How We Might Move On From Racism

 

I like to spend time listening to people whose opinions differ from my own. During the financial crisis, I went to engage with the protesters who were camped outside banks; I've been to several Black History Month events; and I've even spent a weekend camping with environmentalists. All those experiences have been very useful in trying to understand how these groups think and what their motivations are. I've written a lot about socialism and environmentalism on this blog, but not much on racism, which is what I intend to do here.

The first thing to say about racism is that it is clearly a learned phenomenon. When young children are put together to play, they don't show any signs of racial discrimination. We are not born racist; it is implanted from other humans. What struck me from my conversations with people at the Black History Month events is how preoccupied they were with skin colour and racial wrongs from the past. I’m sure that is even truer of more hostile groups like Black Lives Matter – there is a propensity to see the world through the unhelpful, divisive and counter-progressive lens of group identity and ethno-tribal polarisation. Personally, I tend to live as much in the present as possible, I try to treat everyone as though they are loved and infinitely valuable, and I couldn’t care a jot about the things (like skin colour and ethnicity) that seem to cause so much prejudice. I care about you as a person, and am interested in you as a unique individual – not as a secondary group member to which you may happen to belong.

Now, I’m not saying the past doesn’t matter, and I’m not saying this country has no present day racism to contend with. But it seems clear to me that continually going on about past legacies, and remaining preoccupied with skin colour and so-called racial identity is only perpetuating a stratification that most people have moved on from (and most prejudice that appears racist probably isn’t racist anyway – see my blog here). This point is compounded by the fact that people who are preoccupied with what others have done to people like them in the past are generally preoccupied with what people have done to black people, as though that particular category of racism is the primary one in history. But the reality is, history is replete of all kinds of injustices committed by every kind of skin colour and ethnicity: white on black, black on white, black on black, Asian on black, white on Asian, and so on, dating back thousands of years.

We are living in a time when the anti-racists are behaving a lot like the historical racists, and the anti-fascists are behaving a lot like the historical fascists – and we need to move forward. As Marcus Aurelius said: “The best revenge is to be unlike him who performed the injury.” Suppose a magic switch was flicked, and everyone woke up tomorrow morning with no awareness of past ethnic, racial and religious injustices. Black and white people, Catholics and Protestants, Jews and Muslims, and so on, would no longer see each other through the prism of past troubles, but simply as different people co-existing alongside one another. I’m not saying that cultural identity and heritage isn’t important. But if we stopped making so much of past racial prejudices and began to refrain from preoccupations with skin colour and group identity, we’d prime ourselves for a future of diminished racial tension.

What about the Lady Susan Hussey and Ngozi Fulani debacle?
I think Lady Hussey's line of questioning could have been better, of course - but the same can be said about Ngozi Fulani's response too, which looked to be opportunist, disingenuous and self-serving. Lady Hussey was stitched up by Fulani, and then subsequently thrown under a bus by the Royals, including her own Godson, Prince William - who, if the media account is accurate, responded ignobly in this. After her 60 years of loyal service, Lady Susan Hussey deserved far better than this - and I think this has reflected very badly on the Royals.

To be fair to Ngozi Fulani, I have sympathy with the fact that it must be difficult to have your nationality questioned when she was born in the UK. And I'm sure it's not always easy to live in a nation in which your skin colour is the minority one. But it would have been very easy for her to have responded to Lady Hussey with more grace and understanding, and not to have capitalised on a poor dialogue in such an egregious way. Not that we should be surprised - from past activity, it looks very much like Ngozi Fulani is a racial grifter, in the same way that Dianne Abbott, Affua Hirsch, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown and Kerry-Anne Mendoza are racial grifters. To see what I mean by racial grifters, here's a quote from a blog post of mine from 2021:

"It seems clear that most tribal groups that peddle extremist propaganda (whether that's extreme left or right wing movements, environmentalists, woke social justice warriors or feminists) are doing so because they want to seek attention, find some meaning and purpose in their life, assuage their own insecurities and moderate their own self-dislike. And in order to this, they have to artificially construct injustices that aren't really there, or inflate the ones that are already there into something much more severe and unrepresentative of reality. An analysis of radical extremism that fails to consider what the participants personally get out of it is an anaemic analysis - and it is absurd that people go about their business as though this consideration doesn't matter. It really does matter; because if you find what's lurking beneath their virtue signalling and agenda-driven search for purpose, you'll find something dark and horrible (I'm sure it's in most of us)."

