Racism: Flew's Three Concepts of Racism

Journal of Applied Philosophy, Vol. 10, No, 1 , 1993

DISCUSSION ARTICLE

Racism: Flew’s Three Concepts of Racism

ANTHONY SKILLEN

ABSTRACT In an article in Encounter, Antony Flew usefully opens up the issue of what racism is by giving three ‘concepts’: ( I ) ‘unjust&ed discrimination’; (2) ‘heretical belief; and (3) ‘institutionalised racism’. He rejects senses ( 2 ) and (3 ) in favour of ( I ) andfinds much ‘anti-racism’ in fact guilty of it. This article, while benefiting from Flew’s account, argues that it basically misconceives and underestimates racism by ignoring its complex ideological (sense 2 ) and institutional (sense 3 ) character. I n regard to (2) it is argued that we need to distinguish scalar and statistical claims from the binary ‘uslthem’ essentialism characteristic of racism. I n regard to (3) it is argued both that afirmative action is required by justice and that it entails ‘collateral injustice’ as well as consequential uncertainties.

According to Antony Flew [ 11, when people, beliefs or practices are spoken of as ‘racist’, one of three sorts of thing is usually being said. These express ‘three concepts of racism’. But only one of them, the first, is valid.

(1) ‘Racism as unjust discrimination.’ In this first of Flew’s senses, to be ‘racist’ is to discriminate in favour of or against people for no other or better reason than that they belong to one particular racial set [ 2 ] and not another. Since the ‘defining characteristics’ of a race are ‘skin pigmentation, shape of skull, etc.’ [3] and since such attributes are ‘strictly superficial and properly irrelevant to (almost) all questions of social status and employment’, racism in this sense is as ‘grotesquely unfair as to disqualify competing candidates because they are bald, or blond, or red-headed’ [a]. So this is a valid use of the term ‘racist’, which both picks out a recognisable practice, colour discrimination, and indicates why it is abominable.

(2) ‘Racism as heretical belief.’ In this second sense, to be ‘racist’ is to believe that there are substantial inherited differences among racial sets in attributes relevant to important practical questions. Such differences in accompanying characteristics might be differences in intelligence or susceptibility to physical pain, in aggressiveness or whatever. But, Flew contends, the person accused of ‘racism’ in this sense (provided they are not simply aiming to throw up a screen for true racism - racism I), is accused wrongly.

We cannot be blamed for sincere and empirically based beliefs, for ‘of what moral fault are these heretics supposed to be guilty?’ [ 5 ] Even were such beliefs to be false, the genuine holder, open therefore to rational correction, is not at moral fault. To call people who hold such beliefs ‘racist’, then, is both confused and dangerous. Flew is particularly concerned to defend proponents of hereditary IQ differences among racial sets (Arthur Jensen in particular) against the charge of ‘racism’ [6].

0 Society for Applied Philosophy, 1993, Blackwell Publishers, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford, OX4 1 JF, UK and 3 Cambridge Center, Cambridge, MA 02142, USA.

74 A . Skillen

(3) ‘Institutionalised racism.’ In this third sense ‘institutions’ (schools, firms, government courts) are said to be ‘racist’ when their routine practices, however, ‘legitimated’ have the effect and typically, it is alleged, the unadmitted purpose, of excluding or disadvantaging racial sets. Against this, Flew argues, again updon’, that institutions cannot have intentions and hence be the target of moral blame. Further, since the ground of the blame is simply the low position of certain racial sets, what the ‘anti-racist’ is guilty of is the error of ‘execrating racism as a moral abomination’ simply on the basis of that low place on the social scale. The irony in Flew’s eyes is that in the name of the struggle to eliminate institutional racism ‘anti- racist’ policies of ‘reverse discrimination’ are advocated. Their burden?: to ‘discriminate in favour of people for no other or better reason than that they belong to one particular racial set and not another’. This, of course, is ‘paradigmatically racist’ in Flew’s preferred first sense! [7]

. . . we shall by accepting such a definition be committed to dismantling all test and other criteria - even the fairest and most perfectly colour-blind - if and when these have revealed one racial set to be performing better than another. [8]

I want to discuss Flew’s conceptual analysis below. But it is worth emphasising what will have been obvious from my summary. Flew’s substantial theme is that the ‘anti-racist’ lobby have hijacked a genuine humanist value and inflated and twisted it into an instrument of propaganda and calumny. This they have done with the damaging and ultimately self- defeating goal of upgrading the social position of racial sets (particularly ‘negro’) with lower than average ‘educational and other track records’ especially through the lobby’s ‘anathematising’ [9] research-based beliefs that this track record is in large measure the result of genetically inherited inadequacies. In Flew’s terms, then, ‘racism 3’ (pervasive ‘disadvantage’) is falsely presented as a function of ‘racism 1’ by representing claims of inherited inferiorities (‘racism 2’) as a legitimating smokescreen. Thus armed, ‘anti-racism’ becomes the ideology of a genuine (hence abhorrent) racism with blacks getting preference simply on the basis of the colour of their skin.

Against this, Flew does not simply align himself with the Powellites. In an important passage he writes

Of course we may well deplore the fact that any group of people, white or non- white, are worse off than the majority in Western society; and therefore devote ourselves to reforms and adjustments in the spirit of equalisation. But to deplore that fact and to devote ourselves to changing it, is very different from discriminating in favour of a racially defined subset out of the total set of all those worse off than the majority. For to act in that way is not comprehensively, nor perhaps commendably, egalitarian. It is instead paradigmatically racist. [ 101

To this we will return. But it is important to be clear that Flew is here drawing a sharp distinction between, on the one hand, the way in which ‘the demands of liberal justice’ (‘treat each case on its merits’, ‘treat like cases alike’) might have an egalitarian implication and, on the other hand, the ‘anti-racist’ ‘egalitarianism’ which, in the interests of global redress treats racial set membership itself as a ground of preferential treatment.

0 Society for Applied Philosophy, 1993

Racism 75

An Alternative View

I do not share Flew’s conception of racism or his consequent sense of what ought to be done. Flew draws sharp distinctions between colour discrimination and beliefs about race and between individuals’ intended action (‘I don’t accept blacks’) and institutionally structured preferences and exclusions (‘Rules are rules’). On the contrary, I see racism, which is by no means peculiar to Europeans, as being like misogyny, bigotry and chauvinism in its straddling the theory-practice (belief-action) dichotomy essential to Flew’s scheme of things. Racism, in my view, is a belief-validated or ‘ideological’ disposition or attitude. As such, racism is not just a feature of this or that individual but a largely cultural matter, something that you learn or pick up as one more or less complex and virulent strand in the more or less conflicting fabric that constitutes your outlook.

