Race, Racisms, and Solidarity

We're not just talking about the physical development of the church, but the more important inner ethical life of the people who compose it. This is one of the most crucial points, not just in the history of black people. This is one of the most crucial points in the history of this nation. How could it be that a people who have been hated for so long enslaved Jim Crow Lynch spit on, hated for so long unleashed into the world so much love and teach the world so much about how to love it. This is a very crucial question, smart little king junior didn't come out of a vacuum. John Coltrane's love supreme didn't come out of a vacuum. Tony Mars' beloved doesn't come out of a vacuum. James Baldwin's love so essays don't come out of a vacuum. My mother and father, dealing with unbelievable Jim Crow teaching me little Ronnie don't you ever stoop so low that you hate somebody. You always love your way through the darkness because that's the kind of people you come from and that's how we raised you. You parted this caravan of love that we heard two weeks ago for the eyes of the brothers thank you sister president for playing that you see now we're not saying all black people come out loving folk but we're saying low and behold when you look at the tradition you see Frederick Douglass we have been enslaved we don't want to enslave anybody Ida B. Wells Barnett we have been terrorized we don't want to terrorize anybody we're not going to be counter terrorists we're going to call terrorism in the question we don't want to be the next slave holders we want to call slavery in the question we don't want to just fit into the United States and be part of some class hierarchy what do you say to boys we want America open to everybody including indigenous peoples whose very lands and bodies was a precondition of it. Hi I'm Dr. Devon Sanchez Curry and you're listening to dialogues meditations and analyses a companion podcast for the problems of philosophy course I teach at West Virginia University you just heard the philosopher Cornell West describing the powerful positive social forces that have been produced largely because of solidarity within oppressed black communities in the United States on today's episode I'm rejoined by returning champions Dr. Ben Baker and Dr. Justin Bernstein in order to discuss the philosophy of race and racism and particularly the question of whether or not race is a morally tenable basis for solidarity by way of a conversation about the views of the philosopher Kwame Anthony Apia according to Apia in order to talk more clearly about race and racism we should first clearly distinguish three importantly distinct feces first there's racialism the view that race is real for example that there are essential heritable characteristics that allow for a biologically principled division of people into different races apia denies racialism he doesn't think that there really are biologically principled ways of dividing human beings but he also argues that making the mistake of endorsing racialism thinking that there are races doesn't necessarily mean that you're a racist instead to be a racist in addition to a racialist you have to endorse one or the other of two distinct racist feces on the one hand there's extrinsic racism the view that the characteristics that distinguish people of different races are morally relevant and provide a justification for treating people of different races differently on the other hand there's intrinsic racism the view that characteristics are irrelevant since the bare fact that somebody is of a particular race provides a reason to treat them better or worse than people of other races biapia's lights extrinsic racism is simply empirically false and a widely accepted Kantian view about morality that we have duties to people just because they're rational agents rather than because they belong to a particular group of rational agents makes it obvious that there's no moral basis for intrinsic racism even when that intrinsic racism is justified by an appealed or racial solidarity on the part of an oppressed group introducing Kantian morality and distinguishing racialism extrinsic racism and intrinsic racism helps clarify the conceptual terrain but the philosopher of race is still left with a tangle of metaphysical epistemological and ethical difficulties so without further ado here's myself, Dr. Ben Baker and Dr. Justin Bernstein doing our best to untangle them thank you guys for joining me on this little panel about Kwame Anthony Apia's racisms that's his article titled racisms not his personal racisms and it's hard as far as I can tell he's a real stand-up guy and I want to start out just by talking a little bit about the framing of the article so apia treats racism in a way that you might find striking in that it's at odds with I think many ordinary ways of thinking about racism so psychologists for instance when they talk about racism are talking about a prejudice attitude that's more like a matter of taste than a matter of belief right so you've got like a taste for apples but you find cucumber's yucky say so too when psychologists talk about racism usually what they mean is something like the attitude where people find people of other races yucky and in so doing they're not necessarily describing any particular belief to the racist about what it is that makes people of other races yucky they're just describing this aversion that the racist has but apia goes in totally opposite direction and defines racism in terms of beliefs or as he puts it in terms of theoretical claims that are held on the part of the racist and thus that can be shown to be true or false right so apia's project is one of describing racism as at least resting on if not being identified with these theoretical claims such that if you showed those claims or false then the racists should give up their racism rather than being a matter of taste where you have to change the racist affective response to the world rather than just making them give up some beliefs and so he explicitly writes that quote the right tactic with racism if you really want to oppose it is to object to it rationally in the form in which it stands the best chance of meeting objections and quote and so in order to put it in this form apia distinguishes between three different theoretical claims that he takes to be part and parcel of racism so first there's racialism which is just the idea that there really are races that people do biologically belong to different races and that they've got heritable characteristics that mark them as members of one race rather than members of another race second there's extrinsic racism which is the view that the heritable characteristics that make you part of a race are or at least go along with some morally relevant characteristics such that some races have characteristics that make them at least in some respects morally superior inferior to people of other races and then third there's intrinsic racism which is the view that just belonging to a race no matter what characteristics you have makes you morally superior inferior to another person but I think there's a couple of ways of looking at intrinsic racism so you could look at it from a sort of objective point of view where it's the belief that there just is a hierarchy of the races or you could look at it from a sort of subjective point of view according to which people have reason to prefer members of their own race and treat members of their own race preferentially over members of other races even if that's true of everybody and so intrinsic racism on that reading is the view that you've got a reason to have sort of moral favorites among members of your own race at the expense of members of other races and apias says that if you're a racist then no matter what you have to go in for racialism it's impossible to be a racist without thinking that races are real that races exist and then you can either be an extrinsic racist or an intrinsic racist or both on top of that racialism but the racialism is sort of the foundation on which racism exists and the main effect of framing racism in this way in treating it as this series of theoretical claims is that apia has set up the issue in such a way that he can present arguments against each of these claims and thereby provide