Ngozi Fulani and the aforementioned group are racial grifters in the same way that Owen Jones, Jeremy Corbyn and Ken Loach are poverty grifters; and in the same way that Greta Thunberg, George Monbiot and the numerous wacky environmentalist hysterics (Extinction Rebellion, Just-Stop-Oil, etc) are climate grifters. They make their living and their reputation on the attempted prolongation of the thing to which they claim opposition, seizing every opportunity to cry foul and attribute malice or bigotry where none exists or is intended.

And this leads us full circle to the opening points. Unless social and cultural grifting is shown up for the pernicious creep that it is, we are doomed to keep repeating the taints of the past, from which the vast majority of folk in the UK have moved on.

Racism's Overton Window

 

As many readers will know, there’s a concept called the Overton Window (developed by Joseph P. Overton) which suggests that in every generation there is a “window” of acceptable views, ideas, beliefs and political policies that are categorised as standard and expected, and that everything outside of that window is unacceptable and beyond the pale. The window gets shifted over time because when ideas outside of the window are considered at the extreme, the less extreme but still radical ideas start to become more widely accepted and move within the purlieus of the window.

Views go from so far outside the mainstream that few people accept them into the mainstream >> to radical >> to peripheral >> to mainstream >> to incontrovertible (whereby you’re now considered far outside the mainstream if you ‘don’t' subscribe to them, and could even find yourself in jail if you speak out against them). Here are some examples; In a few decades we’ve gone from climate change alarmism being a belief only subscribed to by a few off-the-wall crackpots, to a situation where if you don’t subscribe to it you’re seen as a filthy capitalist rogue who doesn’t give a damn about anything other than money. In a few decades we’ve gone from homosexuality being illegal, to the slightest intolerance of it being seen as a hate crime. In those same few decades, we've gone from thinking of 1984, Brave New World and Fahrenheit 451 as dystopian fiction, to them being actual political realities imposed on us by the establishment.

Being the hot topic of the day, I want to talk about racism in terms of the Overton Window. Racism is best categorised as unfair segregation or hostile aggression on the basis of race. It is telling people they are not allowed on a bus; it's lynching; it's beating up, it's murdering people because of their skin colour or ethnicity - that is what racism is, and we can all agree that these things are bad. The trouble is, once something is rightly identified as bad, it becomes tempting for people to stretch its meaning and apply it a bit more widely to encapsulate their own cause. Then the Overton Window begins to shift, and it gets applied a little more widely still, then even further, until it means nothing more than 'disliking or disagreeing with someone who happens to be of a different ethnicity or skin colour', and then even further to become 'holding a different view to a view that's popular within a particular group'.

Once terms like racism, sexism, hate crime, misogyny and Islamophobia become more mainstream, people become readily tempted to use them even more widely for their convenience. Before you know it, it's possible to cry 'racism' if someone with different skin colour demolishes your argument; it's possible to cry 'sexism' if someone doesn't support all-women shortlists; and it's possible to declare that you've been the victim of a hate crime just because someone insulted your religion on Twitter (and worse still, perhaps, it's easy to find swathes of people getting offended on your behalf).

And once society is at that stage, it's scarily easy to descend into absolute ridiculousness, where things like the denial of the biological distinction between the sexes, the eroding away of a the concept of competence-based achievements, the refusal to believe that IQ makes any significant difference to success, the denial about the fact that many of the reasons for our struggles are due to our own bad decision-making, the differences between men and women are socio-culturally determined, etc are mainstream views, and to be outside of them is to be beyond the pale.

Social grifters
As I indicated in a recent blog post, it seems clear that most tribal groups that peddle extremist propaganda (whether that's extreme left or right wing movements, environmentalists, woke social justice warriors or feminists) are doing so because they want to seek attention, find some meaning and purpose in their life, assuage their own insecurities and moderate their own self-dislike. And in order to this, they have to artificially construct injustices that aren't really there, or inflate the ones that are already there into something much more severe and unrepresentative of reality. An analysis of radical extremism that fails to consider what the participants personally get out of it is an anaemic analysis - and it is absurd that people go about their business as though this consideration doesn't matter. It really does matter; because if you find what's lurking beneath their virtue signalling and agenda-driven search for purpose, you'll find something dark and horrible (I'm sure it's in most of us).

