Wednesday, September 26, 2007

 

What is racism

Racism and Steven Pinker

A time ago I read an article about Steven Pinker who was said to have said approximately the following words:” different groups of humans developed differently.” I must admit here that I have not read the original text by Pinker, so I cannot give any guarantee for its correctness. Pretty soon Pinker was criticized for these words and accuse of being racist and a Nazi.

I was shocked and tried to find out what was wrong with this statement and counterstatement. The fact is that Steve pinker is right, people really do developed differently, depending in what group of people they are. Evidence is absolutely overwhelming; just have a look at different nations, or even at different layers of one nation. The problem many people have is that sometimes the differences are huge and striking so that hardly anybody can see them, and sometimes the differences are so subtle that nearly nobody can notice. Therefore people usually notice and speak only of the large differences, e.g. language.

A question what is wrong with saying that people develop differently, well, the answer is that some simple minded people may take this as evidence for racism. But what exactly is racism and what it is not? Saying that nation or other groups of people develop differently, is merely saying that there are some people who develop in on certain direction than the others or they develop faster. But racism must include also the feeling of hatred. Otherwise it is only a mere statement that is absolutely neutral in feelings and only highly scientific.

If the mere statement that people develop differently should be witch-hunted under the apron of racism, then, of course, every teacher at every school all over the world would have to be racist, and all the governments that run education would have to be also charged as racist. The explanation is simple: every teacher always gives some grades, which means some students will get As and some Bs etc. This is a mere act of evaluating the level of development of these students.

If all governments and all teachers are not racists then, of course, the statement that people develop differently in different groups cannot be a racist statement either.

So why are there people who say such thing? It seems that only those people take such statement as a racist one who either cannot differentiate between racism and evaluation, or people who suffer from a stupid idea that all people are equal.

Well, people are not equal in one sense and are equal in another sense. People are equal as a biological art different from dogs, elephants, ants, flies or monkeys. Inside of the group of humans only we have differences. People differ from one another inside of the biological group of people. If it were not so, then everybody would have to be in prison for murder, as we have murders among us, but thanks God we differ and not all of us are murderers. Some people are gay but not all of us are gay, we differ again.

These differences are the huge ones, the striking ones that basically anybody can see, and therefore basically no one has any problems in seeing them. But if the differences are more subtle or even showing us that our own position in the hierarchy of human group is pretty low we try to make statements that all people are equal as this statement push is us higher in the hierarchy.

Typically, Nazis and communist maintained this statement because they were mostly coming from lower levels of human hierarchy; therefore saying we are all equal pushed them higher. One can see this still in the behavior of working class people in the east Europe that used to be communist-reigned and proletariat was politically put over intelligentsia.

So to make some sort of conclusion on the words that people are not equal: they are and they are not, it depends. If people are consider as biological group then they are equal, when considered as one sole group and compared to each other within this group they are not the same and not equal. If we were, then every human being would have to be a terrorist, which is obviously nonsense.

So Steven Pinker is no way a racist, as no teachers are racist, the mere evaluation misses the aspect of hatred and therefore it cannot be racist, and racism must involve evaluation linked with hatred. Some people should think a bit before opening their mouths.

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