Racism and Small Pox

 

            If you are reading this because you think it is going to be about some evil soldiers and missionaries giving small pox laced blankets to Native Americans in the 1800’s, you will be disappointed.  In fact, that episode never happened, and falsely claiming that it did is one of the reasons that Ward Churchill got drummed out of academia.

            But I digress. The point of this essay is racism, and how we might end it.  The connection with small pox will be revealed in a little bit.

            Early on in the Obama administration, Attorney General Eric Holder said we are a “nation of cowards” for not having any real dialogue about race relations in this country.  I agree with him, it is a shame that we don’t talk much about one of our biggest problems.  But then, he and his boss haven’t done much to move things along, have they? 

            I think the biggest obstacle to an open and honest discussion about race relations is that we are burdened with a flawed definition of racism.  While you can look it up, and find a bunch of definitions that say judging folks or favoring them based on their ethnic heritage is racism, the definition the intellectuals use says that racism is a combination of prejudice and power.  This means institutional power, like in government, corporations, etc.  So that second definition, the flawed one that we are burdened with, basically says that racism is something that only white people do.  Thus, we are stuck with a situation where racism is considered the sin of all sins, but only white people can commit it. You can see this perspective confirmed at websites like stuffwhitepeopledo.blogspot.com.  Be forewarned though, if you go there be ready for a convoluted, hard to follow logic.

            The connection with small pox comes up now, because as far as we can determine, small pox has, happily, been wiped from the face of the earth.  After years of careful research and hard work, that horrible, deadly disease has been eliminated. 

            This pertains to racism since we arrived at this happy outcome regarding small pox only because we went after it no matter where it showed up.  Even though some ethnic groups have less resistance to it than others, the only way we could completely eliminate it was to identify and attack it wherever it showed up.  If we had dealt with the physical disease of small pox in the same way that we are dealing with the emotional disease of racism, by trying to stop it only when it infects white people, then small pox would still be a scourge on humanity.

            Today, in the world as a whole (America included) racism is still a scourge, and I think that is due, in large part, to the fact that we are afflicted with that flawed definition.  The analogy with small pox goes further.  Since, at least in intellectual and governmental circles, it is thought that only white people can be racist, the problem isn’t even looked for in other cultures, and it is mis-identified in white culture.  It is as if small pox had been thought of as a disease affecting only whites.  Not only would cases in other groups be ignored, but other diseases, such as measles, chicken pox, pimples, and even just freckles occurring in whites would send the authorities into frenzies of outrage, shouting about small pox.

            That is how it is today with racism.  A lot of innocent, non-racist comments by whites send authorities and pundits into frenzies of condemnation and ridicule, and yet some deeply racist stuff, such as the kind of things Louis Farrakhan or Al Sharpton say gets accepted without comment.  Words like ”Chicago”, “Hussein”, “inner city”, “angry”, “Constitution”, “food stamp president”, “experienced”, and etc. are considered (by some liberals) coded racist words when uttered by (conservative) whites, and yet Farrakhan can call Judaism “a gutter religion” and he still gets accepted in polite company. This kind of uneven playing field will not bring about reconciliation, but it will keep the scourge of racism and racial division alive.

            The solution is for the mass of people to ignore the intellectuals, and use some common sense.  The best definition of racism I know of says that any thinking which determines the moral weight of any action based on the ethnic heritage of any of the participants is racist.  Consider how that definition gets applied.  Slavers said it was okay to enslave them, because they were black.  It was okay to lynch them, and deny rights, for the same reason.  Native Americans were denied rights because they were Indians. The perpetrators couldn’t be prosecuted, because they were white.  In all these examples, the moral weight, the right or wrong of an action, was determined based on the ethnic heritage of the participants.  That’s racism.

            Now, consider a more modern example.  A young man of one ethnic group gets assaulted by three young men of another group, because of race.  If the single guy is black, and the three are white, we all agree it was racism in action.  But if the single guy was white, and the three were black, the intellectuals say it wasn’t racism, because the blacks don’t have institutionalized power.  I say, that if you use my definition of racism, the intellectuals are being racist, because they are determining the moral weight of an action based on the ethnic heritage of the participants.

            So that is where we are today, unable to make much progress toward ending racism because we are saddled with a flawed definition of racism that is itself essentially racist.  Look into it. Even though it is hard for normal folks with common sense to believe; that really is the definition that intellectuals and government bureaucrats use.

            If we started using a different, more honest definition of racism, I think we would find that it exists in every group.  Yes, we might find that white folks have more of it than others, or maybe not.  But if we did start honestly identifying it wherever it pops up, we have a chance of ending it the same way we eliminated small pox.  That would be a very good thing indeed.