Re: USAGE: "racism"

Ed Heil wrote:

> Tom Wier wrote:
>
> > John Cowan wrote:
> >
> > > Because "racism" is not synonymous with "discrimination" or "race
> hatred";
> > > it refers specifically to a pattern of *institutionalized* denigration
> > > and degredation of dark-skinned people.  (This point is not
> > > well understood or explained in general, and a non-native speaker
> > > can certainly be excused for not being aware of it.)
> >
> > Eh... I would ammend that only to say that it is the institutionalized
> > denigration of other people on the basis of skin color.  There can
> > be black racists, too. (Given the history of African peoples, however,
> > my suspicion is that there are fewer of them.)
>
> You both seem to be taking a very prescriptivist stance towards this
> word...  Surely you're better linguists than that! :)
Not at all.  It's a question of using efficient and precise terminology.
(For that precision, see below.)

Just as in linguistics we couldn't get very far unless all of us had settled
on an effective use of words like "morphology", "phoneme", etc., so
too here we cannot progress very far in understanding the object of
our study (racism) unless we agree exactly what that is.  John proposed
one meaning for the word, and I proposed a different one.  We both
had our reasons, and neither is assumed to be right.  But in putting forth
our reasons, we were trying to argue for use of the word in our terms,
because by doing so, each of us thinks we can better understand the issue
at hand.

Much of science procedes in arguments based on fundamental questions
of definition like this.

> I think that most people would say that "racism" is thinking of
> someone badly because of their race, and/or treating them badly
> because of that.
That may be true, but does it mean they have the most effective usage*?
You know, I think it was Wittgenstein who said something to the effect
that "all philosophy is language", meaning we have to understand what we
mean by the words we use before we can procede to understand anything
more complicated.

Personally, I like John's dichotomy because it reveals something very
interesting about the way societies manipulate hate for the advancement
of some agenda.  If a society can enshrine hate as a part of social or
legal code, then that is a kind of hate of very different dimensions than,
say, the race hatred which more often acts like xenophobia than hatred
of race per se.  While the latter is often transitory, and not very much a
fundamental, day-to-day experience of a society (much like, say, the
Boxers in 19th Century China), the former can almost be taken as the
encoding of the power structures of a society,  like the American South
until recent decades.

* This reminds me of an argument on metaphysics I was once involved
in in highschool.  The discussion centered around whether God can be
omnipotent, and someone made the comment that how could God be
omnipotent if he can't make a boulder so large he himself cannot lift it.
Naturally, the response was:  "You're confused about the meaning
of 'omnipotent'.  'Omnipotent' is better defined as 'being able to do
anything not in itself self-contradictory'."

> "Race" here is taken as a primitive but is of course in fact a
> thoroughly modern and culturally constructed notion, which deserves an
> analysis of its own.)
>
> The example of "racism" par excellance has been American whites' bad
> treatment of American blacks (going back to the way those blacks ended
> up in America in the first place).  This is what people immediately
> think of when they hear the word "racism" so it has to be included in
> the definition of the word as a sort of "textbook example."
But I think that's my point:  you're confusing two very distinct subsets
of hate:  the kind, like xenophobia, which makes whites walk away faster
if they see a black person on a dark street at night; and the kind that encodes
one class's power into day to day life, like Rosa Parks's experience on that
bus.

===========================================
Tom Wier <artabanos@...>
AIM: Deuterotom ICQ: 4315704
<http://www.angelfire.com/tx/eclectorium/>
"Cogito ergo sum, sed credo ergo ero."
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