grounds for showing the racists that they've made an error a cognitive error as opposed to a moral error and should give up the beliefs that make up racism so he thinks it's wrong to think there are such things as races biology doesn't support the existence of races even if it were true that there were races they wouldn't be essentially linked to any morally relevant characteristics so extrinsic racism is false and there are no good reasons for preferring members of your own race to members of other races just in so far as you belong to the same race and so intrinsic racism is false and I guess the upshot is that given that there are these arguments that these views are false everyone should be able to read apia's article and be educated and give up their racism and we live in a world without racism so I wonder what you guys make of this way of coming at the topic of racism through a philosophical end yeah I found the framing a little bit confusing I mean there is something attractive I guess about if racism did come down to propositions if there were some content that you could clearly argue against and you can get some people in a philosophy classroom to think clearly about that there's a clear solution there but what what is the solution a solution to and is it a solution to the problem that we really are trying to identify when we're talking about racism which I think some of the content of apia's article itself kind of cuts against yeah um so after he sets up intrinsic and extrinsic racism the next section of the paper after racist propositions is racist dispositions wherein he's a little bit cagey but acknowledges that lots of people that you might think or that might seem to be extrinsic racists actually have some intrinsic racism and they're a little bit insincere or they're unable to see that the evidence doesn't support certain things that they think so there's this irrationality that he ends up associating with the term racial prejudice and this does a whole lot of work in the paper and I imagine we'll talk more about it but just the fact that he does so much work talking about what looks to be in between intrinsic and extrinsic racism and looks to have a lot to do with irrationality and ways of distorting ones reasoning such that you're not just operating on some clear principle of people of this race should be treated like this and people of that right like that that principle isn't doing the work in that middle section of the paper so yeah that's where the framing kind of came apart from some of the things that I thought were compelling about what he said yeah just echo a doctor baker has to say it's it's weird reading this article right now when we've learned so much about implicit bias and implicit bias training and stuff like that and to me there you know a lot of what's being talked about right now is the person you know the good person who wants to be an ally or who is sympathetic to causes of racial justice yet despite their own best intentions when they are asked to describe faces when they see you know a black face they say things that are basically extrinsically racist using apiast sort of language so it seems like a lot of what we're concerned with or not the people who are espousing racism as an ideology but the people who despite their best intentions end up harboring sort of a differential attitude towards people in the basis of race at the same time I guess you know we're seeing a lot of people right now who are died in the wool racist coming out who espouse it as an ideology the Richard Spencer's so I think in one way his article is kind of really well suited to engaging with the Richard Spencer's it's not as well suited to engaging with those who who are afraid that they have this sort of prejudice built in and don't want to it seems like the sort of rational persuasion strategy might be applicable to the Richard Spencer's to some extent although as Dr Baker was pointing out you know I think a lot of those people are kind of irrational and they won't respond to reasons yeah so one maybe more charitable way of putting what api is doing is that he's very clearly distinguishing racist beliefs on the one hand which he's calling racism here but we don't have to get too hung up on the terminology from racial prejudice right where racist beliefs are constituted by racialism and either extrinsic racism or intrinsic racism on the part of Richard Spencer for instance whereas racial prejudice is more like what the psychologists are talking about where there's just just this aversion to people of other races um and what api does that Ben mentioned is explains how even when you do educate people and show them that their racist beliefs rest on a very shaky foundation sometimes they still go on espousing those racist beliefs and a good explanation for that is that the racial prejudice is sort of the stronger uh more dominant force that's actually causing them to articulate these beliefs and it's not that they hold these beliefs on the basis of the evidence but rather that they espouse these beliefs as a way of articulating what at base is just a prejudice not a matter of theoretical principle yeah something that i also think is hinted at but then is ultimately kind of missing in this part of the paper is the way that this racial prejudice affects processes of forming beliefs and the way those then processes of forming beliefs affect action which affect the world which affect what beliefs you should form and so if you imagine someone who has a sort of extrinsically racist belief or extrinsically prejudiced in that they are more likely to perceive a black person as a criminal say and then say that person actually can affect the world in such a way that that person might be more or less likely to go to jail and that changes the proportion of people that are in prison what on the basis of their race and then that you know is a further basis for them to form beliefs when you see what ups says about irrationality and sensitivity to evidence being a part of what prejudice does you can sort of work your way there but he ends up not saying that much about it may be partly because of the framing of the article and being focused on racism as a set of propositions yeah and to yeah to echo that and to be you know maybe to be fair to Apia is he's not a psychologist he's not somebody who's a expert on how to defeat like racist sort of dispositions as much as he is a philosopher so it sort of makes sense that he would consider racism more as a series of propositions that you can sort of evaluate and engage with sort of rationally rather than psychological processes and then think about how we could combat those psychological processes yeah I mean it seems right that that's what Apia is well trained to do but I think Ben's question as to whether or not that's a very useful thing to do in the fight against racism is a good one right you might think that explicit racist beliefs held on the basis of bad evidence or bad reasoning aren't the things that are really driving the sort of pernicious racist behavior in our society and that the focus should be much more on racial prejudice though to say one thing maybe in favor of Apia's sort of analytic philosophical approach he does suggest that one group of people that his philosophical analysis of these racist beliefs might help are people who hold racist beliefs not because they themselves have any deep racial prejudices but because they've been raised in a society that is deeply structured by racial prejudices and so they have all of these social forces at work that make it very natural for them to form these racist beliefs without ever really scrutinizing them and so while nobody who is a deep committed racist like Richard Spencer or somebody is gonna read Apia's argument and be convinced that they should give up their racism and become a good person it may be that there are people who just haven't put too much thought into it but have taken it for granted that some of these racist beliefs must hold water because why else would racial prejudice be so rampant in their society and it could be that there really is a large contingent of people who sort of go along with racial prejudice in society because they are mistaken about these beliefs even if they themselves aren't the main drivers of the racist I guess I