In the August 2010 issue of Liberty I wrote an essay about racism. But that article was largely theoretical. Now I would like to share my personal experiences about the topic.
To do so I must first disclose my own racial identity. I am what might be called a mutt or a mulatto, although I prefer the term “mudblood,” which is the Harry Potter name for wizards who come from Muggle bloodlines. My mother is a white American woman of Russian Jewish lineage, and my father is a Muslim man with brown skin who immigrated to the United States from Bangladesh. My parents were married at the time of my birth but later divorced. My childhood religious and cultural education was a mixture of Judaism and Islam, although I never felt completely comfortable among either Jews or Muslims and as an adult I have abandoned organized religion. I have light brown skin but I am sometimes able to “pass for white.”
For my reader’s education let me mention that Bangladesh is a country with a population of mostly Muslim brown-skinned people located on the Indian subcontinent. (I doubt that I need to explain where Russian Jews come from.) What insight into race relations do I have as one of the world’s few part-Bangladeshi-Muslim, part-Russian-Jewish people?
The amazing thing about knowing Jews and Muslims is how distorted and out of touch with reality are the stereotypes and preconceived notions that some people have about members of other racial groups. Let me discuss the Bangladeshi stereotype first.
What most Americans know about Bangladesh, if anything, is that we are Muslims. Many Americans believe that most Muslims are Islamic fundamentalists who oppress women and support terrorism. My experience is that Bangladeshi Muslims are all different kinds of people, each with an individual identity. A minority of Bangladeshis are deeply religious, Islamic conservative fundamentalists. Some Bangladeshis are modern-liberal or leftist Muslims. However, I have found that most of the Bangladeshis whom I know are religious but not fanatical. I strongly believe that most Bangladeshis do not sympathize with or support Islamic terrorists. In fact, Bangladesh has something right now that the United States has never had, a female head of government.
If race has so little conceptual value for understanding people, then why do people make such a big fuss over it?
On the other hand, what can I say about Jews? Aside from a general enjoyment of gefilte fish and matzah ball soup and the other festive ornaments of Yiddish culture, the Jews whom I have known each have different individual personalities with traits that could not be predicted on the basis of knowing that they are Jews. I do not believe that most Jews are unusually smart or that most Jews are greedy, although the argument can be made that Jewish culture places a high value upon learning and intelligence and is conducive to a successful career as a lawyer. I recall with a certain fondness the Jewish custom of Hanukkah gelt, which is children's chocolate wrapped up to look like gold coins. I also recall pressure to study Hebrew and read Jewish books, but it is a stretch to find some special meaning in those customs. I regard “smart” and “greedy” as compliments, but I have known Jews who are neither. Yet some people have bizarre stereotypical pictures of Jews, as if all were identical.
When you have no firsthand knowledge of something it is easy to have a two-dimensional understanding of it. If I have any insight to offer it is that no two people are the same, and racial or ethnic generalizations have no relation whatsoever to how any real human being behaves. There is a notorious academic argument that if you were forced to form a basketball team to win money it would be logical to include no one but African-Americans. I suspect that athletic talent varies widely among blacks, and the idea in question is a thinly disguised excuse for racism. It is plausible to think that bigotry and racial hatred begin innocently enough as a crude cognitive technique of relying on racial generalizations for the purpose of understanding people. But this evolves into racism as the natural result of thinking about humans in terms of groups rather than individuals. I believe that racial stereotypes have no predictive accuracy.
If race has so little conceptual value for understanding people, then why do people make such a big fuss over it? One likely reason is that if race blindness were prevalent then the people who purport to speak for oppressed racial minority groups, the leaders of the racial special interests, would have no power. Unlike some libertarians, I have always believed that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was a hero and that the civil rights movement was a good thing. But I believe this only because in the Jim Crow South, blacks were second-class citizens who were not legally equal to whites. Segregation was the result of racist laws as well as the actions of racist owners controlling their private property. In my opinion, the civil rights movement was a success. Blacks achieved legal equality. There are still parts of America where racism is common, and I have been told that some data suggest that certain areas of the United States have noticeable numbers of white racist police officers. But the use of the machinery of government to enforce racist laws has disappeared in the United States, and this precisely is the victory of the civil rights movement.
Now, in the post-civil rights era, socialist blacks such as Al Sharpton and Cornel West have hijacked the civil rights movement and preach to the members of racial minorities that we remain locked in a racial war against the white supremacist conservative Republicans. They claim that the Democratic Party with its modern liberalism is the only place where we can find refuge and protection from the evils of the white racists. The desired protection takes the form of special programs to favor non-whites, or certain non-whites. This is an Orwellian nightmare — like saying that racial equality is our ideal but non-whites should be more equal than whites.
It is up to us to fight on behalf of individualism as the solution to racism by arguing that what matters about people is their individual personalities and not their race.
It is probably true that there are more pro-white racists in the Republican Party than in the Democratic Party, but I think that the American Right is a racially diverse group of people. Most conservatives, and the vast majority of libertarians, are good people who oppose racism. Only a small but vocal minority on the Right are Nazis or Klansmen who give the Right a bad name. It is worth noting that at various times in American history the Democratic Party was associated with the racist South and the Republican Party with the slave-freeing North. It is merely another absurd stereotype to say that the “average” right-winger is a white racist.
It is clear that racism and racial stereotypes have their philosophical basis in the doctrine that people are defined by their memberships in groups. If there is any hope of ending the blight of racism, it will come by taking an individualist approach. We libertarians are the world’s best advocates for individualism, and it is up to us to fight on behalf of individualism as the solution to racism by arguing that what matters about people is their individual personalities and not which race they are members of. I think that individualism will ultimately produce more diversity than state-sponsored affirmative action, because individualism attacks the root cause of racism, whereas affirmative action merely treats the external symptoms.
My friends in high school used to tell me that I should bomb my own car, and there have been many times when I got the sense from some Jews that they didn’t like me because I was Muslim, and received the same feeling from Muslims who did not like my being Jewish. I have never been beaten up as a result of racism (although my father has, and my maternal ancestors endured the Russian pogroms), but my entire life I have felt abnormal because it was not easy for me to fit into a traditional established role as a member of a specific race. I cannot be “a Jew” or “a Muslim” or “a white person” or “a dark-skinned person,” although I can be on the receiving end of discrimination against all of those categories. But it is still possible for me to be “an individual.” And being an individual is what each member of every different race on the planet has in common. It is what unites us and brings us together.
It’s liberating to be a mudblood, and it’s comforting to think that there are libertarians out there in the world who believe in individualism and represent the possibility that the human race will one day outgrow the abomination of racism.