To illustrate the complexity, here is a simple song I learned during the 1940s in my Australian infants’ school in an all-white city:

Oh how I wish that I could be A little Aborigine. The boomerang he learns to throw; And that is all he needs to know. He chases bunnies all day long And paddles in the billabong.

This arcadian ditty, consigning the Aboriginal to the grinning realm of nature, did not, I recall, go down well when I sang it to my country cousins whose wisdom was that ‘Abos’ were stinking, thieving, drunken Iayabouts. There was no space for my nigger-loving patronage in a town (Moree) where the large number of Aboriginals were excluded from the local swimming pool (though no doubt they had their billabongs to paddle in). You just don’t get racism without an ‘account’, however muddled, of its targets’ shortfalls. Nor do you get racism in isolation from a sustaining culture and constitutive institutions elevating, celebrating and welcoming activities, and consequently some individuals, as against others. A corollary of this is that, while racism is indeed an evil, it is less usefully thought of as an object of individual moral condemnation than as an object to be critically understood and contested at many levels.

Let us examine Flew’s ‘three concepts’ in more detail.

Racism 1: Unjust Discrimination

Are there any racists in Flew’s first sense? Not, I suggest, many. For the definition of ‘race’ that Flew proposes is wrong. His article defines racial difference as difference in ‘skin pigmentation, shape of skull, etc.’, characteristics which he rightly describes as ‘superficial’. But these things are not defining characteristics of race. Given some people’s skull shape, when they go dark brown in summer they can pass as ‘coloured’. But they are not. If Flew’s definition were right it would be hard to make sense of the fact that you can be mistaken for a person of a certain race. Nor does it allow for the possibility that two racially distinct sets could have coinciding skin colour, etc. These attributes are indices of racial identity. But races (and this is without prejudice to the ultimate utility of the concept, let alone to the existence of any ‘pure’ instances in our migratory and polyglot world) are


76 A . Skillen

defined in terms of genetic history, in terms of what used to be thought of as an ‘essence’ or ‘nature’ (now genetic components). Skin colour and such things are, in some cases though by no means all, more or less reliable indices of this, of what is colloquially called ‘blood’.

It would seem that it is this ‘essence’ rather than its surface manifestations, or perhaps ‘stigmata’, that is the racist’s self-defining and self-aggrandising focus: alien and inferior ‘blood’. This blood gives us, as Linnaeus (von Linne), the great botantical taxonomist, ‘revealed’, the following ‘characteristics’ of the ‘African’: ‘black, phlegmatic, relaxed in posture, black hair, etc . . . crafty, indolent, negligent, annoints himself with grease, governed by caprice . . .’ The Encyclopaedia Britannica 8 years earlier (and until over 100 years later) wrote of ‘vices the most notorious’ as ‘the portion of this unhappy race’, listing them with passionate exhaustiveness [ 111.

Skin colour, though itself liable to be seen as a ‘strange’ or ‘alien’ thing, is not in itself the racist’s target. Rather it is a sign of ‘that within’, which is seen as equally responsible for physical characteristics and for sundry incapacities and disqualifications. In this regard, contemporary genetic investigations into the degree to which what may seem superficially to be spectacular differences reflect minor differences in genetic structure have their cultural importance in questioning the very validity of the sharply posed ‘He’s not a - ?’, as if races were Aristotelian species: kinds of human, ‘essentially different’.

In an effort to negate racism, many rubbish the very concept of race as an ideological reflex of rivalries or conquests. They see the whole idea of different, albeit mingled ‘races’ as a vicious postulation or construction of ‘essential differences’, of ‘otherness’, justifying hostile or exploitative practices. Given that in everyday life the more or less casual recognition of racial distinctness is quite literally universal, such a view strikes me as phobic. We need to recognise the historicity both of races and of conceptions and theories of race. We need, for example, to reflect on what would be entailed in answering a child’s question such as ‘Are French people of a different race to Irish people?’ in one way or another. More to the point, we need to be clear about the distinction between making interesting genetic distinctions and making distinctions of great human importance. We do not need to jettison the very idea of race in order to contest racism. We do, however, need a critical understanding of what racial identity amounts to.

Racism 2: ‘Disfavoured Belief

Flew’s ‘second concept of racism’, as belief in relevant racial differences, then, seen by him as a quite distinct species, contaminates the (corrected) first concept in so far as any racial discrimination is ‘prejudiced’ and ascribes characteristic shortcomings to its targets. Indeed it seems to me that the notion of racial identity as an inherited essence goes some way towards explaining the pervasively ‘ideological’ character of racism, its general expression in terms of mystifying beliefs in inherited differences ‘relevant’ to practical life - as when one’s mother explains one’s speciousness as a function of the ‘Irish blood from your father’s mother’s side’.

Here Hume is, as always, interesting. He says, for example that Jews are duplicitous and rude. But he explains these vices as the Jews’ cultural response to their persecution and ostracism. On the other hand, he pronounces ‘negroes’ to be inherently inferior:

I am apt to suspect that the negroes and in general1 all the other species of men (for


Racism 77

there are four or five different kinds) to be naturally inferior to the whites. There never was a civilized nation of any other complexion than white, nor even any individual eminent in either action or speculation. No ingenious manufacture among them, no arts, no sciences. On the other hand the most rude and barbarous of the whites, such as the ancient Germans, the present Tartars, have still something eminent about them, in their valour, their form of government, or some other particular. Such a uniform and constant difference could not happen in so many countries and ages, if nature had not made an original distinction betwixt these breeds of men. Not to mention our colonies, there are negro slaves dispersed all over Europe, of which none ever discovered any symptom of ingenuity, tho’ low people without education will slant up amongst us and distinguish themselves in every profession. In Jamaica, indeed, they talk of one negro as a man of parts and learning; but it is likely he is admired for very slender accomplishments like a parrot, who speaks a few words plainly. [ 121

Now this sort of talk, sometimes more, sometimess less grounded or thoughtful, is as common as litter on the streets of London. It is paradigmatic of racism. Flew excludes it from the field of racism proper. When Ian Smith said it is not a question of race but of standards that blacks should be denied the vote, he was saying things that are, ‘we would ordinarily say’, racist. Yet, to the extent that they are sincere utterances they can’t, on Flew’s view, be racist at all, because racism by proper definition is morally abominable, whereas morally to condemn a belief is to be categorically mistaken. Moreover, stupidity, ill-discipline and built-in authoritarianism are actually relevant to the potential for such things as self-government, so you can’t condemn people for racial discrimination on such grounds. Skin colour, the focus of Flew’s ‘racists in the first sense’, is not relevant. So if racism were the second sort of thing ‘we would be left with no warrant for condemning the racist as wicked’ [ 131.