One way to look at today’s society is to say that we must still be in the throes of racism if mobs of people feel the need to the streets and pull statues down, and demand the removal of others. Another way to look at today’s society – a way that at least has some truth attached to it – is that we must have done an awful lot right to bring about the decimation of most racism if people have the luxury of having to focus on statues of people who died before they were born. As always, I expect the truth lies somewhere in between.

But there is something significant, to do with balance, that we are probably getting wrong about the racism matter. I think it’s partly in the misdiagnosis, and partly in the misallocation of attention. The misdiagnosis is that I think virtually all acts that appear to be racist are, in fact, only proximally identified. I think the distal, and far more prominent causes of apparent racism are built on more fundamental kinds of pain, weakness, fear, resentment and insecurity (often flavoured by national and cultural heritage too). In other words, when someone appears to show racial hostility, it is often only superficially to do with the victim’s skin colour or ethnicity – it is largely driven by the inner hostility and self-contempt of the perpetrator. If we looked for the hurt in the racist, we’d see damaged people who have not been given the sufficient education, diversity of life experience, love, guidance and opportunities to enable them to be better, more tolerant, less hostile people. Attacking someone by their label is the outward manifestation of an inner self-disgust – I don’t think it’s much to do with a genuine prejudice against skin colour or ethnicity. As Graham Greene observed in The Power and The Glory:

“Hate was just a failure of imagination.”

And that leads me to the misallocation of attention. Having regularly misdiagnosed racism, society then places almost all the emphasis on the victim, and almost none on the perpetrator. Don’t get me wrong, it is certainly important to create a society in which the victims of any prejudice are loved, respected, supported, valued and encouraged to thrive. But unless we begin to identify racism and prejudice for what they are, we won’t help the victims or the perpetrators to move forward, and we’ll remain mired in a false stratification that neglects to focus more accurately on the poison and on the medicine.

Why It’s Time To Bring An End To Terms Like ‘White Privilege’, ‘Male Privilege’ & ‘The Patriarchy’

London is caught up in fractious Black Lives Matter (BLM) demonstrations, and social media is awash with people targeting what they call 'white privilege', 'male privilege' and the 'patriarchy'. It's almost impossible to turn on the TV or have an account on social media and to not have encountered some hysterical assertion that if you're white and male you somehow have an advantage to laud over minorities. Just this week, in the midst of BLM taking to the streets in mob-like fashion, I've had 3 white friends message me privately and tell me that right now they are feeling judged for the colour of their skin even though they have always tried to be kind, tolerant and opposed to all forms of racial hatred.

Instead of using terms like 'white privilege', 'male privilege' and the 'patriarchy', here, I think, is a better way to look at this situation. I hate racism as much as the next person, so I hope you'll hear my good intentions when I tell you that I don't think looking at individuals through the lens of the particular group identity you perceive them to be part of (white, black, male, female, straight, gay) over and above their identity as an individual is the best way to treat humans. I don't think we are at our best when we engage in identity politics. In a world of 7.5 billion unique people, the primary consideration of any person has to be at the individual level above all else. Groups of people of any category are a diverse set of individuals far more than they are a group, and people who see the world through the hostile lens of identity politics can't easily love people as individuals, because they see the individuals through the lens of the perceived in-group or out-group, not the group as being comprised of individuals worthy of love and self-determination.

Even if you're right that someone has 'privilege' because they are white or male, or even if it's true that they are part of an ethnic group that historically committed acts that contemporary folk rightly find abhorrent, there is still, I think, a better way to treat them than to lump them into an artificially constructed 'out-group' where their individuality gets diluted in the collective wash. The idea of using the term 'privilege' as a weapon against someone being white or male or part of a patriarchy is actually deluded and reprehensible - it comes right up from the bowels of critical incompetence, and it will turn us into rogues if we are not careful.

