Racism and Opportunism

In a comment to my Blog Against Racism Day post, Nobody in Particular offers a reasonable criticism:

I think you're giving them a little too much credit to say that partisanship is the overriding motivation. It certainly is the principal motive for everything they do, but I'll just betcha there's a stinkin' healthy heap o' racism in the mix. Where there's smoke, there's fire ... and where there are rich old right-wing corporate white guys, there's racism.

Fair enough. Mr. Particular is absolutely right in observing that casual racism is extremely common among the socio-economic-political cohort currently running the Executive Branch. I think we could probably say, with some degree of confidence, that their racism was at least a factor in the policy change. In fact, I think we could say that they could not have acted as they did without at least indifference to the welfare of minorities.

All of which I skipped over in my post. And the reasons I skipped over it are related to the distinction between racism as an internal state of mind, and racism as a practical state of affairs.

Once upon a time (within my lifetime), the distinction between the two was more academic, and both were a whole lot more obvious: openly racist people pushed openly racist policies because they were racist. Happily, overt racism is now a lot less socially acceptable than it used to be; unhappily, racism has adapted (developing a complex set of coded signals in place of the old blatant declarations). At the same time, the issues in the struggle for racial equality are not as brutally obvious as it was in the '50s and '60s. No decent person, nobody who is not virulently racist, could possibly support segregation. It is possible for people who are not racist to, for example, oppose affirmative action on principle; I think they're wrong, but I don't automatically ascribe their wrongness to racial beliefs. All of which means it's a lot harder to tell who espouses genuinely racist beliefs.

Now, it's difficult to discern much of value about the internal life of anyone you don't know personally (and sometimes of those you do know, but that's another matter), and doubly so when they aren't being honest about their internal life. Meanwhile, the highly charged nature of race, combined with the dishonesty of those who would exploit it (mostly on the right, but also, in some cases, on the left), make discussions about the racism of public figures (mostly) more acrimonious than informative or useful. So identifying racism (as an internal state of mind) in public life becomes an increasingly difficult project with drastically diminishing returns. For me, the actions of the administration--the practical racism of what they're doing--are what really matter, and getting into another Bush-is-a-racist/no-he's-not debate would only distract from them¹.

So that's part of it.

The other part is that I'm not sure it matters.

Obviously, it matters in a lot of cases. Take the hypothetical affirmative action opponent, for example: it makes a huge difference whether their stand is motivated by a) the sincere belief that any kind of preferences are wrong, even if they are necessary to correct current as well as past discrimination; b) ignorance about the nature of affirmative action; c) indifference to the fate of people who don't 'succeed', whatever the reason; d) the sincere belief that affirmative action is harmful to minorities; e) the belief that affirmative action is wrong because minorities really are inferior; or f) other. There is a continuum of reasonableness here; some of the possibilities are reprehensible, but only one is truly monstrous.

But let's consider something a little more extreme. Throughout American history, racism and opportunism have repeatedly converged; one of the most egregious examples would be the white farmers who took over land lost by interned Japanese-Americans. Some were doubtless motivated by hatred for the Japanese-Americans. Some were relatively indifferent to the racial aspects of the matter, but saw an opportunity and grabbed it. Does the distinction matter? Were the farmers who were motivated by 'mere' opportunism, rather than by racism, any less evil?

Is the Bush administration any less evil if they really don't hate black (or gay or female) people? If they're just abandoning civil rights enforcement to squeeze out an electoral advantage, or endorsing bigotry just to pander to the homophobic, misogynistic true believers?

This is not wholly a rhetorical question...but I'm pretty sure of what my answer would be.


¹Yes, this debate is entirely hypothetical and extremely unlikely, given that only one other person actually commented on the post. But still.