But Flew’s concerns here are more particular: much of his discussion of ‘racism in the second sense’ is taken up with defending, against charges of racism, Arthur Jensen and the sort of factor-analytical IQ geneticism that has been exemplified in Britain by Hans Eysenck [14]. These are ‘heretics’ wrongly anathematised - for how, as we saw Flew arguing, can you condemn people for their beliefs? But Flew’s argument is even more speclfic here. The IQ-geneticists’ proposition is that, allowing for environmental influences, blacks on average are less intelligent than whites (who in turn tend to rate below Jews, Chinese and Japanese). Now the other side of such statistical claims is that nearly half of blacks are more ‘intelligent’ than the average white given the overlap in scores of the two racial sets. So any individual black might be more intelligent than any individual white, though if you meet a randomly selected white there is a slightly better than even chance of his or her being brighter than a randomly selected black. Flew writes, then,

It remains manifestly impossible to deduce a conclusion about any particular individual from propositions stating only the average characteristics of that set as a whole. [15]

I do not want here to add to the blood spilt on the nature-nurture debate over intelligence, though it has always struck me that the section of society most wedded to natural superiorities is also most ardent, for the sake of their own progency, in paying for its nurture. There is, however, no a ptioti reason for thinking that the common humanity of


78 A . Skillen

racial sets entails our sharing an equality in its good or bad qualities. Here Flew makes an important point in the pursuit of which he quotes Melvin J. Lasky:

I would much prefer equal treatment and political rights to be argued from ‘the brotherhood of man’ than from dubious thesis of ancient cultural achievement, for I am appalled at the implication that if Africans had no glorious past behind them they would somehow be ineligible for freedom and fraternity. [ 161

Flew is saying first, that those who nail their anti-racist colours to the mast of the falsity of ‘Jensenism’ are committed to the uncomfortable inference that if the Jensen’s thesis turns out in fact to be correct then it will be legitimate to discriminate against blacks.

Now it seems to me that Flew, as so often, is saying something right here, but not quite for the reasons he gives. In everyday life we take for granted that some people, including our own kith and kin, are sometimes more, sometimes less bright, conscientious, strong, fit, fast, placid or handsome than we are. This is a basic condition of understanding what it is to live in a human community; among the ‘brotherhood of man’. It is part of a common-sense, intuitive, ‘statistical’ or probabilistic grasp of things. The important thing to grasp is that only the most despicable snobs look down on or shun people just because they think those people are not quite as good along some dimension as them. If they think of others as fellows in the first place such differences are much of the time irrelevant.

Now, within limits, it is possible to see Jensen’s sort of claim as no more threatening than that. It is a claim about average differences within an overall population, humanity, whose similarities are overwhelmingly more impressive and important. But Flew is wrong to talk as if the believed scale of such differences is irrelevant to our sense of common humanity. Hume, we saw, believed that ‘negroes’ were incapable of civilised attainments, and was even prepared to doubt the existence of ‘exceptions’. Given that belief, a sense of common humanity, of ‘the brotherhood of man’, is at best problematic. This is an extreme case, and we are familiar with intermediaries: ‘He’s not your usual black, quite a decent chap really’.

An as ideology, racism isn’t in the form of a balancing of probabilities against a black person’s measuring up to a white. Racism isn’t about averages or tentative hypotheses regarding overlapping sets. However it might be methodologically suspect, however it might be taken up politically by racists, Jensen’s sort of work is ‘scalar’. But racism in all the forms I have seen in operation, is not scalar, it is ‘binary’, a matter of ‘polar’ oppositions in the way some people see their fellow humans. A matter of eithedor, of us against them, or of us over them. Hence racist thinking is obsessed with the attribution of ‘essential’ or ‘basic’ or ‘inherent’ differences of kind, with ‘alienisation’, to coin a suitably ugly term. Within that sort of thinking the exceptions, if allowed, tend to prove the rule. This is the ancient vocabulary of ‘types’, ‘species’ or ‘natural kinds’, a concept which permits exceptions, freaks. It is the vocabulary of, ‘your Paki . . .’, ‘The Abo . . .’, ‘The Japs . . .’, of genetic generalisation. If such thinking is scalar at all, its populations scarcely overlap, for such overlap consists of ‘odd ones out’, conceded blurs in otherwise hard-edged profiles. It is the sort of thinking we nice people fall into when we find ourselves seeing a piece of behaviour, which in our own ‘kith and kin’ would be seen as the sad human norm, as ‘typical bloody . . .’ (the reader may complete accordingly) - stereotyping [17].

So Flew, in instancing massively overlapping but different distribution curves as his model of the victimised ‘heretical belief racism’, fails to get at the essentialist and polar thinking characteristic of the racist way of seeing humanity.

It is helpful here I think, to look at Aristotle [18]. For Aristotle’s discussion of the


Racism 79

legitimacy of slavery shows how easy it is for even great minds to slip between a scalar and a polar mode of thought. (It is fascinating too that The Philosopher’s defence of slavery as a ‘natural’ and benign form of existence for some makes, as far as I can see, no racial references .)

Aristotle stresses that ‘the difference between ruler and subject is a difference of kind which the difference of degree never is’. Yet he argues that the ‘inferior’ and the ‘lower’ are ‘by nature slaves’. Given the threatened clash between a dichotomy (which is linked with another: citizen and non-citizen) and a scale, Aristotle fabricates a string of analogies: soul to body, human to animal, adult to child, male to female, master to slave, conjuring up dichotomising distinctions consistent with his intentions. For, at the end of the day (and at the beginning of the day too), ‘a slave is useful for the wants of life and therefore will obviously require only so much virtue as will prevent him from failing in his duty’. It looks very much as if ‘nature’ has miraculously fitted some humans to flourish precisely in doing such hack-work as Athenian bosses might require. Scalar ‘inferiorities’ become alchemised into polar ‘inferiorities’, to natural ceilings on individual potentialities, to legitimate that most polar and political of relationships, the subordination of slavery.

I must beware of my own polarising urges here. For I want to say that given the overwhelming similarities that underly the sense of common humanity, the person who sees the world in terms of the sort of essentialising divisions I have been drawing attention to is at least suffering from a shortfall in vision. If his racism is sincere he ought not to be ‘condemned’ and vilified, still less hunted as a heretic, though he may need to be argued with, contested and, if he is in a position of power, fought. Flew offers me the alternatives of ‘moral condemnation’ or polite discussion. This is too exiguous. Not only can beliefs be racist but racism typically entails a belief ‘system’. Hence Flew’s dissection of ‘racism in the second sense’ involves considerable misdirection.