Instead of 'privilege', I think using the term 'advantage' is better - it's less emotionally connotative. It is an advantage being born in London, comparatively to Mogadishu. It is a disadvantage being born severely disabled in England comparatively to able-bodied in England. If you are born in Mogadishu and born severely disabled, that's a double disadvantage. But the upshot is, there are actually countless (literally countless) ways to measure advantage in the human species, because everyone perceives the world differently enough for those differences to matter, and similarly enough for the similarities to matter - and there are an infinite number of ways to perceive reality and all its complexity. The differences between women and men are such that both males and females will have advantages over the other - but the intra-differentials between the set of all women, or all men, or all white people, or all black people, or all gay people, or all straight people, or all bisexual people is going to be far greater than any kind of group identity differential. It’s time we saw the cessation of toxic terms like ‘White Privilege’, ‘Male Privilege’ & ‘The Patriarchy’, and I will now take each one in turn, and show why I think it is an unhelpful term.

Why 'male privilege' is an unhelpful term

Humanness is a ravine of interconnected complexity, about which 'privilege' comes in unisexual, multi-dimensional aspects of personhood: everything from intelligence, attractiveness, temperament, health, athleticism, genes, region of birth and many more factors - and those are just the attributes that are not based on the decisions we make. Both males and females have comparative and absolute advantages in each of these categories, and the further differentiations in the diverse and assorted ways to perceive the world only add to the complexity. Furthermore, in terms of the slog against natural forces, males and females have astronomically more similarities than they do differences - and by and large, despite being a highly flawed species, have worked on the same side symbiotically in pair-bonding relationships to look after one another to climb out of the quagmire together into a relatively stable and peaceable co-existence. Men have suffered, women have suffered; women have helped create a better world, and men have helped create a better world. Both are evolutionarily primed to make different decisions, have different priorities, and play different roles in support of the family unit. For most of our 200,000 year history, life has been 'Nasty, brutish and short' for both men and women - disease-ridden, in poverty, in war, in hardship, in laborious working conditions - and we have almost always got through it together; men and women by and large pulling in the same direction.

The concept of 'male privilege' comes from agenda-driven minds that don't really care much about men or women. It's just not a term that an intelligent, balanced person who understands history and science would ever utter. Those who believe in 'male privilege' believe that males have most of the advantages when it comes to social, economic, and political situations or rights - that this advantage is afforded to them solely on the basis of their sex. It's an absurd idea, and factually wrong. It's a philosophically intractable proposition because maleness is a narrow category of determination - far less important than the traits I mentioned based on the individual over and above the group. Males have some advantages, so do females, so do tall people, intelligent people, hard-working people, educated people, good looking people, healthy people, people born in geographically favourable areas - there are just too many factors to this equation for success or advantage to be solely or even primarily about maleness. No group identity is representative of its constituent parts - there is a wide-ranging diversity in every group identity we could list, and therefore no individual in that group is ever going to be wholly representative of the group, because there are too many ways for a group with one shared trait to be different in so many other ways. Where there are instances of unfair discrimination against women or men, we should, of course, do all we can to address them.

Why 'white privilege' is an unhelpful term

A similar thing can be said about 'white privilege' - it may be tempting to say that history has shown a demonstrable advantage of being a white person from a Western nation - and there's no denying that in several important senses that is true. But I don't believe the human race will progress on the basis of love and kindness and empathy while people insist on playing identity politics with people's 'whiteness' and try to make them feel morally ashamed of their ancestral associations. Not only does that rob them of the most important element of their selfhood - their individuality and autonomous agency - it seeks to divide people by trying to make them morally culpable for the terrible things their ancestors of hundreds of years ago did.

The human race is complex, and because there are all sorts of advantages and disadvantages based on countless criteria - intelligence, sex, geography, personality, size, looks, genes, age, and several more - I think humans do each other a grave disservice when they talk of 'white privilege' and try to make white people feel uneasy about their whiteness on the basis that racism exists. Tell the white boy who is currently under 25, lives with his parents, anxious, unemployed, depressed, addicted to porn and in an abject state of inertia that he has white privilege - I'm sure he can feel it really acutely right now. Tell the thousands of white Christians being persecuted in Muslim countries that they enjoy white privilege. The truth is, when any tribalistic force gravitates together, the humans involved have been pretty dreadful to each other - white on white, white on black, black on black and black on white - there have been European atrocities, American atrocities, Mongol atrocities, Ottoman atrocities, Persian atrocities, Arab atrocities, Ancient Egyptian atrocities, the list goes on. The biggest truth here is that, except for certain biological limitations, there are no good or bad qualities that are uniquely attributable to any group identity - be they male, female, black, white, European, African, Asian, or any other - and it is ignoble to try to tar any group with any kind of collective guilt.

