One curious criticism that has arisen lately in response to so-called SJW criticism of conservatives is the argument that those people are themselves being racist against whites. Having given the subject some thought, I would have to conclude that there is, in fact, some merit to this argument, that the racism police are, themselves, racist. I can’t dismiss the idea out of hand.

Having said that, I would want to make clear that I’m not on anyone’s side, only the side of justice and understanding and consistency. Are the so called SJW’s wrong about racism (being everywhere)? Of course not. Racism is a function of various natural protective and often irrational instincts that all humans feel, and just one of the many possibile ways they can be expressed.

The fear of the other or unknown, familial and familiar love and attachment, tribalism, these are instincts felt by all humans regardless of culture or time, in fact they are shared even with other species. Ants protect their own colonies and are distrustful of other insects, even other ants. They feel a special attachment and obligation to those with physical and genetic proximity to themselves. They do not feel the same obligations or attachment to those who do not share that proximity.

And that trickles down for humans in a very granular way. We feel particular sympathy or understanding for those with physical or genetic proximity to ourselves. Our family matter to us, more than other humans, and we feel protective of it, and other families can feel weird or even threatening when we’re around them much. We may feel more sympathy and understanding for people from our hometown, regardless of how they are otherwise similar, vs people from another nearby town, regardless of how they are otherwise similar to us.

So we can conclude that the underlying instincts that drive racism are universal to all living creatures of sufficient complexity. They are, in themselves, natural and even important for survival. But, like many instincts, they can go wrong, especially in a society like ours of great complexity. Snow monkeys from Japan don’t really have to worry much about working out their feelings or ideas about monkeys in Africa, because they’re quite unlikely to meet them. And if they did meet them, they would feel no hesitancy or remorse about following their instincts to compete for resources and protect their herd to whatever degree they deem necessary. Their understanding of such relations, and likelihood of having them, are very limited.

But human society and human understanding are far more complex. We are capable of perceiving the bases of our own instincts and of questioning and either confirming or reevaluating them. We cannot live without such instincts; they’re part of what it is to be human, but we can determine how to best direct and express them. How to direct them to their proper objects and to resist them when they seek to lead us astray.

To return to the subject at hand, though, the relevant point from this part of the discussion is, that realizing that racism exists is not sufficient to free oneself from the instincts that underlie it. You can’t get outside of being human. And it’s very easy to think you have escaped the problem when all you’ve really done is reframed it. To think you’ve escaped racism when all you’ve really done is to shift the point of your position and identification and relation (which groups you identify with and which you don’t).

To be sure, in a way this is what we must do, to realize that the scary others are not necessarily those who merely look different, but whose hearts are different, to judge not by a surface criteria of limited relevance but to see the criterua of greatest relevance. Judgements must be made; that is proper, that is right, that is needed for survival. But we need to make sure we are making them on the proper grounds, turning our instincts to the right objects, not using an arbitrary or inaccruate measures.

And this is where we start to come back to the main point. What is racism? It’s easy to point to particular examples, but what is it, in itself. I would argue that rasicm is a form of reductionism. Making a judgment or reducing an understanding of someone or explanation of their behavior simply to a statement about their racial identity. Sexism is the same thing, but with sex. Race and sex are real and are good things. But racism and sexism are not.

The “isms” are all about taking something small and turning it into an overriding philosophy for judgment and understanding. When you ism something you make it a god, and you reduce complex humans to merely a function of that narrow aspect of their humanity. The clearest examples of are those cases where the category, race, for example, is not expecially relevant and has little explanatory power, but is still used casually as the explanation. Why did he do that? Because he’s black.

Personality, upbringing, mental state, education, economic circumstances, family, personal appearance, religion, gender, all of these are lenses through which you can examine a person and their motives and actions (and for each there is an academic discipline that seeks to understand people through that lens, often at the expense of others, often as the price of ignorance and specialization). And the same kind of myopia exists across all isms (and the disciplines that study them). People can be classist, can be sexist, can be prejudiced by religion and appearance and family, by just about anything. All of them are wrong when they become reductionist, or when they are given significance beyond their real relevance. And all of them are also somewhat relevant and neecessary. All of them are ways of understanding people.

Where isms like racism become most clear, and clearly bad, as I said, is when they seek to provide total explanatory power by simply making categorical (and perhaps not relevant) statements about whole people based purely on that one element of their total being. Is race relevant? Yes, of course! But it’s not the whole person. Its not the whole or perhaps the best explanation for everything. It’s perhaps not the only lens you need for evaluating people.