Racism 3: ‘Institutionalised Racism’

Flew represents his target here with a quotation from the Swann Committee Report:

There are certain routine practices, customs and procedures in our society whose consequence is that black people have poorer jobs, health, housing and life chances than do the white majority . . . These practices and customs are maintained by relations and structures of power, and are justified by centuries- old beliefs and attitudes which hold that black people are essentially inferior to white people - biologically or culturally or both. ‘Racism’ is a shorthand term for this combination of discriminatory practices, unequal relations and structures of power, and negative beliefs and attitudes . . . [ 191

Much of Flew’s discussion here is taken up with ‘satire-defying’ instances of ‘anti-racism’ of this sort, to which one might as well add the taboo in certain places on asking for or offering ‘black coffee’.

Save to point out that political life universally throws up ludicrous extremities motivated by despair or power-seeking and that the ‘anti-racist’ movement has been mined for gems with energy and panache while other seams have been left unexplored, I want to avoid discussion of these anecdotes. For Flew, they reveal that the ‘race relations industry’ is precisely an industry that manufactures ‘racism’ where little or none exists.


80 A . Skillen

Flew advances three objections to the notion of institutionalised racism. First, it confines ‘racism’ to whites. Second, it makes racism ‘a characteristic of institutions rather than individual behaviours’ whereas racism properly so-called is ‘essentially intentional’. Third, ‘racism’ in this sense is defined by consequences, by inequality of outcomes of practices, rather than, again by discriminatory intentions.

Part of the trouble with discussing Flew’s argument is its extreme particularity of focus: the British scene and in particular the writings and actions of Afro-Caribbean and Asian activists and their supporters within Britain. A refugee from Mars (assuming he or she gained access to the country) would, if Flew were his guide, imagine that these ‘anti-racist’ movements were an utterly unjustified and irrational eruption in a fine-and-dandy world besmirched only by a few pigment-fetishists. You would not think that racism is a major problem in the world and in Britain today, save in the form of a mania for reverse discrimination.

(1) It is surely right for Flew to reject the idea that whites alone are capable of racism. Although types and styles of racism are various, it would need to be recognised that ‘racism’ is a general possibility, and a real feature of, for example, South-East Asia, the Horn of Africa and Eastern as well as Western Europe and North America. A talk to Japanese or Thai racists about the Korean or Vietnamese ‘races’ is educative for western whites. Within Britain, moreover, not to describe antagonisms between Afro-Caribbean and Asian groups as having a ‘racial’ dimension is crazy.

(2) Flew’s second objection seems to me misguided. As I have already stressed the ideological and cultural character of racism, hence, by implication its institutional character, it will be clear that I am not disposed to accept Flew’s claims here. If it is the case that individuals, not institutions, have intentions or goals, we need to say that institutions operate through individuals, that our intentions are structured by institutions (going home, teaching, keeping the country or the club white, and so on). Having said that, it is possible to go on to examine in more detail what it means to talk of institutionalised racism.

At the most obvious level the term applies to rules that exclude or handicap members of racial sets. The apartheid laws and practices of South Africa, the restrictions on Chinese in Malaysia are instances, as have been immigration acts in Britain with reference to the ‘New Commonwealth’ (us Australians were all right) or to ‘patrials’. Such racism can be more or less veiled: the White Australia Policy, now defunct, was transparently imple- mented through the negligee of a selectively administered dictation test in English as well as through discrimination in migration propaganda and financial assistance.

But racism, like sexism or confessional discrimination can be an implicit thing, taken for granted, a traditional part of ‘the way we’ve always done things’. Here I am not simply talking about the mere contingent absence of, say, non-whites in a tennis club. I am talking about the sort of situation where eligibility for membership has, without its ever being formalised, been confined to a certain ‘set’, whose racial character is revealed to be part of what constitutes its specialness. Typically, pressure for admission in such circumstances provokes a sometimes serious crisis of identity for the institution, and, by the same token, for its members, who might even come for the first time to argue about and discover ‘what it means’ for them to belong to that institution (‘I thought we were here to play tennis’, ‘I thought we were supposed to be a friendly social club’, etc.). And, returning to Flew’s talk of ‘relevant characteristics’, with those disputes go disputes over what is and is not relevant. ‘Relevance’ can be as problematic as the issues it is meant to


Racism 81

settle. Now typically, as the Swann Report says, uncontroversially one would have previously thought, ‘implicit’ racism survives through ‘centuries-old’ notions, passed on more or less clearly as we grow up.

(3) But, as Flew’s third objection charging the opponent of ‘institutionalised racism’ with definition in terms of ‘consequences’ bears out, his main concern is not with institutions whose racism is more or less constitutive of their identity. His concern is with regulative practices: tests, entry requirements, employment practices, which, as it turns out, result in poor outcomes for members of certain racial sets. Flew attacks the branding of such institutions and practices as ‘racist’.

Flew’s objection is again a pn’on’. Since racism is morally objectionable it cannot be attributed to institutions, let alone to the consequences of their activities. The argument is a strange one, for we might surely equally infer that there might be something wrong with an individual-moral definition of ‘racism’ and begin to explore the possibility that it might best be thought of as a social phenomenon. That possibility being opened up we might seek to demarcate ‘consequential disadvantage’ from ‘constitutive racism’.

Suppose Dr Smythe-Browne’s surgery has been ticking over happily for years until it is realised that few of the many local Asians visit him. It turns out that they travel some distance to Dr Patel’s surgery. Dr Smythe-Browne and his staff are upset. Then they realise that, stupidly, he has never taken the trouble to make himself understood by or to understand the Asians in his area. His surgery practices have had the effect of excluding or at least discouraging Asians. Newly aware, he sets out to fix the situation.

By the same token as his practices have been ‘consequentially’, not ‘constitutively’ discriminatory, they have been ‘blind’, lacking in awareness.

The example shows the possibility of a certain sort of ‘racism’ ( 2 ) that, if we must attribute blame, is a function of a lack of thought (energy, resources, etc.). If that lack of thought is itself to be described as ‘discriminatory’ it would need to be shown that Dr Smythe-Browne showed no such lack of attention when one of the local streets became gentrified, or that he was more impatient with Asians than with other patients and so on. Examples can be multiplied: of insensitivity in the choice of books in schools, in response to new neighbours, in the atmosphere of institutions, where such insensitivity just is that, a habit-bound failure of awareness, and where becoming aware is a sufficient condition of being motivated to do something about it.

