Joseph Heath: How to beat racism
There is a very astute insight here into the psychology of race. What matters is not so much the differences between individuals but which differences we choose to invest significance in. This is the good news on race. It suggests that the best way to overcome race may simply be to distract people from it. If there is nothing else to attract people’s attention, the set of physical characteristics that distinguish race will be regarded as significant, but this can be overcome by reducing the salience of these characteristics. There is probably nothing we can do to stop people from classifying others into groups and developing animosity toward those whom they regard as belonging to an out-group. Yet even if we are unable to change this basic feature of human psychology, we can develop an effective work-around, by manipulating the environment so that people classify each other in ways that are less socially pernicious. For example, instead of allowing people to fixate on inherited features of individuals — such as skin colour — we could encourage them to focus on arbitrary or symbolic features — like hair style. The advantage of hair style is that it can easily be changed, and so does not translate into permanent disadvantage for any class of individuals.
I object to this plan because wealth is inherited.
This is the exact same “colorblind” racial ideology that America had settled on until it got talked down in the last decade
This is just people grokking why that fence was there now that they see what happens without it
I dislike +1-ing anyone’s comment on the internet, I think it’s bad discursive form, but…this is an important point. Really important. So, uh, “amen to that.”
[We were so close, people! We’d successfully turned racism into a disgusting social disease! We had a generation of kids raised on Sesame Street! And now look what’s happened to us, Christ, it makes you want to cry…]