When you make that mistake, making race everything, that is where you cross from thinking about race to thinking racism. Now, in seeking to understand racism and combat it, ironically, us moderns become in a way more susceptible to it. We shift our position (who and how we identify someone as like or unlike, as other, as better or worse) to seek to unhook those races from incorrect instinctual judgements. But by focusing too much on race as a way of understanding human behavior, by coming up with little phrases and special terms to describe racial relations (to provide explanatory power), it’s very easy to fall into the kind of myopia and casual judgment that is the foundation of racism itself.

Why did he do that? White privilege. Because he’s white. This statement isn’t really qualitatively any different from the earlier statement explaining behavior in terms of blackness. It’s reductive, it’s often of limited relevance and explanatory power, it’s shrinking understanding of a real human to a simple statement about their race. I’m not saying that in all cases it’s wrong, in some it may be right, or at least be relevant, but it’s exactly the same sort of statement that racism itself consists of, and so is inherently dangerous and should be used carefully and sparingly.

Now, SJWs, as they have been termed, aren’t wrong about racism existing or being bad or about the need to confront it. It’s merely an irony that one of their tools for confronting it is to engage in perpetuating the same sort of reductive language and broad categorization and emphasis on race that is the object of their concern (they’ve merely changed which side they identify with). The underlying behavior, then, the fundamental mistake, the reductiveness, the overemphasis on race as a category for understanding, the creation of trite explanatory categorical statements to judge and explain the behavior of others, those have survived and persisted.

This is the sense, then, in which some conservatives are not entirely wrong about reverse racism. In some cases, yes, they are merely feeling resentment about what is actually a leveling of the playing field and the loss of actual white privilege (which is indeed a real thing, it’s just a dangerous term to use to casually to explain or describe the actions and motivations of another person). But they are also not wrong in perceiving the irony of having the same sort of statements and explanations and reductive understanding applied to themselves as they are being chatsied for applying to others.

People have an instinct for that kind of hypocrisy. Children become very belligerent when confronted by it, when their parents criticize them for a behavior (losing their temper, or talking impolitely) by a parent who does so angrily and impolitely. Or even more when it’s a sibling, who accuses them of being mean while displaying the same animosity. And so the children don’t listen to each other, because they feel aggrieved in turn by the perceived slight and unjust criticism in kind by the other. And they both get angrier, and neither listens. Maybe the second child (or parent) even felt justified in the nature of their response, having been first harmed themselves. You were angry to me, which hurt my feelings, so I have a right to speak to you about it, angry in turn, and feeling justified in returning the same for same.

Adults are not really so much different from children. What we see writ small and simple with them we see writ large and more complex with adults. Rather than righting a wrong, we tend to compound it or reverse it upon the other side. We don’t let go of the underlying mistake. Is reverse racism a thing? Of course! People find it almost impossible to actually shake loose of these underlying problems related to our instincts and how we understand others, and since they cannot figure out how to not be humans (nor should they), they just adjust their position a bit and keep going, or they dig in and add a bit of resentment against criticism to the mix.

A white person struggling with racism won’t actually be convinced not to be racist, they will just transform or add the inherent damage and resentment of being reduced and labeled according to their whiteness to it. It’s good for white people to learn about white privilege. It’s bad, or at least very risky, to use it casually as a label and categorical statement about a particular person to zip up and write off their behavior. It’s good to know about African heritage and culture. It’s dangerous to label and explain a particular person’s individual behavior merely in terms of it.

Is reverse racism justified? In a sense, yes. You got mad because he got mad. Upon being reduced and labeled, rather than going through the hard work of creating understanding and discussion and steering clear of the same mistakes and getting everyone back to a more proper foundation for comprehending and evaluating one another, our first instinct is to reduce that person back and label them. It makes sense. It may even be deserved. But it doesn’t solve the problem. The solution needs to be bigger than the behavior that produced it.

Now for a series of addendums. I’ve covered my main point, here are just some additional thoughts for further examination. First, with all the very real and terrible racism in the world, why be concerned about this kind of fairly innocuous, “white glove” racism? After all, the criticism have some validity, a lot of it is happening internally, and it’s not like white people are in a position of vulnerability. It’s not like anyone is starting a pogrom on the most powerful people group in the world. Well, three reasons.