‘Perhaps if you don’t announce that you are an equal opportunities employer it will be assumed you aren’t.’ In this context ‘anti-racism’ need be no more than normal civility adapting to, perhaps abnormal, circumstances. Here belongs the struggle for lack of ‘cultural bias’ in tests of ability, for a respect for differences in family structure and so on. What is important, as far as I can see, is that overwhelmingly in such cases, it is not racial sets as such that are the focus of attention, but race as culturally ‘inscribed’. In other words, one is concerned with people in respect of how they identify themselves and are identified and related to by others (for example, intimidating institutions or outright racists). We are talking then about ‘appropriate’ dealings with ‘individuals’, as Flew himself says, and that of itself means struggling to penetrate stereotypic suppressants of sensitivity to individu- ality. In this context it is fatuous to abuse ‘racial awareness training’ as inherently ridiculous. What is more plausible is that some silly things happen when officials set out to remedy elderly wrongs.

But when Dr Smythe-Browne, newly aware, sets out to reform his working practices, he does not thereby alter the very concept of what he is doing as a general practitioner. Nor does

0 Sociery for Applied Philosophy, 1993

82 A . Skillen

he slacken his standards of medical care. Nor does he set out to alter the thresholds beyond which he terms people ill. Rather, he sets out to be a better doctor. But suppose he decides that the only way to cope with the situation is to get an Asian doctor, preferably female, onto his staff. He advertises the job and, finding a good person of the sort he needs, she joins the practice, whereas a number of, in other respects at least, equally good applicants (white, male for the most part) do not. Is this ‘racism’? Is it not, in Flew’s terms, a case of ‘discriminating in favour of a racially defined subset out of a total set’? Well, not necessarily. For Dr Smythe-Browne’s criteria remain medical. His selection is legitimate in so far as we accept that medicine is a human and communicative ‘art’ in respect of which socially significant variables are relevant. In that sense it is simply not the case that by-passed candidates with better degree results were necessarily ‘better candidates’. Given the goals of general practice, ethnicity and gender can be relevant variables.

Consider two further possibilities consistent with my account so far. (1) The doctor appointed, though of Indian origins, is thoroughly Western in outlook to the extent of being impatient and dismissive of her patients’ ‘silly’ habits and ideas. She soon establishes herself as unpopular, and patients flee in droves. A bad choice has been made. (2) Suppose, that just because of her racial and national background, this bossy doctor’s impatience is respected by the patients; they see her as clever and authoritative. She is popular. Here, by a nuance, the selection turns out to have been a good one. But what we are seeing is justification not by the new doctor’s virtues so much as by the cultural response she elicits. Nonetheless, I would stress, medical standards have been maintained, and maintained through the mediation of cultural values. In principle, I would argue, the case is no different from the following: Jane prefers Kate to Zoe as her doubles partner although Zoe is a better player, because Jane herself plays better when she is teamed with Kate and they are therefore a more effective combination. It is useful to remind ourselves of the objective role of ‘communicative’ variables in the most ‘objectively tested’ activities.

Let us return to the last case, of the Indian doctor. Because it meshed in with their preconceptions, subcontinental patients ‘respected’ her authoritativeness, her short way with their ‘backwardness’. We can duplicate the case with teachers, with policemen, shop assistants, and so on indefinitely. But surely, in justifying things moving in that direction, I am also opening the space for justifying the antithetical situation of whites being hired (or men, or people who are tall or have posh ways of speaking) because they command respect or whatever not by virtue of their ‘quality of character’ or professional virtues, but by virtue of others’ perceptions of them.

Now in abstract terms it seems to me this is a fair riposte. Moreover, while ethnic and racial ‘sensitivity’ does not amount to fully fledged racism (which entails notions of dimensions of genetic superiority) but rather is a form of provincial xenophobia, such anxieties are as common among the dominant or host or majority ‘community’ as among others. So if it is right to take ‘ethnic feeling’ among, for example Asians, into account it must be right for such reciprocal feelings to enter political equations. It is wrong, for example, to scorn white working-class unease in the face of the Asian doctors who, to fill the vacuum created by their white colleagues, tend to gravitate towards working-class estates. Nor is it wrong to think that such doctors, as much as the Smythe-Brownes, owe their white patients the work of ‘ethnic awareness’ simply as part of being good doctors.

But the ‘politics’ of all this is delicate and combustible. It is regrettable, for example, that one consequence of accepting all these ‘differences’ as relevant is typically the objective bolstering of such differences, a sort of collusion with, even at times an exploitation of forms

0 Society for applied Philosophy, 1993

Racism 83

of backwardness. Without labouring officiously to prolong the list of ‘criteria’, it seems to me that the mark of progress (as one stage better than avoidance of regress) is the combined attainment of, in this instance, medical goals with the breaking down of boundaries through exemplary openness and pluralism within the institution itself. This is a matter of qualitatively assessing tendencies.

So in challenging Flew’s tight notion of ‘occupational relevance’ I realise that I have drawn a two-edged sword. The sword is indeed two-edged, but it is and ought to be in play anyway. The problem is to keep it sharp and supple. Otherwise multi-culturalism becomes cultural balkanism, many ‘racisms’.

A Loftier Racism?

But this does not touch Flew’s further and principal concern with notions of affirmative action which go beyond an enriched sense of relevance to the subordination of ‘occupational’ to political criteria. White apartheid, Nazism do and did it. Flew’s claim, not without its plebeian echo in the pubs of England, is that black people are now the beneficiaries (or rather putative beneficiaries since it is a disaster for all) of such policies.

. . . sooner or later we are going to be asked to go further down this road - to condemn and abandon anything and everything the actual effects of which are that the racial ‘representation’ in any set is substantially different from that of the population-as-a-whole. [20]

Here Flew is talking about ‘reverse discrimination’ whereby, notwithstanding poorer performances on ‘relevant . . . tests and other criteria’, certain racial sets (blacks) are preferred. Moreover, since those tests are precisely the ones on which certain racial sets (blacks) do poorly, they are themselves condemned by ‘anti-racists’ as racist, part of ‘institutional racism’.

We need again to make distinctions. We need for example (i) to distinguish allowance for disadvantage from (ii) ‘redressive compensation for disadvantage’ and also from (iii) ‘overlooking of shortcoming’. A simple example of allowance for disadvantage would be regrading an examination mark attained at a poor school or under difficult personal circumstances to carry the weight of a better mark attained at a good school or under propitious personal circumstances. A simple case of redressive compensation for disadvantage would be appointing at above the normal starting level someone hitherto unjustly prevented by the system from entering a career. A simple example of the overlooking of shortcomings would be the inclusion of a player in a team, despite her being a worse player than others, because she comes from the local area.