It is shameful to pick on people because they have, say, male genitalia (or indeed female genitalia) or white skin (or indeed black skin), and to try to get white people to apologise by renouncing their whiteness, as several videos have shown happening recently. The Black Lives Matter folk that are demanding this are acting in a way that mirrors the racism they are trying to stamp out. Because the reality is, around the globe, every category of person is full of members having a hard time of it somewhere in the world. And even in places like the UK where it seems that a great majority of people have it easy compared to the minority of 'disadvantaged' people, I don't think 'them vs. us' is ever the best way to look at things. I think it's far more accurate (and enlightened) to think of us all as being involved in many struggles that are shared by just about all fellow humans, and realise that we all have our problems and our hardships, however well we seem to be doing on the outside.

As I've said for years, the big impediments to sound reasoning and honest truthseeking in a complex world are over-simplicity, lazy thinking and perverse incentives. To get anywhere in any complex subject, you have to start with the humility to say "I don't understand this as well as I need to", and if you're on really good form, "I don't even know some of the ways that I don't understand this". When you do this, two important things happen. The first is that you begin to act with more humility as you adopt a more circumspect attitude towards 'doing something' - realising that many of your suggestions are contributing more to the problems than the solutions. You get to see that almost all the suggested solutions to the world's problems, and the low-resolution beliefs about high-resolution scenarios, are woefully inadequate to the reality of the situation. And from that level of humility - both humility about how inadequate your understanding about complex reality is and how little you know in the grand scheme of things (epistemic humility), and humility towards others (empathy) - you get to see the world more like it actually is. You get to see that if you really want to understand a situation competently you are going to have to expend a lot of cognitive effort in focusing on a diverse range of considerations

The problem with over-simplistic responses to complex problems is that to the beholder those responses look like they offer a sufficient analysis of the problem and the obvious solution: a young black man tragically loses his life under the knee of a racist cop and there is racist behaviour showing up on social media so we should take to the streets and demand that there is a systematic redress; there is inequality, therefore the rich must be hoarding the lion's share of the wealth conspiratorially against the rest; women earn less than men on average so there must be systematic unfair discrimination against women; some negative things are happening to the climate, therefore what the world needs is the decimation of the market system; there are lots more men in CEO roles than women so we must therefore be living under a patriarchal system; there are a lot of people on low-paid jobs so we need a socialist revolution to topple the greedy bosses at the top; people seem a lot more sensitive to offence themselves, so we should silence people we don't like, rewrite history, retard debate, and censor and retard free expression - the list goes on. 

The trouble is, once you dig deeper into these things, you find layer upon layer of causal complexity, and the deeper you dig, the less information you can compute in one hit, and the greater your margin for error. There are dozens of reasons why black people show up as statistically disadvantaged, there are dozens of reasons why men earn more than women on average, there are dozens of factors to consider when we talk about trade-offs between economic growth and sustainability, there are dozens of reasons why some people are poorer than others. And then if you combine any of those factors and start to engage in multi-factorial analyses, you hit a nexus of complexity, with every single element requiring careful thought and competence-based, time-consuming assimilation of facts and reasoning.

Whenever you think you’re trying to solve one big problem, you’re probably actually dealing with hundreds of other elements sitting under the surface. The very first question you should ask yourself, before you start anything else, is “What the heck makes me think I have the first clue about what I’m doing here?” To construct the framework of a worldview to encapsulate that many complex factors is not just a difficult task that requires lots of effort, it's actually a task that few can manage. So instead, people tend to default to a simplistic heuristic - an ideology, an in-group mentality, a tribal affiliation - to shelter them from the storm of chaos that comes with multivariate analyses, where it's easy to get overwhelmed with how ignorant we are and how much effort it's going to take to get to even a reasonable level of competence on just one of those elements of consideration, let alone many of them. Social justice warriors think that if only they come together as one tribal group - black, female, gay, straight, feminist, socialist, working class, or whatever - that it's the only way we can see change, by teaming up to fight our oppressors. But not only does that seem to be false, it actually seems to be backwards - the real changes for the good almost always happen organically, by focusing more on individuals, on liberty, on kindness, on love, on encouraging people to reach their potential - that's how you get genuine advancement, that's how you get a more realistic equality of opportunity.