wonder though like I mean so he asserts I mean I agree with him that there isn't good empirical evidence that there are characteristics associated with races that would vindicate extrinsic racism but he doesn't really spend much time debunking those sorts of claims so you know he uses the example like a stereotype is that Jewish people are greedy he asserts that those are false but if people are growing up in the society and they sort of internalize those beliefs merely asserting well actually you know Jewish people aren't greedy that doesn't seem like that I'll do much to disabuse those sorts of readers either so I guess I wonder you know it's not clear to me that you know this article would help out those people who you mentioned so that sort of target audience the people who've grown up who you know in a sense he says have mitigated sort of responsibility because it's just in the air I don't know that this is the kind of thing that would disabuse them of those notions either because he's not getting into the weeds and disproving the sorts of stereotypes that lend themselves to extrinsic racism yeah I guess maybe you might think that api is doing the analytic work to very clearly distinguish what sorts of cases need to be made in order to show people that their racist beliefs are faulty so that educators armed and activists armed with api's categories will have the tools to go out and and actually convince people right yeah right kind of a long similar line to what dr. Bernstein was just saying you can see that maybe someone who was something like a pure extrinsic racist who we were suggesting there may be not that many of would be in a position to be swayed in the way that dr. Curry was describing but for those people who he's really talking about when he's talking about racist dispositions and racial prejudice what they actually have to be sensitive to is their own potential irrationality and their own potential insensitive insensitivity to evidence which is kind of coming at a meta level and is much more difficult than is not something he spends a lot of time talking about I did like that point a lot that he said look you should notice that this is a feature of other people who are in the grip of ideology and so you should be very cautious at the very least and sort of be aware that you might have that sort of tendency to dismiss evidence that challenges basically I mean he doesn't use the charm of your privilege but basically that's what he's talking about I like that point a lot I was wondering what you two thought about some of those comments about responsibility so I'm just going to read part of the racial prejudice section so this is after he says something that we've already challenged a little bit that the that racist prejudice will be articulated through the sorts of theoretical propositions I dubbed extrinsic and trinsic racism so whether or not you think that's right I was asking whether it's right to treat such people as morally responsible for their acts of racial prejudice and we can even strengthen in the case a little imagine someone who's relatively open to analyzing their own processes of belief forming and so you know they've just committed some slight that was hard for them to notice but they're the kind of person who maybe will reflect a little bit later and have some thoughts about that and api is kind of suggesting that responsibility might not fall to such a person for that sort of behavior in the way that you know you would just standardly assign responsibility to someone who just punches someone or whatever so yeah I'm just I'm just wondering about how api thanks slash how we should think about responsibility in these circumstances it's a really hard question yeah it is yeah I mean I had one thought about it when reading the paper which was it when he asks that question he associates it with what we would maybe call a microaggression that's maybe what people who are open in the way I was describing shouldn't be held responsible for but once we bring into the conversation this larger picture of racial prejudice it brings to the fore for me a question about responsibility for doing something about racial prejudice doing something about one's own racial prejudice I would want to assign responsibility in a positive light for someone who does reflect back on an earlier interaction and say oh maybe I shouldn't have been so quick to dismiss that person or maybe I shouldn't have been so quick to cross the street so that's the kind of thing I want to give someone points for so there should be a flip side of that too and yeah that's just kind of where I'm thinking in a way about a more forward looking assignment of responsibility as opposed to looking back at the microaggression and being held responsible for that it's interesting you're saying this is going to sound like a complete tangent but I mean you hear people talk that way sometimes about like addiction so we think that people's agency is sort of compromised in that case and we don't want to blame people for having a certain sort of disease on the flip side when people eat their addictions we think that that's a really impressive feat and they deserve credit for it I wonder to what extent we would think that that sort of model applies to this doesn't apply to this I mean to what extent are powerful social forces that lead a lot of people to hold certain views like being under the influence of a really addictive substance or something like that kind of out there but I thought I'd throw it out yeah it's not something I thought about but they both involve a kind of deep sort of irrationality and so yeah maybe there's an analogy there to be developed yeah it's interesting I mean it ties back into api's tendency to frame this as a matter of cognitive failings rather than moral failings because as you point out even when he's talking about racial prejudice as opposed to racist beliefs he talks about it in terms of being in the grip of an ideology which is probably best described as a set of beliefs that you know have some sort of power in society and it's much easier to motivate the idea that people aren't to blame for their own racism if you think about it in terms of a cognitive failing right if they've just got a cognitive system where you know through no fault of their own they're missing the fun they're reasoning or they're under the grips of this ideology that they themselves are not responsible for inculcating in themselves then it's easier to analogize them to people suffering from addiction as people who who maybe we want to let off the hook of moral responsibility and it just strikes me that this is not the way in which most people think about racism most people think about racism as primarily a moral failing maybe with some cognitive failings and attachment to ideologies attached you know and yeah I think there's a real question here that I don't have a good answer for either about to what extent we should see people who are saying or even doing horrifically racist things as acting in a way they're morally responsible for when they've been raised in a society that is structured in deeply racist ways yeah it's tough it's a tough one yeah it's all I have to say about this again go really hard thinking about it is at a couple points happy I mentioned a larger pattern that individual racial prejudice kind of fits into and he even uses that to suggest you know maybe this is a way to push people out of this racial prejudice that isn't according to the way he sets up the paper racism per se but it's something that we've been really concerned about in this conversation you know show them how their reaction fits into this general pattern and then they'll have reason to reflect and assess their own dispositions in a way that hopefully could lead to some sort of change and so I want to ask about the relationship between this pattern that he mentions a couple times and the sort of structural claims that don't show up so much in the paper things like when people say "oh the police are racist" or this set of institutions are racist is that what Appia is talking about by another name is there's something further that we should say about what racism is when it's not just an aggregate of individual cases of racial prejudice and how would we describe such a thing that's not just an