How do these models work in the case of racial sets? (i) Allowance for disadvantage would involve, for example, the acceptance of different

entrance and promotion requirements. Its rationale would be that individuals have had different opportunities to develop their capacities. More specifically, what is being done is done in the belief that, now given the opportunity, the disadvantage will be overcome and left behind. There is an hypothesis (falsifiable, with functional, personal and political consequences) about capacities and dispositions to realise them. What if it is said in objection: ‘But young Jenny White was best qualified for that job. She had the right to it. The selection was unjust’? It seems to me wrong to deny that an injustice of a sort might have


84 A . Skillen

been done to Jenny White. Put it this way: if we are talking in terms of hypotheses about potential, then it is likely that, had Jenny White been aware that she would be ‘handicapped’ because of her advantageous background, she would have worked harder still. Given the way in which our conception of justice is bound up with de factu expectations (think of how upset we socialists get when our private property is pinched), Jenny White has grounds for being aggrieved. It is not after all her fault that the successful black applicant went to a lousy school and had to lock himself in the toilet to gain peace and quiet to work in. But it is not the case that such injustices function as ‘categorical imperatives’. It is not the case, in other words that doing the right thing by one person, where that is also the right thing to do, may not entail wronging another [21]. This difficult balancing of wrongs (in a situation of overall grossness) is one reason why discussions of racial discrimination so easily lurch between rival lunacies.

(ii) Compensatoy or restitutive preference I take in the sense of an agency accepting a responsibility for disadvantage and for that reason accepting an obligation to make amends. In the United States, for example, the descendants of American Indians are claiming compensations for inherited losses, as, on different grounds are the descendants of American slaves. These claims, then, are not merely about disadvantage but about responsibility for it. As South African apartheid is eroded, this compensatory dimension will undoubtedly be powerful. The Australian Aboriginals argue in similar terms. Britain is an interesting case. It was up to its neck in the slave trade and used to rule not only the West Indies but most of North America. For all its civilising achievements it reduced large proportions of many populations to a servile condition. In more recent years its schooling resources have been such that, particularly in parts of London with high concentrations of immigrants (areas already poor) children have had no school to go to. Arguably, such background and foreground conditions are grounds for recognising a component of redress in the struggle for justice for racial sets.

How about (iii) allowance for shortcomings? Throughout the discussion so far, I have been assuming that we are talking about

individuals who need or deserve special treatment. Race and racism enter the story in so far as any individual member of a racial set can be seen to share in oppression or disadvantage suffered by fellow members, due to a history of slavery, of colonial subjugation, of racist legislation, and so on. But imagine the following case (which amounts to a nightmare scenario for the frustrated white!). John White, child of an unemployed father who left him to be brought up by his overburdened mother, has, through determined hard work and native ability, qualified to apply for a good position with a major chemicals firm. But the company is committed to moving towards a racial representation of employees proportional to that in the population as a whole. As a result it hires the slightly worse-qualified John Black. Now John Black, the son of a star cricketer, has been to a private school and has all but the skin colour attributes of the typical English upper-class chap. It seems ludicrous to think of John Black‘s preference over John White in terms of some justice owed to him. In personal terms, John White should have had his disadvantages taken into account.

Here then, is a case of ‘overlooking of shortcomings’. But shortcomings are overlooked all the time, with old boy networks, freemasonry confessional preference, regional, gender or white racist preference. It is commonly masked by all sorts of stereotypic attributions of the sort discussed earlier. But in the John BlacldJohn White case we have policies promoting employment distributions of racial sets proportional to those in the population as a whole, so that the merits of individuals’ claims may be studiously ignored. Flew vigorously and


Racism 85

understandably castigates such practices as ‘paradigmatically racist’. It is in this context, moreover, that Flew’s apparently pedantic insistence on talking of ‘sets’ as opposed to ‘groups’ or ‘communities’ has for good as well as ill, its bite. For the ideological reflex of ‘class’ or ‘group’ legislation of this sort is the highlighting of racial set membership as the crux of one’s identity. By treating John Black as having more of significance in common with the unemployed or Afro-Caribbean Asian teenager - ‘his brother’ - than with his old school chums, such legislation in the short term at least promotes race as the basis of identity. And it is difficult not to promote such identity and ‘pride’ in one racial set without a correlative deepening of racial identifications and hence sense of ‘wound’ in the racial set whose position is being challenged. Flew is right to draw attention to the irony that class legislation is especially prone to foregrounding mere race and by the same token to burying other intrinsically and perhaps consequentially more important characteristics. And, standing out among these dangers, lies the reality that John White has been the victim of an injustice.

But Flew’s attack on ‘class legislation’ over race is untempered. For while the selection of John Black in preference to John White may, by my account, have failed to achieve the goal of giving a start to someone who would otherwise have been denied such a chance there is a possibility that in the absence of the positive injunction involved in severe discrimination legislation he would not have got that start. For if employers are racist in the first place, an ‘even-chance’ requirement can always be nulldied through the claim that the John Blacks of this world weren’t ‘quite as suitable’ as the John Whites. So, given that legislation is always a social force among others, such issues of ‘effect’, of the actual impact of a law, are unavoidable. There is a good chance in the unregulated or loosely regulated situation that John Black’s blackness would be a sufficent condition for his not getting the job; that his slight genuine inferiority to John White on ‘relevant tests‘ would be of no consequence since, being black, he had no chance anyway.

But let us assume unprejudiced selection panels. Can the appointment of John Black in preference to John White be justified?

It seems that this cannot be ruled out. John Black is the unfairly lucky beneficiary of a rule which was not aimed at people like him but at people who were very likely, and because of their racial set membership, precisely not like him. Reverse discrimination’s ‘class legislation’ is based on several presuppositions. The first is that unfair disadvantage is the normal lot of a given set of individuals. The second, as I have just argued, is that the very disadvantaging factors are likely to be operative in selection or admission procedures. The third is that social practices are structured and guided by expectations. Unless positions are and, through example, are seen to be available to individuals of a given set they will not be filled and they will not be applied for. They will not even be on the horizon that organises the energies and motivations of young blacks in their formative years. I have mentioned a negative aspect of all this in the fostering of race consciousness. But the legislation is itself predicated on the need to contest an already virulent race consciousness. The situation that exists is one in which some are excluding, devaluing, and downgrading, while others are alienated, desperate and humiliated. Into this maelstrom of passions and practices ‘reverse discrimination’, more or less resolute, more or less tactful, makes its dangerous entry [22]. Not least because the dominant are dominant, legislation’s attempt to shift the balance risks fomenting a disastrous backlash. And that puts at risk the fourth, consequentialist, assumption of reverse discrimination in favour of racial, or any other, sets: that over time, as socially produced distortions are corrected, disadvantaged sets will achieve normal


86 A. Skillen

‘performance’, and that once that is accepted and becomes part of the community’s cultural constitution, reverse discrimination will become unnecessary and wither away.

