Many Things That Sound Racist or Transphobic Aren't

The case for not relying on our pre-theoretic ick reactions to assess whether something runs afoul of an ism

Introduction

CW: Detached discussion of racism and transphobia and discussion of possible worlds in which some assumptions that some racist people have are true

I remember at one point listening to a socialist political commentator respond to a video by Dennis Prager. Given that he was a socialist, he had lots of negative things to say about Prager (shocking!!). But one of the more bizarre objections that he had to Prager was the following. Prager used the term blacks to refer to black people — this progressive commentator insinuated that this was indicative of racism.

This is obviously absurd. For one, Prager referred to white people as whites, and the progressive commentator made no fuss about this. But I think it’s pretty easy to understand why this produced the reaction that it did — when a lot of young people hear the term ‘blacks’, rather than black people, it’s sort of jarring — much like hearing the term transgenders.

I think that this explains a lot of how people decide whether something is racist. People hear something, and, if it causes them to cringe in the right way, they conclude that it’s racist. People just rely on whether statements sound racist, without carefully reflecting on what they actually mean. If a statement produces the right type of ick reaction, people just assume it’s racist, without carefully reflecting. This is a mistake, because this ick reaction misfires — all the time.

A bunch of examples of misfiring

Suppose someone says the following: I like non-trans people better than trans people on average. Is that objectionable and transphobic?

Our system 1 answer is yes. However, the following is also true — we know from poll results that trans people are disproportionately left-wing. It seems unobjectionable to like republicans more than democrats on average. Thus, as a result of that, it seems unobjectionable to, on average, like non-trans people more than trans people. I wonder what people would make of such cases.

For what it’s worth, I probably like trans people more than non-trans people on average. They tend to be smarter and more highly educated — I prefer smart, highly educated people to stupid uneducated people. What about with gay people — would it be homophobic to suggest that one likes gay people less than non-gay people on average?

What about with black people — could one suggest that, on average, they prefer non-black people to black people? After all, black people tend to have less higher education than non-black people and be more likely to be democrats — one that likes democrats less than republicans on average or prefers more highly educated people could very plausibly like black people less on average. So is this racist?

Maybe it’s the type of thing that’s not racist to possess but is racist to say. Maybe it’s not racist to like black people less on average but it is racist to say that you do like black people less on average. But it seems like there will be some contexts in which one should utter any true statement, thus it’s odd to suggest that this is one example of a statement that you should say. Suppose, for example, that one actually holds that disposition.

Or what about the view that black people have lower average IQs. I won’t delve into the science here, but if one believes this for valid scientific reasons — even if those reasons ultimately end up being wrong — it’s unclear whether this is racist. One natural thought it that it is. But it’s hard to figure out why. Suppose one thought that, for non-genetic reasons related purely to chance, IQs of black people were lower. This is plausible — after all, it will be incredibly unlikely that all IQs will happen to be exactly equal of all groups, just as it will be incredibly unlikely that any two quantities will be exactly the same. But if this is true, then one will have to hold that, just by chance, racism could be true.

Additionally, there will be some possible worlds in which black people have lower IQs — maybe it’s not true of the actual world, but it’s certainly true of some possible worlds. But it seems like racism would be wrong in all possible worlds — at least, barring outlandish ones where a genie tortures everyone unless you’re racist — so this does seem to put pressure on the idea that it’s racist.

Maybe the idea is that it’s racist to believe that black people have lower IQs than white people if and only if they don’t have lower IQs than white people. But this has some clear counterexamples. Suppose that we live in a possible world in which it appears that black people have lower IQs by the available science. However, the available science turns out to be wrong for some strange, unforeseeable reason — maybe space aliens abducted most smart black people so that their average IQ is lower. In this world, it seems odd to claim that the fact that those aliens abducted smart black people in the womb would make believing the mainstream available science racist.

Here’s another example of how much our intuitions on this topic misfire — it was originally thought that non-Africans had lots of neanderthal DNA, but Africans had minimal neanderthal DNA. However, more recent studies are putting pressure on this idea — providing evidence that Africans have more neanderthal DNA than was previously though, though less than non-Africans.

If a study provided evidence that black people have more neanderthal DNA than non-Africans, many people would find this idea racist. The idea that Africans have more in common with non-humans is one that many people would find odious, even if it were true. The truth cannot be racist. Yet if we hold that this is racist, then there would have to be a possible world in which the truth is racist, in which black people have more, rather than less, neanderthal DNA.

Yet no one would claim that saying white people have more neanderthal DNA is racist. Why is that? Well, the theory I gave above of how people decide whether something is racist explains this — we cringe when we hear the idea that black people have more neanderthal DNA more than we do when we hear the idea that white people have more neanderthal DNA.

Conclusion

We think in words far too much. When deciding whether something is racist, we’ll listen to the sentence and see if it sounds racist. But this is a terrible procedure — our linguistic intuitions are not very accurate at figuring out if something is objectionable.

In general, it makes less sense to think of whether something is racist than to think of whether something is bad and wrong. If something is neither bad nor wrong, it’s hard to imagine that it’s racist. Racism should be neither good nor true. If there is no argument that something is bad beyond the fact that it meets some contrived definition of racism, then there is still no argument that something is bad.