I read on another thread that using racial slurs isn't racist. I've also read that if you claim someone is a racist then you yourself are a racist. Both of these statements seem rather silly to me.
To use examples in the news:
Gates implies Crowley is a racist, therefore Gates is a racist.
Obama says the cops acted stupidly, therefore Obama is a racist.
Glenn Beck calls Obama a racist that hates whites, but Glen Beck isn't a racist.
It's really more confusing to me as time goes by.
Can anyone explain racism definitively?
If you'd like, swap the word ethnist for racist, I've just used the term because it is more common. I realize all humans belong to the same race in reality.
Broadly speaking, racism is the belief that race is an important determinant of talent, qualities or behavior. The beliefs can be positive or negative. Black people have rhythm, but black people are lazy. Jews are smart but Jews are crooked. Most people have prejudices about race or ethnic groups or religious groups or nationalities of some kind but if you're not a racist, in a generic sense, then these prejudices work as hypotheses until you have objective information about the person you are interacting with, but if your prejudices are so strong that you are likely to respond to your prejudice about the group the person belongs to instead of to what he/she is actually doing, you are a racist.
With respect to Gates-Crowley-Obama, the question is first when Gates first called Crowley a racist and accused him of racial profiling, were Gates' accusations based on Crowley's behavior up until that time or on Gates' beliefs about how white cops treat black men? Whatever you may think about the arrest, at the time Gates first called Crowley a racist and accused him of racial profiling, nothing Crowley had done warranted those accusations, so Gates' statements were racist. When Obama launched into a talk about what he believed the black experience with cops in America is or was after acknowledging he didn't know what had actually happened in this particular situation, his remarks were racist, too, since they were based on beliefs about how white cops treat black men, not how this white cop treated this black man. So, to the extent Gates' and Obama's statements were based on their beliefs about white cops, their statements are racist, and to the extent they continue to defend these statements, Gates and Obama are racists.
Without disputing that racism and racial profiling do sometimes still take place, the fact that both Gates and Obama, two exceptionally smart, well educated, worldly men could be blinded to the facts before them by their prejudices suggests that in addition to the fact of racial profiling there is a myth about racial profiling the many black people find compelling, so compelling that just hearing that racial profiling has been charged is enough for them to launch into stories and myths about racial profiling in America without caring about what the facts at hand are.
Had Obama acknowledged the power of the myth of racial profiling to distract us from the facts of a particular case and instead of reflexively defending the charge of racial profiling without first learning the facts, he might have said, "In the past, racial profiling was a common experience for black people, especially for young black men, but there has been much improvement in recent decades, and while racial profiling still takes place, it is just as important to identify mistaken accusations of racial profiling and take steps to limit the damage as it is to identify real incidences of racial profiling and take steps to limit the damage if we are to continue to make progress in race relations. What we must not do is take refuge in prejudices that blind us to opportunities to make further progress." That would have been a teaching moment.