So does the fourth assumption amount to the falsity of beliefs along the Jensen-Hume continuum in innate racial differences? Not necessarily. One possibility is that ‘normalisa- tion’ will not occur because of what is implied in the term ‘multi-culturalism’. There may be deepseated differences in cultural values among members of a society, whose outcome is a differential involvement and achievement in the dominant institutions of that society. Belief in a divine proscription of usury is scarcely a qualification for a high position in Lloyds Bank. To the extent that the dominant institutions hegemonise social life, relevant cultural differences will entail cultural marginalisation and the limitation of opportunity. Just as God is unlikely to have created the majority of humankind with just the capacity to spend most of their waking lives actively engaged in stupefying labour or passively engaged in the stupefying entertainment that happen to be the order of the day in our society, so He or She is unlikely to have constructed all human cultural patterns to mesh in with the fabric of our career hierarchy. Cultural differences, sometimes, though by no means as a matter of course, linked to racial differences, expose the rigidities of a social formation, requiring energetic attention as a condition of maintaining a sense of common membership. The issues of ‘multi-culturalism’ are too large to stray into in this article [23] . Suffice it to stress the obvious fact of the need both to keep the issues of cultural chauvinism and racism distinct and to see their potent interaction. For example, notwithstanding any point about cultural variegation it needs to be borne in mind that some lethal cultural differences are formed and engrained precisely by racist exclusions from the opportunities offered within the dominant order. Many sub-cultures are the cultures of subordination.

In this context the role of education should be mentioned. In so far as education implies not only enlightenment and cultivation in the appreciation of value, but ‘equipment’ of the young citizen with the skills and dispositions to reach his or her potential in the practical, economic-political sphere, shortfalls in relevant family input, whether due to language, culture or family structure need, for the child’s sake, to be compensated for. The fashionable doctrine that parents are the ‘consumers’ of the schooling of the children they ‘own’ is oppressive and anti-educational in itself [24]. In the context of racism, the argument becomes a multi-culturalist rationale for trapping young citizens in the world of their parents, reinforcing racism by institutionalising backwardness. Flew is right to remind us that remedial ‘reforms and adjustment’ entailing the commitment of extra resources are ‘perhaps commendably egalitarian’. He is right too to stress that the criterion of remedy should be individual needs, rather than social set membership. Where he is wrong is in failing to see ways in which racial set membership, though it doesn’t constitute, does generate need.

But suppose assumption four to be false in part because of significant average genetic differences in capacity among racial sets. This is clearly Flew’s belief. He thinks that if (since) this is so, the very idea of tilting the playing field so that in significant positions (legislative, legal, medical, educational, professional, etc.), non-whites are distributed more or less proportionally to their wider social membership, is outrageous. But even here, he is wrong. For there can in principle be reasons more important than ‘qualifications’ for the distribution of positions within a society. These reasons are bound up with the way the tenure of such positions is part of the sense of that society and of what constitutes people as members of it. At one extreme, monarchy is, for reasons many regard as important, inherited; so that, although it is important that the monarch or monarch-to-be is neither a

0 Sociely for Applied Philosophy, 1993

Racism 87

fool nor a knave, it is possible for them to be both. A democratic society, on the other hand, needs to be sustained as democratic by the manifest diffusion of such elites as it maintains and the absence of visible stigmata of ‘second-class citizenship’. And so, given a requirement of competence and diligence, a society in which the distribution of respected positions took ethnic and other set membership into account, as Norway takes gender, would be defensible. Eysenck used to go around proclaiming the relative unintelligence of Catholics compared to Protestants. But I have not heard him condemning the 1989 Fair Employment Act in Northern Ireland which requires proportionality between the two sets. And the aim there is not ‘just’ justice. It is to establish the conditions of common citizenship.

I have already given reasons for accepting that the very reasons reverse discrimination is ‘necessary’ are sufficient to threaten its viability [25]. And these reasons bring home to me a dimension of racism that makes me realise that I have been so far perhaps over-emphasising the ‘rationalism’ of racism. Whereas, in criticising Flew’s account of racism 1, 2 and 3 , I stressed the ‘ideological’ notion of superiority as central, it is clear that the less sophisticated notion of ‘difference’ is equally powerful. (Jews and Japanese, remember, are widely hated because ‘they are such smart bastards’.) The racist’s first perception is: ‘not one of us’ !26]. Not that this reduces his racism to Flew’s ‘first sense’ of colour discrimination. Colour is the archetypal index of alien membership, of essential and timeless not-belonging. ‘They’re just different’. This semi-species view of race, linked often with myths of origin and struggle against ‘un sung impur’, this narcissistic tribalism, functioned in the past and still does today to block the sense of human fellowship with other peoples. In an epoch of mass migration from the imperial periphery to the metropolises, the racist vision is of others coming to claim the rights that properly belong only to ‘us’ [27]. And when, not being white you do not get a job for which you are equally qualified, not because you are thought thick but because you are ‘one of them’, Antony Flew’s continued harping on supposed advantages being heaped on blacks by the alliance of wet white liberals and Black Power fanatics is a distraction from the issues that ought to be at the centre of attention. Having said that, I for one am grateful to be forced to become clearer about my own anti-racist position. Like him, I look forward to a time when skin colour plays as much role as hair colour in the organisation of our feelings and our lives. But as will be clear, I have a different view of the preconditions of that human achievement.

To repeat the article’s general claim: racism is a complex of ideological attitudes and practices, more or less bound up with institutionalised barriers. While metropolitan societies such as Britain are characterised by racism largely in the informal attitudes and practices among individual groups and institutions of white-skinned people, I do not regard racism as tied by definition to being an attribute of the dominant. Equi-potent neighbouring territories can be equally racist towards one another, and it is possible for the marginal and disadvantaged to put racist constructions on their predicament. At the micro-social level, racism is common, for example, in directing, perhaps coercing, offspring in appropriate friendship and.marita1 channels. In all cases there is an exercise, through ideology, of power. But power is not dominance. It remains the case, however, that it is racism in the dominant culture that is one of the main obscenities in our society.