For that reason, I'd encourage us to refer to someone's group identity as infrequently as it is possible to do. BLM do the opposite - they make a big thing of skin colour, when the vast majority of people who are the side of progress are simply seeking to love them as individuals for who they are. By wedding themselves to a tribe that increases focus on group identity they are accentuating the division and making a big thing out of the very categorisations that love for individuals seeks to deracinate. Look at the results of taking to the streets - the hostility, the volatility, the shouting through each other - you can see the 'them vs. us' effects with your own eyes every day. 

Here's something important that you might have missed. When people in the quagmire of racism, bigotry and intolerance are fighting for rights, tolerance, respect and opportunity, think about what they are actually fighting for: they are fighting to be treated as an individual worthy of love because they are a unique person of value. They are fighting (rightly) to get that job based on merit, to be able to vote, sit where they like, marry whomever they choose - they are fighting so the group identity part of their identity is given a secondary place behind their talents, personality, character, competence and numerous other qualities as an individual.Of course, BLM folk will say something like. "It's alright for privileged white men to be saying this, but our black causes need to be fought for, and how else but coming together in solidarity and unity are we going to do that?" It's a popular response, but like many popular responses, it neglects not just all the important points we’ve covered thus far, but also perhaps the most important point of all: by perpetuating the desire to categorise themselves according to group identity (however noble they think the cause, or however right about the anti-racism sentiments they clearly are) they are artificially fostering a climate in which they are being asked to be seen through their group identity first, and their individual self second. 

The best way to advance and progress is to view everyone through the lens of their individuality, judge each other according to our beliefs, views, actions and attitudes, relate to each other through our kindness and grace, employ each other through our competencies, and regard each other on our merits, allowing room to give a helping hand to the poor and vulnerable in society whenever it is needed. That is the kind of society Christ teaches us to aspire to. Where there are instances of racism and bigotry, we should, of course, do all we can to combat them.

Why the 'patriarchy' is an unhelpful term

As with ‘male privilege’ and ‘white privilege’, this is why we also need to repudiate the widespread and hasty assumption so many people make that we live in some kind of oppressive patriarchy. As in the above cases, people who peddle the patriarchy-narrative are confused about how complex the world is, how multifaceted and diverse human behaviour is, and how to properly analyse an epistemologically intractable social environment. To cherry pick a few isolated examples of where men have the edge in society, and ignore all the contra-evidence and declare 'patriarchy', is a bit like surveying people in their 40s inside a job centre and claiming that most of the people in their 40s in the UK are unemployed. Most people in their 40s in the UK are not unemployed, but if you cherry pick that sample group from only inside a job centre, it's going to look like they are unemployed. The UK may look like a patriarchy if you only look at the Catholic and Anglican churches, or if you only look at male CEOs, or if you only sample garage mechanics, or if you fall for the bogus 'gender pay gap' canard (see my side bar for articles on the ‘unfair gender pay gap’ myth). But it doesn't look very much like a patriarchy if you only sample primary school teachers, or if you look at the number of male suicides compared to females, or if you look at the ratio of men to women who have died fighting in wars or doing risky jobs. The world can be a far more kind and loving and unifying place when we treat each other as valuable individuals over and above our group identity.

Society as a whole is not accurately represented when seen through cherry-picked data analyses that are sought to corroborate the bogus arguments of people trying to score points with their identity politics. Society is much more complex than that, and the reality is, there are many ways in which men have the comparative advantage over women, many ways in which women have the comparative advantage over men, but where in most cases of human living, men and women cooperate together to work, to survive, to love, have friendships, to pay their taxes, to bring up families, to fight against nature's hardships, and to make each other's lives better (either directly or indirectly). The church probably is, in several ways, too patriarchal in its ethos - failing to capitalise on the immense benefits and diverse duality of perspective within the two sexes, as are most religions and institutions that are built on status-driven hierarchies. But to claim the whole of society is an oppressive patriarchy is to be guilty of misrepresenting the reality of how men and women really operate in a relationship symbiosis, in mutually beneficial synergies, and in reciprocal encouragement against the vicissitudes of nature's hardships and challenges.