aggregate I'm sorry I have some thoughts about it but just thought I would put it out there for you guys to see if you have a response to yeah I like that question because it really puts into focus just how individually focused Appia's sort of you is and how focus C is on psychology and that again seems kind of it sounds kind of odd right now in this moment when we're having this conversation when people are focusing on systemic or institutional racism which is clearly not focused on individual psychology as much as it is on institutions social processes outcomes of sort of mass interactions that get aggregated and we see disparities in terms of how people of different races are treated so I guess I would think I don't see how one could really take his idea of extrinsic or insert that racism and really plug it into it analyze that sort of phenomenon a lot of time to what people have in mind is they have something where it's not even on the basis I mean you know maybe implicit bias but certainly not on the basis of ideology that a lot of this stuff happens so people get sentenced more and just people just don't think about how a policy will have differential impacts on different communities and that leads to very different outcomes on the better match up with race and that certainly seems to be racist and in some understanding of that term but it's not clear to me how that would map on to his definitions. Yeah just to put some some flesh on that point when people call the institution of the police say racist they emphatically don't mean that individual cops are racist or that the chief of police who is racist and is giving racist order to his cops you know maybe that sometimes happens but the problem is on the whole that the institution is structured in such a way that even if there were no racist people in the institution it would have outcomes that disproportionately affected certain racial groups over other racial groups right so the way in which neighborhoods are policed in the United States means that black people are more likely to be arrested on charges of owning a small amount of marijuana than white people are and that's true even if all of the cops who are on the beat in that neighborhood are totally pure of heart and are not racist at all because the fact is that they're patrolling that neighborhood rather than the white neighborhood down the street and so they're just more likely to arrest those people whatever they believe about extrinsic racism or intrinsic racism. Yeah that that said pretty clearly what I thought was kind of most missing in this article too that you know you bring up these certain policies in the way they can be self reinforcing and you have a policing policy that puts more back people in prison and then their parole kind of conditions are different and the way all of these different policies can self maintain the the initial let's call it racist policy of policing black neighborhoods more strictly is something that it doesn't seem to me can be accounted for at all in terms of individual dispositions and it seemed like an analogy that I've been using recently to think about these sorts of high level phenomena more generally but in particular this one if we you know were to imagine a sort of less informed science of astronomy and they're looking at the orbit of the earth you can imagine imputing to the earth certain forces and kind of an angular velocity and you know in the spring it's moving so and so fast and it's moving over here and then summer comes and it turns a little bit more but you know you can add those up and sort of describe the earth's course around the sun but what you would be missing is gravity itself this higher level phenomenon that is pulling the earth around and so that's kind of a way that I think about the big picture forces that you'll hear you know white supremacy the racist police force that's something that doesn't relate to individual movements in the way that the gravity of the orbit of the earth doesn't relate to kind of individual courses along its trajectory. I mean given that there is that sort of lack of connection there I do think there's a real question to be asked about whether it's wise to use the same term racism to refer to all of these different phenomena right to refer to affective prejudice and to refer to these beliefs that have very specific truth conditions and to refer to disparate outcomes built into how institutions and maybe society as a whole are structured. You get the point of calling all of these things racist right in that in the end they are all things that end up having effects where people of one race have a tougher time than people of other races but I do think that a lot of people sort of knee-jerk reactions against charges like the institution of the police's racist is to say like oh no my cousin's a cop and he's like a great guy or like my cousin's a cop and he's black and he's definitely not racist against black people and insofar as they're right about that and the point of calling the institution racist isn't to charge any particular cop with being racist it's not clear to me that tactically speaking it's best to use the same term on these different levels yeah I buy that I've seen those same sorts of conversations that you just refer to among among philosophers actually and prominent blogs you know where somebody says well they they refer to the killing of George Floyd and they say things like well you don't know what he was thinking on the day when he went out and he killed this person he might not have had a racist bone in his body and it sort of distracts from the conversation that people want to have when they say things like that the institution of policing is racist in the United States so I get the temptation to talk about it all under the same umbrella because I think you know Richard Spencer's aside most people are are very on board with the idea that explicit extrinsic or intrinsic racism as a matter of belief is wrong and so if you can parlay your view that that's wrong into a critique of institutions that's very powerful the worry is if we're just talking about something that's so different that people don't see the connection between the two other than as you put it for people of certain races things go poorly as a result of a variety of different factors some of them psychological some of them institutional yes so we just mentioned this police officer who's black so surely he's not racist and one question that comes up during that is article is kind of about the racism on the part of non let's say non-whites and more generally the prejudice on the part of groups who aren't in the dominant position so one thing for us to discuss I guess is you know what how do we make sense either in apiasterms or in our own terms of non-whites being racist non-mails being sexist things of that nature yeah I mean I think his view pretty clearly allows for people of dominant groups to be racist or sexist or whatever because it's sorry of non-dominant groups yes that's very clearly he allows for dominant groups to be racist is sex yeah non-dominant groups can members of non-dominant groups can be racist or sexist because it's a matter of psychology and when people say things like that you know that say for instance like black people can't be racist or women can't be sexist they clearly have in mind something that's much more social they have in mind they're using racism or sexism in a sense of like you know enjoying certain sorts of social advantage or something like that or oppressing people of groups that are at a relative disadvantage but since apia seems to define things in terms of psychology he his view wouldn't rule that out so somebody who's extrinsically racist who's a member of a disadvantaged group could be extrinsically racist towards the advantaged group they could say something like you know all people of race X or are in fact lazy and they're just lucky and that's why they're in power or they could be extrinsically racist towards their own group they could say something like the reason why my group has not succeeded is because we have characteristic X as in virtue of being a member of this racial group or this racial group members of this racial group have characteristic X and they could also be intrinsically racist towards their own group or towards