Anthony Skillen, Darwin College, University of Kent, Canterbuy, Kent CT2 7NY, UK.

NOTES [l] A. G . N. FLEW (1990) Three Concepts of Racism, Encounzer, 73, September. This article developed out of a

0 Sociery for Applied Philosophy, 1993

88 A. Skillen

discussion between myself and Antony Flew with his article as its focus, at London University under the auspices of the Society for Applied Philosophy. I am grateful to the Society, to those who attended, and especially to Professor Flew for the humane and inquiring spirit of the afternoon. As Encounter is now defunct I have been, I hope, especially careful not to under- or misrepresent Flew’s ideas.

[2] Ibid., p. 63. Flew insists on using ‘set’ rather than ‘group’, whose implication is that genetic characteristicscan of themselves constitute people’s social affiliations. This seems to me right, notwithstanding further problems of the adequacy of a would-be neat term like ‘sets’ to the complex jumble and mixture that constitutes humanity. In consequence, I write ‘blacks’ with a small ‘b’.

[3] Ibid.,p. 64. [4] Ibid., p. 64. [5] Ibid., p. 65. [6] Compare The Jensen uproar, in ANTONY FLEW (1976): Sociologv, Equuliry and Education (London,

Macmillan). [7] Compare H. J. EYSENCK (1981) any attempt to treat the problem on a quota basis is basically racist and

disregards the rights of the indivi to be treated, not as a member of a race, but as an individual‘ (Intelligence: Battle for the Mind, H. J. EYSENCK versus LEON KAMIN, London, Pan).

[8] FLEW (1990), p. 65. [9] Ibid., p. 65.

[ 101 Ibid., p. 66. With Flew’s colour-blind individualism contrast ENOCH POWELL’S ethnic communalism: ‘In your town and mine . . . the transformation into alien territory . . . invasion . . . by those who do have another country . . . occupation a coloured population . . . the people of England will not endure it.’ E. POWELL (1972) Still toDecide. Paperfront, pp. 189-203.

[ l l ] See R. H. POPKIN (1973) The philosophical basis of eighteenth-century racism, in: H. E. PAGLIARO (ed.) Racism in the Eighteenth Centuy; Proceedings of the Amm’can Sociery for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 3 (London, Cleveland Press), pp. 245-262.

[12] D. HUME (1890) Of national characters, in: Essays, Literay, Moral and Political (London, Ward, Locke and Bowden) Footnote p. 123.

[13] F ~ ~ ~ , o p . c i t . , p. 65. [I41 For a summary of EYSENCK’S views see EYSENCK & KAMIN, op.cit., passim. [IS] This impossibility is not so manifest to me. Perhaps FLEW is leaning heavily on the word ‘deduce’ as a term

contrasting with ‘induce’. Averages do give a higher or lower probabilistic inference regarding individuals. And when FLEW, despite everything, speaks of the bright black person as the ‘odd one out’ he seems to be in the realm of almost discrete distribution curves; hence of fairly strong, if defeasible, inference. But I think it best to overlook this and to stress FLEW’S picture of overlapping sets and weak inference.

[16] M. J. LASKY (1962) in: Africa forBeginners (Weidenfeld and Nicolson). [171 After my World War I1 infancy complete with comic-book images, I had tremendous difficulty thinking of

Japanese as members of my species and felt that any Japanese should ideally be killed. I was helped out of this view by two honest ex-servicemen who worked in my grandfather’s shop.

[18] ARISTOTLE. Politics, Book 1, Chapters 5 and 13. [19] From Education for All: The Report of the Committee of Enquiry into the Education of Children from Minoriry

Groups (1985) HMSO, quoted by FLEW, op.cit., p. 65. The concept of institutionalised racism has been given legal expression in the term ‘indirect discrimination’, a broad term and to my mind one that is both vague and ambiguous in relation to intent. CHRISTOPHER MCCRUDDEN, DAVID SMITH, COLIN BROWN & JIM KNOX (1991), in RacialJustice at Work, Policy Studies Institute, discuss and give references for th is . The book is an excellent corrective to the image of a nation of decent whites being bullied by coloured whingers. Though confined to employment practices, this book demonstrates the normality of white racist injustice in Britain today.

[20] FLEW, op.cit., p. 66. [21] RONALD DWORKIN (1977), in: Chapter 9 of Taking Rights Seriously (London, Duckworth) and PETER SINGER

(1979), in: Practical Ethics (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press) take the wrong view. The correct view does not entail support for a given system. In: Ruling Illusions (1978) (Harvester, pp. 4153) I argued that NOZICK’S defence of an unjust system is partly based on winning sympathy for expectations reasonable given the system.

[22] For example, if, for whatever reason, a set is underrepresented in top institutions, and such institutions seek to end that underrepresentation, then, given the scarcity of candidates, those institutions will necessarily draw up people in posts in institutions lower down the scale. Hence lesser such, e.g. women’s colleges, black colleges, universities, etc. will become temporarily drained of their better members, with corresponding impact on ‘communities’ from such sets (think of blacks or women here). Strangely, some people look very


Racism 89

differently on problems of transition from racist or sexist systems to problems of transition from State communist systems.

[23] Much well-intentioned nonsense has been written insisting that oppressed groups enjoy a ‘different’ rather than a ‘disadvantaged culture’. An objective view would recognise dimensions of vitality and normative richness in non-bourgeois cultures as well as stiffness and confinement in respectable culture. But such recognition would not entail a relativistic failure to see that subjugation takes its cultural toll. Relativism is the panic of the mind in the face of complexity.

[24] J. S. MILL argued in On Liberzy that the State had the duty to liberate children from oppressive and confining parents. If schools did not so regularly duplicate oppression and confinement one could only praise his liberal boldness.

[25] It should go without saying that one incompetent ‘woman or minority’ in high places represents propaganda material invaluable to the reinforcement of stereotypes. Normal incompetence of normal place-holders is, of course, not normally taken as a sign that the normal is awry!

[26] See MCCRUDDEN ef al., op.cit., especially pp. 30-31. [27] Jack Kyriacou has pointed out to me that while the notion of ‘belonging’ is important to the racism of ‘native’

populations as in Britain, as my quotation from POWELL above indicates, the racism of marauding settler populations sees black ‘belonging’ to the land as an index of almost vegetative backwardness. As HEGEL (1956) says in The Philosophy offfistory, ‘What we properly understand by Africa, is the Unhistorical, Undeveloped Spirit, still involved in the condition of mere Nature’ (Dover), p. 99.


Documents

Racism: Flew's Three Concepts of Racism