of trying to address structural issues here is going to change the fact that these children are being raised in sub-standard conditions because of the choices that their parents have made.
Your solution to try and fix what you consider to be structural racism is to drop standards.
It is to not require these children to behave like the white and Asian and Jewish children.
I'm sorry, but that is the bigotry of low expectations.
It is not unreasonable of us to expect black children to behave in the same way that white children or Asian children or Jewish children behave.
I am sorry, Francesca.
No.
We will not simply abandon our standards because someone's parents made bad decisions.
If you want, you can hold these people to account at any time.
You could make these crappy videos day after day castigating parents who don't form a stable family before having children.
For men who run out on their families, for women who have children with like half a dozen different men.
You could be addressing the real social problems that plague the black community.
Instead, you're blaming it on whitey.
And simply believing we shouldn't see race or we shouldn't talk about race does nothing to solve this problem.
That's because race did nothing to cause this problem.
But I suppose to the hammer of racial ideology, every problem looks like a nail.
Number two, the name study.
A study by the National Bureau of Economic Research confirmed that people with ethnic sounding names, that's a whole nother episode, are less likely to get interviewed when they apply for jobs.
Meanwhile, applicants with white sounding names actually get 33% more callbacks for interviews.
Amazing how they delineate between white people and having an ethnicity.
But more specifically, you mean English and non-English.
There is a reason Donald Trump is not called Donald Drump.
His German father changed his name to fit in with the English-speaking culture around him.
This is what we would call integration, and it's the way that societies maintain their homogeneity.
It's how we prevent deep rifts in civil society.
And it's not just black and white.
They've done similar studies around the world, and in Canada, people with white-sounding names were 35% more likely to get callbacks than people with Indian or Chinese sounding names.
People with white-sounding names, again, read English-sounding names, are more likely to be culturally acclimatized to the society that you're in.
They're more likely to have been born there.
They're more likely to speak fluent English.
But I suppose that's what you would call racism.
So instead of just assuming people shouldn't care about colour or names, companies, governments, and schools should take the bias out of hiring and experiment with nameless resumes to, you know, solve the problem.
Absolutely not, Francesca.
I mean, you know what we call it when a minority dictates to the majority, don't you?
We call that an aristocracy.
If you don't like being different to the society that you have immigrated into, maybe you should just try and adapt.
Maybe you should try and fit in.
And one method of doing that is anglicizing one's name.
You are in an English-speaking culture after all.
So tell me again how colorblindness is going to fix the fact that I can't get an education, a job or a house.
You have an education, a job and a house, Francesca.
You, a black woman, managed to get all of these three things.
So colorblindness must be working somewhat because you weren't being racially discriminated against.
Not judging people based on their race is how we end racism.
Because that is the practical end of racism.
That's where it stops.
That's where, after this point, when we cease judging people based on their race, there is no more racism.
So other factors come into play.
And I know you don't like other factors because they take away from your thesis that everything is caused by racism.
I realize that for someone who talks almost exclusively about race, that's going to be a bit of a problem.
If we were to move into a post-racial society, you'd be out of a job.
So I understand why colorblindness can't be the solution for you personally.
But have you considered that your constant racializing of every issue is perpetuating the problem and means that it will never actually die?
These differences may seem minute, but they're part of a very large structure of oppression that's been ingrained in us.
If we can understand that we made it up, we can actively work to change it.
The systemic issues are not actually systemic issues.
They're actually family issues that are manifesting in a system that expects the average person to have come from a nuclear family.
The question, Francesca, is not why do Jewish people find it impossible to form a family?
Why do Asian people, Indian people, or white people find it impossible to form a family?
Because they don't.
The question is, why are Mexicans and blacks failing to form a significant and cohesive family unit?
Instead of focusing on this question that applies to these small, distinct groups, you have externalized all of the problem to be the entire rest of society.
When the entire rest of society, in all its diverse glory, is busy getting along just fine.
Why are these groups failing?
That's the question you have to ask yourself, and they're the solutions that you have to find.
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