another group so they could say members this other racial group is just morally superior not in virtue of any characteristics they just are superior or they could say our own racial group is inferior yeah and I mean I think it's important to remind ourselves that apia takes these sorts of racism to involve cognitive errors necessarily but not necessarily moral errors so he definitely thinks that people of any group can be extrinsically racist to people of what they take to be given their racialism any other racial group but that doesn't necessarily mean they're doing something morally wrong at least conceptually speaking apia's account leaves room for people to be racist without making any sort of moral error yeah maybe another thing that we can consider here is the way we were pushing the conversation towards the more social structural forms of racism that I was suggesting before he kind of hints at when he mentions the pattern that people's prejudice can fit into that that too can be something and that there's you know documented evidence showing that even if you are say black or a woman you can and are likely to display the exact same forms of irrationality discrediting people on the basis of where they're from or being more more hasty to react in a certain way just maybe because this is the pattern you've grown up in and so that too isn't something that we should think only falls on dominant group members yeah so I think the the most interesting stuff in apia's article has to do not with extrinsic racism which we've mostly talked about so far so not with this view that you know people of one race have characteristics that make them intellectually or morally inferior to people of another race but rather has to do with intrinsic racism which is just the view that merely belonging to a racial category changes the amount of moral worth you are rightly attributed yeah I mean there's a sense in which I mean in he points us out that intrinsic racism almost always co-exist with extrinsic racism so in some ways this distinction like it's kind of hard to envision somebody who says well you know the Jewish people for instance are superior to all the races just by being Jewish and it's not because they have any other characteristics so usually people would say things like the reason why this racial group is superior to this other racial group is because they they're very hardworking or something like that so it's sort of abstract in a way I mean intrinsic racism to think of it in the absence of extrinsic racism well just quickly on that point I wonder if part of what he has in mind here is that in some cases sort of extrinsic racism seems to be the driver and in other cases even if there's extrinsic racism along for the ride intrinsic racism really seems to be the driver so think of Nazis who take Aryan people to be the dominant race there are these extrinsic characteristics associated with Aryan people that they take to sort of be evidence that they're right that they're the dominant race right so the blonde hair and blue eyes and their tall and sharp and whatever but at core of the sort of Nazi racial ideology seems to be just this intrinsic racist belief that a particular race is the chosen race that should dominate the earth and the extrinsic characteristics that distinguish them from other races really do seem to be just sort of incidental ways of of reaffirming the intrinsic racism at the heart of it but it's not like you know when a really intelligent Jew came along that the Nazis were like oh maybe we should rethink things because actually we don't have all of the best traits right the commitment was first to the intrinsic value of the race and only secondarily to do these superior traits I mean I guess I wonder though like I mean how possible it is that people really hold that view that deeply so I mean usually what you have is when you get the intelligent Jewish person comes along you re-describe that it's like oh they're cunning or you put you put a negative sort of evaluation on trait that might seem positive in somebody from some others race and I mean I guess I'm wondering like imagine if you know it turned out that the Aryans were just so happened that they had all of the characteristics that go against standards of beauty in the society at the time what would they say about a sort of case like that right so if the intrinsic if the extrinsic stuff that seems so valuable were suddenly not to be associated with the racial group I'm wondering how robust the belief would be in the intrinsic superiority of the racial group I mean point well taken like you're right that like I mean I think that for a lot of these cases the intrinsic stuff is driving a lot of it causally like in terms of why they have the beliefs that they do that they're you know and they'll manage to explain away everything but it's I guess it's interesting to me to think about whether the intrinsic can sort of be the driving force as much as you're suggesting but yeah I certainly seems like it'd be a rare thing that someone would just like state their intrinsic racist beliefs without bringing in some some extrinsic stuff to sort of buff it up right yeah I was kind of make a similar point partly on the basis of distinction you made at the beginning of the conversation Devon between what I would call agent relative intrinsic racism and kind of objectivist that's just the way it is intrinsic racism which if that's the driver that has to be like axiomatic there's no kind of underlying well people of race X are better because it's just people of race X are better and so how are you going to express or argue for that in any kind of way that an analytic philosopher is going to engage with yeah that just seems like kind of underlying or an abstraction as you put it before Justin so it would make sense then if you're going to reason your way into your racist behavior you're going to have to appeal then to some extrinsically racist stuff or you're going to say something about an agent relative view that we haven't really put on the table yet yeah let's put it on the table yeah let's put it on the table um well it's okay so yeah I mean the intrinsic racist stuff I thought was the the most interesting part of the article so one question I had was just about apia just considered this analogy between intrinsic racism and favoritism towards one's own family so he points out that you know certain movements are based around intrinsic racism like sort of certain pan-African movements where there's a sort of significance attributed to being a member of a supposed racial group and and then that that you know sort of membership that shared membership sort of justifies a certain kind of moral partiality so you're you know you should look out for people who are a member of their group in a sense and you they have a sort of extra moral standing and he said well some might sort of defend this on the basis of saying well you know you owe something more to your family and you owe to a stranger and that that seems very common sensical to a lot of us and apia dispensives with that idea in a way that I mean he might be right but it happened pretty quickly that it interests me so he says something like look you know when it comes to your family what makes it okay for you to give preference to those in your immediate family over others is that you owe some sort you have some sort of responsibility over those in your family and virtue of sort of a causal relationship so you know if I'm your your parent you know what's am your father I bring you into existence that means I thereby acquire certain sorts of moral responsibilities over you and so it's in virtue of my having these special moral responsibilities over you because I brought you into existence that I'm permitted to sort of look out for your interests more than I'm permitted to look out for the interests of say like my neighbor's kid right and I guess at first of all I thought that that was like I don't know there's a lot of use you might take about why you ought to treat your your child or members of your family as having extra moral importance that don't have to do just with your causal responsibility so for instance I could see someone saying well look I owe something more to my cousin than I do to some stranger on the street I don't really stand in