First, we don’t know which way history will go. Whites will eventually be a minority in many places they once were a majority, and racial vengeance is a real thing, and we don’t want to contribute to that any more than we want to contribute to injustice by whites. Second, it’s the principle. Two wrongs don’t make a right. If racism itself is the problem, not merely racism against XYZ, then it’s wrong in all cases, not merely in one case. Third, this type of racism is worth noting because it’s the sort of racism you can fall into by trying to rid yourself of racism. It’s sort of a cruel irony, and as people trying to escape rasicm, we need to be particularly on guard against just the sort of racism that trying to do that might inadvertently lead us into and corrupt what is a very admirable undertaking.

One aside I would like to make is in regard to exceptions. I think there’s some merit in having an exception for humor. Humor is special. It’s a non-confrontive way of facing things that would normally be very difficult to address. Historically, the jester could say to the king what no one could. And there’s real value in that. We can laugh at ourselves and at others in a cathartic way that can actually help increase our understanding of one another, potentially. It increases our awareness of ourselves and can even increase our recognition of the self-awareness of others, helping us see that we all are more similar than we thought and can enter one another’s perspectives.

We just have to be careful how we carry that into other parts of life. I can enjoy a joke about white privilege, and maybe learn from it, but I would be being careless if I started repeating things from the joke as a serious criticism of someone I met. I’ve listened to a lot of black comedians. I’ve learned a lot from them and find their work hilarious. But it would be very careless of me to repeat some of the things Dave Chapelle has said about black people as a serious comment about a person I know. Humor has a performative aspect to it. It’s a special place where we set aside a lot of the normal rules about what we can say and what we’re willing to listen to. Those special rules need to remain special, they can’t be removed everywhere. If we abuse the freedom and candor of humor and aren’t careful about how we carry that into the rest of our life and normal conversations and relations with and judgment of others, we can cause harm. Humor is a special and powerful thing. We need the insight it’s freedoms bring us, we just need to be careful not to abuse those freedoms.

One other aside I would like to make is a particular case study. The problem with bringing up an actual situation is that it’s likey to upset feelings when you get too specific. But it can also be very helpful to have an example. Before I get into this example, I am in no way suggesting that I’m great or that anyone else has a problem. Everyone involved was speaking in a good spirit and intended no harm and is in no way inferior for saying what they said. This isn’t meant to be a judgment, just an illustration.

So I was talking to a friend recently who was slightly frustrated by a meeting they had just been to. It was a very common situation. The person in charge had a lot to say, a lot which wasnt really relevant and was more them thinking aloud to themselves, and wasn’t really relevant to the people in the meeting or anything they needed to do. But the leader went on for a very long time, talking about many things, and the other people were polite and obligated to sit and listen. My friend had been reading about race relations recently, out of personal interest in increasing their understanding of others. And they reflected that perhaps the behavior of the their coworker was the result of white privilege (in particular, the expectation that people have to sit around and listen to you because you’re white).

My immediate instinct was to question this. I felt uncomfortable with the explanation. It seemed to fall into the trap of reductivity and irrelevance. The person’s whiteness was not of special significance in this case. Because the audience of other listeners were themselves white. Also, the cultural setting, the town and place where this meeting was located and where the person had come from were overwhelmingly white. So there was no one to be privileged above, to be in contrast to. So reducing their behavior to function of race seemed questionable. I pointed out that the audience was white, so the talker couldn’t really be expecting people to listen to him simply because he was white. I also made the counter example that even in homogeneous cultures, people in charge expect others to have to sit around and listen to them (often for little reason). Leaders in Africa do it, leaders in Asia do it. Even lions do it. We don’t explain the fact that people listen to the president of Botswana by invoking black privilege. There’s more to the situation than that, other part of the person and the social situation that are more significant. Even big dominant animals expect the betas to wait on them and put up with them and listen to them. It isn’t a quality particular to whiteness. As a causal explanation, in this case, it’s very weak. Plenty of people do it who aren’t white, who aren’t even human! And plenty of white people, including many at that very meeting, don’t do it. And so, ironically, the statement itself was an example of textbook racism, reducing the explanation of someone’s behavior to a single category, race, even when it’s not particularly relevant.

I pointed that out, and my friend responded that the tendency to expect other people to listen to you is something a lot of people who talk about white privilege say is part of it. And that struck me as a case of using knowledge and association dangerously. I’ve heard that being black is associated with liking fried chicken and watermelon; I’ve heard many people say that. So if I go to a summer picnic in Colorado and see someone black eating watermelon, would it be ok for me to tell my girls “He’s eating that because he’s black.”? That’s where association gets conflated with causation, and you start to cross the line into isms. Especially if it’s not relevant and many other more important factors may exist in that particular situation. That’s reductivism, ignoring the greater reality of a person or situation to reduce it to a simple formula about race. And a lot of people saying it about that particular class of person doesn’t make it right to do.