Final word

I've said all this not to perpetuate further division, but to explain that I think anyone who sees the world narrowly in terms of group identity and seeks to pit one against the other or foster resentment towards other groups is missing the most rewarding element of being human - the sovereignty and worth of the individual as an agent of value. When I think about all the elements that make up my self-identity, I find that I am numerous things all at once: I'm a man, a son, a Christian, a manager, an employee, a writer, a weight trainer, a cousin, a libertarian, a Darwinian, a Humean, a Jungian (the good parts of Jung, heh), an egalitarian, a white person, a tall person, the list goes on. Unless we treat each other as though our individuality, our feelings and our unique personhood take primacy over any shared characteristics we share with others, we are not being fully appreciated for the whole essence of our distinct self, and we can't thrive as well as uniquely created people with a distinct purpose and an exceptional individuality.

All Humans Probably *Are* Racist, But It Doesn't Mean We Have To *Be* Racist

I think if we really could access windows into souls, we'd find that most perceived racism isn't really racism as per the dictionary definition. It will be one of two things:

1) Dislike of the person - not their skin colour or ethnicity - but of their views, beliefs, attitudes or what they represent (this will have both proximal effects and distal effects, by association). If you think of contrasting two black people like the execrable Afua Hirsch and the excellent Thomas Sowell, you'll probably sense an idea of what I'm getting at here.

2) Outward manifestation of the inner gamut of insecurity, frustration, self-regret, self-loathing, pain and hurt that lives within human beings. A lot of what seems like racist behaviour is actually fear, pain and longing from within the bowels of the perpetrators. They feel marginalised, and without much hope, and suffer from the 'malice of the underdog' that Evelyn Waugh wrote about (which actually has its provenance in Proverbs 26:26 -"Their malice may be concealed by deception")  

To that end, Black Lives Matter and the SJW virtue signallers are fighting the wrong battle from the off, because these battles are more about planting fruit-bearing seeds into our own minds than about trying to chop down weeds in other people's. Only truth, facts, love and kindness can solve human problems - and every individual stands accountable to first get their own house in order before they try to change things on the outside. If the attention-seeking Black Lives Matter and SJWs could understand this they wouldn't be partaking in misjudged demonstrations with bogus opposition to illusory enemies - they'd take some time out in solitude - you know, the place in which Byron rightly said we are least alone - and fight the enemies within that are stopping them see the power of the truthseeking individual who knows how to love.

I won't ignore the enemy they think they are fighting, though. I'll just try to expound on it on my terms, which hopefully explains why I think love and words are better than noisy protests. The best explanation I have for racism is that it is an exaptation (as per Stephen Jay Gould) - it's a trait that evolved because it served an in-group function to aid survival by helping us to be tribally connected, but has subsequently hung around in vestiges of our personality. Social development and greater cultural integration means it is frowned upon in relatively advanced places like the Western world, but it is still nested in our behavioural mechanisms, especially when we are not conspicuously exposed.

This seems to be backed up by what Carlos Navarrete found in his "Prejudice at the Nexus of Race and Gender", that there is evidence for biases against out-group males that were markedly distinct from those in the in-group. Men's biases were motivated by social dominance, presumably to increase the probability of passing on their genes, and women's biases were motivated by fear of sexual coercion, presumably because they don't want to get impregnated by males that are not going to stick around and help rear a child. Both of these findings tie in with what we know about differential selective pressures on men and women and the necessity of in-groups for survival stability.

Consider this interesting social experiment from Malcolm Gladwell’s book ‘Blink’:

“Consider, for example, a remarkable social experiment conducted in the 1990s by a law professor in Chicago named Ian Ayres. Ayres put together a team of thirty-eight people—eighteen white men, seven white women, eight black women, and five black men. Ayres took great pains to make them appear as similar as possible. All were in their mid-twenties. All were of average attractiveness. All were instructed to dress in conservative causal wear: the women in blouses, straight skirts, and flat shoes; the men in polo shirts or button-downs, slacks, and loafers. All were given the same cover story. They were instructed to go to a total of 242 car dealerships in the Chicago area and present themselves as college-educated young professionals (sample job: systems analyst at a bank) living in the tony Chicago neighborhood of Streeterville. Their instructions for what to do were even more specific. They should walk in. They should wait to be approached by a salesperson. “I’m interested in buying this car,” they were supposed to say, pointing to the lowest-priced car in the showroom. Then, after they heard the salesman’s initial offer, they were instructed to bargain back and forth until the salesman either accepted an offer or refused to bargain any further—a process that in almost all cases took about forty minutes. What Ayres was trying to do was zero in on a very specific question: All other things being absolutely equal, how does skin color or gender affect the price that a salesman in a car dealership offers?

