Understanding racism

ABSTRACT

This article defends an account of racism as centrally an ideology, a system of illusory ideas. It argues that the relevant ideology has the effect of oppressing people of some racial identities, an idea it explains and explores. It defines ‘racialism’ as a kind of essentialism about racial identities and argues that it is false. Both racialism and the vice of racism, which consists of having morally impermissible attitudes to people in virtue of their racial identities, are among the consequences of racial ideology. On this view, not all differential treatment on the basis of racial identity is racist.

KEYWORDS:

• Race
• racism
• identity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 ‘Sadly, the trend of fatal police shootings in the United States seems to only be increasing, with a total 721 civilians having been shot, 142 of whom were Black, as of 28 September 2020. In 2018, there were 996 fatal police shootings, and in 2019 this figure increased to 1004.’ https://www.statista.com/statistics/585152/people-shot-to-death-by-us-police-by-race/.

Given that there are about 60 Americans for each Norwegian, that would involve a police shooting rate in Norway of 16 or 17 people a year. In fact, in a typical year the Norwegian police kill no one. There were four police killings between 2002 and 2016, and there was one in 2021. In 2020 there were 7.8 homicides per 100,000 people in the United States; the Norwegian number is 0.58, 7.5% of the US rate. So, the explanation isn't just the general murder rate, since the police killing rate is less than 2% of the US rate.

2 https://www.kff.org/racial-equity-and-health-policy/press-release/poll-7-in-10-black-americans-say-they-have-experienced-incidents-of-discrimination-or-police-mistreatment-in-lifetime-including-nearly-half-who-felt-lives-were-in-danger/ Kaiser Family Foundation news release 18 June 2020.

3 See the ‘Slave Voyages’ website https://www.slavevoyages.org.

4 This is the truth in Jorge Garcia's view that, at heart, racism is a vice (1996).