some sort of important causal relationship to them I mean we both happen to come from the same grandparents you know but you know one generation removed but it's not as though I have some sort of causal role over my cousin but we still might think that I owe something to my cousin that I don't owe to a stranger when they ask for help or something like that so people think that family ties often have more moral significance than opia lets on and they think that they have that moral significance independent of some sort of causal role so that you know just one thing is just to push back on opia's initial picture of the moral significance of family now for his purposes the reason why I think this is interesting is that you might think that well he considers his family analogy to consider to address whether intrinsic racism might sometimes be morally appropriate and he says well no just because you know you have to have some sort of causal relationship with somebody to have this sort of special you know claim to treating them in a in a partial way to give them extra sort of special treatment and you don't stand in that sort of relationship with other members of your supposed like racial group but if we reject that initial move we say well yeah you are permitted to treat your cousin in a special way that they you they have a special claim on your allegiance that your neighbor doesn't if we think that then maybe the same sort of strategies open to the person who defends some sort of intrinsic racism and I have a very specific example in mind here so just people have a lot of the same sort of biological material they're a relatively small group and so you might think that if we buy the idea that you can afford some sort of preference to your family and just invert you being part of the same family why not think that you know say Jewish people are a very big family and so you might be able to justify intrinsic racism towards members of your very big sort of family group and I think that this is something I mean I'm I mean I'm talking about it in very abstract terms but I think this is something that like a lot of people experience they feel like they owed something just in virtue being part of the same racial group to other people so I guess I wondered what you all thought about that yeah good so there's a lot in there so let's talk about what grounds your obligations to members of your family if you have such obligations before turning to the analogy to racial groups because I think there's there's a few different places in which this argument really turns so with regard to the family so I come from a big close knit extended family and I definitely think that I have moral obligations to you know even second cousins third cousins twice removed whatever that I don't have to people who aren't members of my family and you're right that it seems hard to justify those obligations in terms of this sort of tight causal relationships or direct causal relationships that api gives as examples so like you know most of them weren't involved in raising me in any serious respect maybe you know we saw each other once a year if that for a couple of weeks but they didn't you know they don't I don't have the obligations to them that I have to my parents as as a result of that sort of direct causal relationship but still that doesn't seem to me to mean that my obligations to them come from the fact that we have this brute biological relation rather there's sort of a familial social contract where it's understood in my family that being a member of the family comes with certain privileges and certain obligations where I know that I can call up my second cousin three times removed and tell them that I'm going to be in their city tomorrow night and expect them to have a place for me to crash right and because I can expect that they'll have a place for me to crash so too I will definitely feel an obligation to give them a place to crash even if it's not super convenient to me when they happen to be passing through town and the source of that obligation isn't just because they've got a little bit of the same genes that I have rather it's because we're both part of this sort of web of social connections where we have affirmed through various actions within that web that we're willing to go and above and beyond for anybody who's in that web sort of no matter how far out to the fringes they are right so it seems me that even though you can't refer to sort of the direct causal relationship that parents have to their children and grounding these family relations that doesn't mean that the only place to go is to is to brute biological relatedness as apiases but here let me let me try a thought experiment so imagine you have a long lost cousin or something like that somebody who you've never interacted with and they reach out and I say could you could you help me out I'm in need I mean I think you know I don't necessarily have this intuition but I think a lot of people think that that person has more of a claim to your assistance than a stranger who just reaches out and if that's right it's not just this I mean you could explain that in terms of the social contract but we could imagine a less tight knit family and after all you've never met this person I mean I think there's some intuition there that you still owe them something where it's hard to understand what that could be other than some sort of family time it's kind of roots yeah I don't know so much depends on the details of the case like why are they long lost why are they calling me rather than calling some other random person you know I think that there's nothing about them being a member of my family it gives me this obligation to my second cousin third removed except that that's the contingent reason that we have this sort of far off but still morally significant relationship but also like if of random philosopher who was passing through my town called me and it's like hey I don't know anyone in the area I really need help so I just went to the WVU philosophy page and I thought I've got this sparse connection with this person I should call them up it seems like that may be enough to ground some more significant moral responsibility to that person then to someone who I don't have that slight connection with right yeah I guess I mean I think pointing to other ways in which we could come to have obligations to kind of people or otherwise strangers doesn't I don't think discount what I think a lot of people would feel is the intuitive pull of the kind of case I got I mean just to be clear I'm sort of with apia I mean so so maybe it'd be useful to say something about where apia's coming from so he's he's invoking this sort of content idea that what we owe each other is just in virtue of our dignity as rational agents that are standing in particular relationships is not the ultimate source of what we owe one another and so mere biological sort of affinities can't be the sort of thing that justifies you know treating somebody partially or giving them giving them an advantage over some stranger he thinks that you know this it's this ideal of sort of impartiality that's really driving I think part of his his view I guess and I I share that to some extent I guess I just I I doubt that it's as uncontroversial as he seems to make it out to be and I would think a lot of people would have a different intuition from yours Devon that like a lot of ordinary folks would say that you do have this sort of special obligation to your cousin and that's completely consistent with you also having an obligation to a fellow philosopher you know you can say well we we have this sort of shared history or this shared tradition that's not biological but then there are other people who you do have these sort of biological ties to their kind of remote and both can be sources of sort of special sorts of obligations that we might have yeah I mean for what it's worth I took him to be saying that the family ties are actually an exception to the general Kantian tenor of ethics where he's agreeing with Bernard Williams here that there are dimensions to our ethical life beyond sort of pure moral responsibility as it's borne out in Kantian ethics and it's those sort of relationship based responsibilities that ground our obligation to families and then I took his