Resistance writes:
The reduction of racism to hate, however, both conceptually and politically limits our understanding of racism and the ways we can challenge it. Racism has been silently transformed in the popular consciousness into acts that are abnormal, unusual, and irrational – “crimes of passion.” Missing from all this are the ideologies and practices in a variety of sites in our society that reproduce racial inequality and domination.
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Here again is the old play “Gender Relations” in three acts:
This drama reflects my default understanding about discrimination in general. I don’t mean to suggest that no one acts out of malice. I merely mean to argue that the amount of discrimination that results from malice is probably swamped by the amount that is caused by ignorance or indifference.
So, why so much attention to discrimination motivated by “hate”? I see it in terms of psychology. First, people tend to remember extreme events, and then to characterize such extremes as representative. Morewedge, C. K., Gilbert, D. T., & Wilson, T. D. (2005). The least likely of times: How memory for past events biases the prediction of future events. Psychological Science, 16, 626-630. Thus the word “homosexual” evokes images of a character in a Mardi Gras parade, “Arab” evokes images of a terrorist, “Republican” evokes images of Ann Coulter, and “racist” evokes images of a Klansman or a fat white Southern sheriff with attack dogs and fire hoses. These images may not be very representative, but they’re very memorable.
Second, people tend to attribute the best motives to themselves and the worse motives to others. Thus it is not surprising that people sympathetic to racial minorities would observe racial disparity and conclude that it must be the result of some hateful intention.
Third, people tend to focus more on villains than on harm. As Harvard Psychologist Daniel Gilbert remarks, “Global warming isn’t trying to kill us, and that’s a shame. If climate change had been visited on us by a brutal dictator or an evil empire, the war on warming would be this nation’s top priority.” Thus impersonal, systemic racism doesn’t fire the imagination like “hate” does.
Fourth, people are more motivated by problems that trigger emotions of anger, nausea or shame than simply by problems that cause harm. As Gilbert notes, “if climate change were caused by gay sex, or by the practice of eating kittens, millions of protesters would be massing in the streets.” The most motivated opponents of discrimination are the most likely to see the issue in emotional terms, and are the most likely to want to describe it in emotion-triggering terms to others.
Fifth, aggrieved people are mad and want action. If they are deprived of a legitimate target for their anger, a scapegoat will do. I suspect that many people feel frustrated by discrimination. I use “discrimination” to refer to the practice of according disparate treatment to similarly-situated people. Discrimination can’t be proved by observing any single act; it can only be proved by 1) comparing multiple acts to find a pattern of disparate treatment, and then 2) ruling out any bona fide basis for the disparity. Thus, while racial disparities may be easy to observe, linking those disparities to any one specific action may be neigh impossible. And if you can (almost) never link the consequences to actions, then (almost) no one is ever held accountable for the harms of discrimination. Who isn’t frustrated by this?
So I’m hardly surprised that people would look for symbols of discrimination – “hateful” actions – as lightning rods for venting frustration. It seems better than doing nothing.