One night last summer, I was talking to a skeptic from Savannah, Ga. He brought up the topic of racism,the KKK and such, and asked why skeptics don’t talk about racism at all. I said that I didn’t think there was much of a reason to talk about it because no one takes groups like the KKK seriously.
This conversation happened a while back, and a few beers into the evening, so the details of it are fuzzy, but I seem to recall him saying that the KKK is not so easily dismissed as ridiculous down in Savannah. Growing up in a relatively well-off (read: pasty white) suburb of Chicago, racism for me had always been discussed as a hypothetical/phlosophical/intellectual topic. And at the end of the discussion, no one ever uttered the words, “Really, the Nazis had a point.”
But the reality is, I know people who didn’t vote for Obama solely for the reason that he’s black. And I now live in a community that just a few years ago was considered rural, now it’s considered a suburb. There has been talk about extending the train line out to our town, we’ve even built a train station (and if you go to the train station now, you can take the bus to another train station that has a real train going to it). But the people out here have voted against actually extending the train because they’re afraid it will bring crime (read: black people) in from Chicago.
Turns out, I don’t talk about racism beause I think it’s ridiculous, and I’ve naively thought that everyone else does, too.
Why do you think racism isn’t talked about much in the skeptical community? Should it be?
I think there’s two ways of being skeptical about racism.
The first, most obvious one is being skeptical about the claims that racists make, i.e. that there is something inherently good about their lot and something inherently bad about others. Claims like that should be testable, even when they’re about opinion-based, rather than fact-based claims.
For example, “alls Norwegian peoples ams immorals”, relies on an opinion about what’s moral. But once you’ve pinned down a personal definition of morality, you can measure how many Norwegians comply with it, and how that compares with worldwide standards. Most racist claims I’ve encountered rely heavily on very cumbersome over-generalisation, and can be picked apart from that angle alone.
The second way of being skeptical about racism is by challenging those who claim that they are hindered by the racism of others. And it’s probably fair to say that most of them are being honest, cos there’s a lot of racist fuckers about, at least where I live.
But there are definitely also those who use accusations of racism to conceal personal incompetence, to deflect blame and to slander anyone they don’t like. There is definitely room for critically examining such claims of racism, so that nobody can be fooled by them. (I vaguely recall something like this coming up once, on a very old episode of SGU, but I don’t remember the context.)
Why aren’t these two things commonly talked about in skeptical circles? Dunno. Maybe because all the loudest skeptics live in happy, egalitarian societies? But assuming that’s not true, then it probably should be discussed a little more often.
This may be a good question – I am not sure that the premise is correct however (that racism is not talked about in skeptical society…)
My quick and dirty simple google search shows 253,000 hits for pages that contain both the words “skeptic” and “racism” …
As to whether it should be – I believe a general precept is that no topic is off-limits.
Y_S_G
Thanks Spatula, you just wrote what I was trying to write for the last ten minutes. Damn brain, why won’t you cooperate with me.
I have trouble discussing racism, because its a foreign concept to me. I was not brought up at all to think another person was inferior to me because of their ancestry. It boggles my mind that people can actually think like that.
I have been taunted and teased before because of my heritage, (Native American with Irish and Scots) and it hurts. I didn’t understand at first, and when I talked to my dad, he did a good job of making me understand.
I see a lot of racism in the area I live towards Mexicans (Hispanics, etc.. whatever you would like to call them, here I call them Mexicans because most are from Mexico.) But, most people if I called them out would say something like, I am not racist, they aren’t black people. Yes, this has happened.
Damn, I ramble…….
Can severe racism be viewed as a mental disorder? Milder forms can be ameliorated by education, but the more severe it is, the less education seems to make an impact.
I could see discussions on, say, Affirmative Action.
I always have to remind myself that someone identifying as a skeptic does not mean they’re not racist, homophobic or sexist. The strangest part of all of that is that my negative experiences with these misguided folks is not from the white, bearded skeptical crowd — it’s from guys (& twice, ladies) my age (30) or younger, and it never ceases to surprise me.
My disappointment in this lot is the skeptical equivalent to trendy bi-sexualism. You just have to shake your head and back away quickly so no one at the club sees you looking at them.
Also, immigration — here in Arizona, I hear a LOT about “illegal immigrants”. I could see a skeptical discussion on that and how to treat undocumented immigrants (I REALLY REALLY hate the terms “illegal” and “alien”; completely dehumanizing).
I think at least part of the reason is that it’s so hard to get most people to admit that they have racist ideas or feelings in the first place, and it’s even harder to get someone to defend them.
First, we tend to tackle high-value targets. It just makes sense, if we’re going to waste our valuable, non-paid blogging time, that we’re going to take on the alpha-woos, rather than the five-dollar palm readers.
Purveyors of other stupid ideas tend to be a lot more prominent. They’re on every other episode of Oprah. Finding someone espousing racism on the kind of scale that Sylvia Browne, Casey Luskin and Stephen Green promote their ridiculous beliefs isn’t nearly as easy.
Secondly, When we inveigh against irrational supernatural or pseudoscientific beliefs, the trolls come swarming out from under their electronic bridges. They arm themselves with the torches of blind faith, the pitchforks of fallacious logic, and the rotten tomatoes of cut-n-paste manifestos, and proceed to defend their village of stupidity until they lose interest and go off to pummel some other rational speaker.
Whereas when we comment on the illogic of or lack of evidentiary support for racism, the folks from Stormfront don’t send their members here to argue with us. They stay in their comfortable, lily white space, and groan about how we’re all race traitors and n-word lovers, without actually trying to refute our arguments.
Also, and not for nothing, I think we as a culture like to believe that racism is a bad thing that used to happen, but that we’re too modern these days to let it happen. I think even rational people want very badly to live in a society that’s better that it used to be, and it’s tempting to think that electing a non-white president of America has put the last nail into the coffin of racial inequity.
Did you miss me while I was on baby leave?
I talk about it all the time. I think I talk about it in a slightly odd way compared to non-skeptics because I find myself discussing it in terms of dismissing the premises that racism is based on as failed arguments. The best science I’ve seen says we’re all very, very related and that culture has much more to do with our differences than race. And that each individual should be measured on their own merits, not on grossly inaccurate “group theory”.
But just like my stance on Gay Marriage (it should be legal) these rationalist arguments tend to disregard the humanity and emotional trauma that all kinds of civil rights and discrimination can inflict on people. I find myself wondering how it is that I ally myself with groups for rationalist reason first and then humanitarian rather than being driven by empathy first, then reason to justify the empathy?
That’s probably too meta. But I do talk about it and wonder about it frequently. Like many humanists, I’m waiting for that Star Trek TOS bridge where everybody can get along and work together – only I’d like it to be on Earth rather than having to wait for the Federation…
Skeptics don’t talk about racism? Can we put some figures to that, discuss it in a way not wholly dependent on anecdotal evidence? I mean, I don’t want to imply that we naturally end up talking about everything that needs to be talked about, but we should be able to get a better idea of the scope of the problem.
Anecdotally, I’ve had to tangle with racist assholes spouting pseudoscientific garbage more than a few times. Check out the neo-Nazi trolls who’ve been banned from Pharyngula, for example.
@Oskar Kennedy (LBB): I’m not quite sure whether you’re saying it’s a good thing or not that most woo-heads will charge out to defend their beliefs. Yes, it makes them easier to confront directly, but if you’re saying that they mostly just retreat to believe their crap elsewhere, then how has the confrontation helped? What do we gain from them that we can’t get from self-insulating racists?