argument to be a sort of error theory where he's pointing out that we have another way of grounding our obligations to members of our family even distant members of our family and so the onus of the argument is on the person who thinks biological relatedness is doing any work given that it doesn't need to do that work in order to ground that relationship now that doesn't answer as you point out people who do have this strong intuition that biological relatedness does matter right and if people think they've got a good reason for making the case that biological relatedness does matter then I think you're right that I haven't offered any reason for thinking that that's false I've just offered reasons for thinking that other things matter that good ground your relationships other than sorry Ben I cut you off. No worries I was going to say it seems his critique of the biological point partly he gets motivated by a feminist and gay critiques of the nuclear family and so there's nothing natural per se about you know the relationship between father and child and the other sorts of cases you two were describing were suggesting okay so maybe there's nothing natural about that but there's something valuable about certain kind of social collective enterprises that cover that and then also cover you know a group of philosophers and also cover other sorts of groups of people and I want to now think about this sort of case in relation to intrinsic racism or maybe something that looks a lot like intrinsic racism but I'm not sure if it fits into his definition what I'm thinking of is something that looks like intrinsic racism but it's without the racialism because the basis of your connected to other people of your quote race is that you have a shared collection of experiences of being oppressed and that does seem like a morally salient feature that you can share with some other people and that could be the basis of treating those people differently and doesn't really yeah again it sort of doesn't jive with the setup of the article where like we're gonna take racialism as the grounds for any sort of racist thing so yeah I know I guess what you guys think about this sort of motivation for claims about solidarity or community it's not intrinsic racism in the sense that it's because you're the same race but it's because you're the same or the you're in the same group of people who get suppressed because of the way people think about race yeah I mean I think that that's pretty plausible and it also I mean so you know I've been chilling for maybe this kind of intrinsic racism isn't so bad but I only have that intuition when it comes to groups that have historically been you know sort of mistreated so solidarity among white folks for being white seems pretty proponent to me but it seems less so when you think about people who have shared experiences so you know I was using the example of Jewish people like I think that's part of what makes it seem more okay at least to me intuitively and I would think the same thing for other historically marginalized sorts of groups so at that point it's no longer you're right to point out that that's no longer intrinsic racism because it's not based off of racialism it's based off of a shared sort of social experience well it's no longer intrinsic racism as apia defines it but I think one of the really controversial things about this article is that right off the bat he defines racialism the view that races are real as biological realism right as the view that races are real and races are constituted as these biological categories but some philosophers of race think that races are real but they're real as socially constructed entities rather than biological entities right so the philosopher and sociologist W.B. Du Bois once said that to be black is to be such that you would have ridden Jim Crow in 1930s Alabama right and his point is exactly the point Ben just made that what actually brings people together as a racial group in which they can find solidarity isn't some brute biological relatedness rather it's a shared cause or a shared experience of oppression or something like that and so if we resist from the start apia's idea that if race is real then it's biologically real then you might think that there are grounds for intrinsic racism as a basis for solidarity within oppressed groups just as there are grounds for you know preferring your family members to other people without taking recourse in the mirror biological relatedness yeah it seems really important to pull these apart because it's so easy to conflate things that look hereditary aspects of a culture are past to children and to children's children but obviously you know a dance style isn't something that's in your DNA Kendrick notwithstanding you know so like yeah just putting on the table this idea of racial realism even kind of heritable activities and and then you know maybe the kind of quote intrinsic racism that we were talking about not apia's sort of intrinsic racism to be a kind of thing that governs like a lot of people's lives in the way they think about race and who they associate with I mean I do think that the focus this is where I mean maybe this isn't fair to apia but I thought the focus on individual sorts of attitudes kind of didn't do justice to the importance of solidarity especially when we think about forms of I won't use the term racism forms of oppression that are much more collective or systemic and so where you know solidarity or something like family feeling could be very useful and important for overcoming systems that require collective action to respond to and appealing to membership in a group whether that's based off of biology or just a shared social history could be quite valuable I wasn't sure that there how much room his analysis leaves for that kind of the value of that kind of favoritism towards one's own group yeah kind of analyzing preferential treatment or preferential you know who you associate with as a coping mechanism in response to oppression yeah it doesn't really fall out of the analysis here it seems to me because that treatment isn't on the basis of racialism per se yeah I mean again here I think one of the genuinely good things that the api article does is really makes us pull apart questions of cognitive error from questions of moral error so you might think that Jewish people who have solidarity for other Jewish people and support their activities and are able to do genuine good work in the world on the basis of that solidarity are committing no moral errors even if they're committing the cognitive error of thinking that the correct basis for that solidarity is shared DNA because it seems right to me that the mirror brute biological relatedness isn't the reason that you should have solidarity with other Jews as a Jew the reason you should have solidarity with the other Jews as a Jew is this long important tradition of both oppression on the one hand but then also rich cultural practices that are passed on within communities on the other hand right and there's plenty of material in there for having solidarity without making the error of thinking that the reason you have that solidarity is some biological fact that binds you closer to another Jewish person than to a gentile it's interesting so yeah I mean on the one hand that seems absolutely right to me on the other hand I'm wondering like how effective I mean people appeals to like blood or imagine sort of group identities can be very effective yeah and I wonder how much more effective it would be like if people were to sort of you know let's say we'd say opus right and the blood doesn't matter right it's all about shared culture shared fight against depression or something like that if we were to if people were to try to rally around that as opposed to some sort of notion of shared sort of racial identity I wonder how much more effective or less effective it would be and the reason why I think that's interesting is that let's say we find out that appealing to this sort of false idea of belonging to a common sort of racial group ends up being very instrumentally effective at you know winning the fight against depression or something like that against systemic racism yeah then then you end up saying something like well they're guilty of a cognitive error even though they're doing