The results were stunning. The white men received initial offers from the salesmen that were $725 above the dealer’s invoice (that is, what the dealer paid for the car from the manufacturer). White women got initial offers of $935 above invoice. Black women were quoted a price, on average, of $1,195 above invoice. And black men? Their initial offer was $1,687 above invoice. Even after forty minutes of bargaining, the black men could get the price, on average, down to only $1,551 above invoice. After lengthy negotiations, Ayres’s black men still ended up with a price that was nearly $800 higher than Ayres’s white men were offered without having to say a word.”

This experiment probably indicates that Carlos Navarrete was onto something about having the congenital structure for racism, and this probably applies to xenophobia too, and maybe even homophobia. But it’s not so straightforward. Our evolution has endowed us with traits from numerous historical legacies, and there are most likely degrees of racism, xenophobia, homophobia in most of us, as well as cognitive characteristics that manifest themselves as tribal and familial and territorial biases. To me, this is perfectly understandable – it doesn’t mean we are all nasty bigots – it means our mental endowments have template-based foundations based on survival mechanisms and competitive instincts that alert us of potentially dangerous situations. Perhaps we could classify these traits with ‘sub’ and ‘supra’ prefixes – they can be called sub-tendencies and supra-tendencies. It doesn’t mean we should all walk around seeing each other as racists. It’s better to think of us as creatures who have the handicap of an evolutionary legacy that once facilitated a form of racism in group rivalry but that now is suppressed with advanced cultural and social development. 

The present gives testimony to our evolutionary past. Those with a group-territorial mindset that we see by the photocopier machine at work, and in politics, and in football stadiums, and in gangs on sink estates - they closely resemble our distant evolution as much as our being vicars, charity workers and Samaritans does. It is this patchwork of elements that demonstrate our history and our mechanisms for survival, and it is this kind of personhood that we have taken into the world. That is why it isn’t surprising to realise that racism, homophobia and xenophobia are still a part of our sub-tendencies. As indicated above, it is easy to imagine why they are there; once upon a time natural selection would have favoured the genes that enabled us to identify a rival, have an acute radar against anomalous and potentially threatening behaviour, harbour a fear of the unknown, and be mindful of radically unnerving breaks from normalcy that could be seen to threaten the status quo. 

Our evolutionary legacies are seen broadly across our behaviour, because they are vestiges of our past. The evolution of the eye has left us with a large blind area in the middle of the retina. Our prurience is the result of our sexual past. Our long spine and susceptibility to back pains and injuries are the result of our quadruped ancestry. Our wisdom teeth are a result of our once having bigger jaws. Plus our fear of the dark, our blushing, our sneezing, our hairs standing up, our goose bumps, our reactions to moving objects, our trepidation at wild animals, and our behavioural similarities with other primates closest to us in origin, all of these show that we are a medley of inherited ineptitudes, built for the Savannah. 

Now here’s the key thing, I think, that keeps us civil and stops most of us becoming brutes (at last outwardly). As well as being integrated into a culture and society of other personalities, we cultivate the ability to suppress these sub-tendencies and we subvert them with what we might call our supra-tendencies. The reason the car-salesman exhibited an underlying prejudice is because it was manifesting itself in a subtle way – it bore the resemblance of a sub-conscious racism – and if he were shown the results afterwards he probably would have been quite perturbed.

Such is the necessity to suppress our vestigial racism, homophobia and xenophobia, we find most of us suppress it rather well. Our supra-tendencies are those more positive aspects of our personality (love, grace, kindness, generosity, acceptance, tolerance, charity, empathy) that we know we must cultivate if we are to avoid being complicit in a kind of Hobbesian collapse of our society. Instead of pulling out the weeds, we have grown trees to tower over them – and in the majority of cases it’s only when we scrape beneath the surface of the roots that we find the roots of the weeds too.