My friend revised their statement then, speculating that it was white male privilege, or maybe just male privilege. On this ground, I was more likely to agree, conditionally. I was on board. It seemed like a better argument. Men do have a tendency to be universally more dominant, less socially conscious of others, across culture (and even species). As a partial explanation, I was willing to grant it some explanatory power, even if I still shy away from statements like “male privilege”, that seek to reduce and explain a particular situation or person with a phrase. Often such phrases are more labeling than explaining, but they give you the pleasurable feeling of having neatly explained something. And so I find them distasteful, even when they are, in fact, somewhat accurate. They still tend to make you feel like the discussion and explanation is over, like you don’t need any more understanding of that person and why they do what they do. It’s because of “male privilege”. And simple, monolithic answers like that make me uncomfortable. You can make judgements and observations about sex that are true and aren’t sexism, it’s sometimes important and helpful to do so, so long as you’re careful. But when you start using neat little terms and phrases and jargon, you start treading closer to turning an understanding of sex into sexism. Reverse sexism (at least to our culture) in this case.

In this particular case, being a man, and having experienced a lot of this sort of casually dominant attitude from a lot of men, who expected me to listen to them, regardless of whether they really had much to say or good things to say, and having felt that resentment myself quite a bit, I was quick to agree to being a man as a relevant factor. I couldn’t quite bring myself to say male privilege, partly for the reasons above, partly because I was man and I, and many other men I knew, did not enjoy this privilege and had often found ourselves on the receiving end rather than the giving end. So it couldn’t be just manhood. Much like the case of whiteness, there were clear counterexamples in the room (all the other men at the meeting). And I’ve known some very domineering women. So there is an association with manhood, but not a direct causal line, so much as would justify explanation with as strong a thought-ending term as “male privilege”.

And having got that far in my thought process, I began to doubt even my own pronouncement, or felt the need to qualify it, that that guy acted the way he did because it was a man thing. As I had just reflected, people in power expect that kind of privilege, of having people have to listen to them, regardless of their gender or their audience’s gender. Parents of both genders expect it of children of both genders. CEO’s expect it, and being a man at a meeting with them is no defense against it. In matriarchal societies the women expect it. In societies dominated by the rich, the rich expect it. Animals expect it in animal society. Yes, often it’s the men, but not always, as with elephants and some other species. So what is the actual common thread? Power and dominance perhaps, as well as a certain social or personal insensitivity or awareness. Even then, probably not the main factor in every case, just in a lot. Some people have personality disorders (or just tendencies) that are more relevant to that kind of behavior. Which is why phrases like “male privilege” can be more trouble than they’re worth. They can make you feel you’ve explained something if the person associated with it is a man, even if other things about them are really more relevant, and you might have uncovered and understood them if it weren’t for that comforting jargon that seemed to end the search

Afterword, added nine months later.

I never imagined people would actually write books redefining racism, saying it isn’t racism if it’s against whites and it isn’t prejudice if you’re doing it against whites. I genuinely didn’t think things would go so far and get so overt so fast. But there are actual public books and arguments that basically say racism isn’t racism, if it’s against the right people. It’s unbelievable. I thought that some of the clever phrases being used were hiding a dark underbelly, I just didn’t think that it would all become so obvious and overt so quickly. I guess I should be thanking people for at least being more clever about their feelings. Even among more specific causes, phrases like “All cops are bastards” can hardly be called subtle, deceptive rhetoric or loaded terms. That’s like Trump making his new slogan “kill the towelheads”.

I suppose that’s the real hallmark of the new age of the hard right and the hard left that Trump has ushered in (not that he caused it, I see him more as the great harbinger of something that was already here and needed someone to officially inaugurate it). No one is bothering to pretend to be civil or sugarcoat things any more. You don’t have to wonder, do they really love the poor or just hate the rich? It’s super obvious how much everybody hates everybody. And now we’ve got a whole raft of intellectuals writing books explaining why rioting and racism and segregation and prejudice are actually just dandy. And ironically it’s coming from the leftists. I suppose that just goes to prove my theory that if you go far enough in either direction you end up in the same places, you just take a different journey to get there. Who knows where things will go from here.