the thing they're appealing to this ideology that's incredibly good at accomplishing this morally worthy end that sounds kind of funny I mean it's not strictly inconsistent but I mean sort of like a useful lie we tell ourselves or something like that and I guess you could say that that's a cognitive error but there's another sense in which that's very rational right so you know I hide you know I tell myself lies all the time like I'm like there isn't any chocolate in the fridge so I won't go and eat it you know I engage in self-deception or I bind myself to the mass in certain kinds of ways now there's a sense in which that's irrational but there's also a sense in which that's quite highly rational it's rational self-deception so I wonder if there's a case we made that believing in racial groups is real is a case of sort of like rational self-deception that's worthwhile on the whole yeah so it's a cognitive error if the goal of your cognition is truth right but it's not a goal a cognitive error if the goal of your cognition is advancing your practical ends or is strategically organizing people to feel deep solidarity with each other because you're right that it sure seems to be built into human psychology that we feel these appeals to biological racial likeness as as motivating yeah I think this is a really interesting question putting out an optimistic reading on the present moment you can almost imagine this you can see this transition in the way we're talking about obvious peace if we you know 20 years ago would have read this and not had quite as much to say or quite as much of a critical attitude towards you know we would have been more straightforwardly on board with yes the biology biological stuff is not what matters and therefore the kind of rest of his argument follows whereas now we're kind of really pointing at the racialism that he starts off with and you know raising issues with it and talking about this more social level and if that's reflected in trends that we see you know in media across the country and what have you maybe in fact we have been telling us ourselves this useful eye and it's kind of working and now we've got some more evidence so that we don't have to rely on that lie as much anymore I mean that would be the optimistic reading of course alternatively we should just keep believing in that the blood matters until yeah I don't know until when but that would be the alternative I'm not sure I think it's a cool way of thinking about how reading api as paper you know in in light of current context raises this question of new neo intrinsic racism and is that able to do as much for us as not so neo intrinsic racism on the basis of blood could have done for us in the past yeah I mean I think it behoves us to point out the sort of obvious dark side of the psychological appeal of making reference to shared blood right because that's exactly what Richard Spencer is relying on just as it's what you know some segments of black lives matter are relying on and to me I've got to say it seems pretty obvious and Ben just just alluded to the same point it seems pretty obvious that it would be much better if we undermine once and for all the idea that shared blood is a basis for solidarity because then it would become obvious that there is still a great basis for a solidarity behind black lives matter and there's no longer any basis for solidarity behind you know the proud boys or whatever organization Richard Spencer associates himself with they all right because all in the end that the alt right has is this appeal to white people as the superior race or at least the race that belongs in the west or whatever because there's really nothing else uniting you know a suburban mother of four in New Jersey who happens to be white with a farmer in Kentucky who happens to be white whereas there is a rich shared context of a struggle against racism that is going to unite the black lives matter movement whether or not they go in for any sort of biological racial realism yeah just to add to that I mean there's also a sense in which you there's a worry about like just playing into the sort of false equivalence sort of game that people like the you know the white supremacist kind of like where they say well look there's just these two different groups that are fighting it out and so if you make it be about race then there's a there's a legitimate worry that that plays into their hands or into the hands of somebody who wants to say there's there's fine people on the sides or right something along those lines all right anyway we can end this on a lighter note well there's the lightness in the note that I mean I at least expressed a note of optimism that perhaps there's more awareness now of this basis for solidarity that isn't based in blood and yeah even awareness on the part of people who are in the dominant group and so that suggests opening avenues for ally ship that combats the kind of irrationalities that apia hints at and that you know we've talked a lot more about and so just awareness of these patterns as having their own kind of self maintaining activity to them is something that the present moment offers that maybe wasn't wasn't around so much when apia was writing this piece yeah I don't know if this is a light note but I guess I'm wondering like how the idea of ally ship fairs under obvious attacks on me so there's a sense in which I would think he'd say everybody's an ally in black lives matter we shouldn't really draw this sharp line between black people and their allies it is because there there aren't there isn't really a black people who's the center of it other than in in terms of like having a biological sort of essence so it's just allies all in the fight for racial justice I'm wondering what he would think of this sort of current right now in thinking about racial justice which does sharply delineate allies and you know people who are not allies who are the people who are who the allies are supporting I wonder how what he would make about what this article would have to say about that yeah I think that's a really good way of articulating the major difference between apia who's an olimitivist about race right who just doesn't think race refers to anything in the world and partly on those grounds is a cosmopolitan who thinks that look we're all in this together and it just takes it's just a matter of correcting um these racist beliefs however deeply ingrained they may be for us to realize we're all in this together um versus somebody who's a social constructionist about race who takes race to be partly defined on the basis of a shared history of oppression and thus may find uh much stronger sort of ontological grounds for thinking that there is a real distinction between the people who should have solidarity and for whom uh the fight is being fought and uh the allies who are supporting them in the fight but who are not central to that fight yeah I think there's something to be sought in kind of both of these approaches that there's something right about apia saying if we were all really good contians and just respected people on the basis of their personhood then you know this thing would sort itself out and then there's something that's come up when we really focus on these irrationalities and how pervasive they can be and how gripping they can be and if that's what we're taking aim at then we kind of have to put aside the fact that yes we could all be good contians and and we would get there but like look how hard it is to do that and let's really focus on giving people the opportunities to enlighten themselves about their own failure to be as good a contian as they might like to be thanks again to dr. Ben Baker and dr. Justin Bernstein perhaps it seems uncontroversial to you the listener that we owe people equal treatment regardless of their race if race even exists next week we'll talk about an ethicist peter singer who pushes this kind of reasoning to its most extreme limit according to singer a utilitarian where apia is a contian we owe people and indeed we owe non-human animals much more than equal treatment we should spend most of our wealth in order to improve their lives regardless of whether or not we have any sort of relationship or anything else in common with them. That's next time on episode 13 of dialogues meditation