Richard Thompson Ford, professor of law at Stanford University and author of The Race Card: How Bluffing About Bias Makes Race Relations Worse, walks us through the definitions of several of the more commonly cited types of racism and offers his opinion as to whether they deserve the label. I picked two to quote:
Unconscious racism
Harvard psychologist Mahzarin Banaji has developed a test designed to smoke out unconscious racial bias. The test requires the subject, under intensive time pressure, to match black and white faces with value-laden terms such as good, smart, and diligent or bad, stupid, and lazy. If you find it easier to match white faces with good terms and black faces with bad terms, you have exhibited what Banaji calls an implicit association between race and merit or virtue. Although she scrupulously avoids using the term herself, almost everyone else has predictably described the results of her research in terms of unconscious racism. And the results are disquieting: Almost 90 percent of whites exhibit some unconscious racism against blacks, while around half of all blacks exhibit anti-black bias.Banaji’s research suggests we have a way to go before we get to a post-racist utopia. But she warns against using the test to try to prove individual bias; in fact, she has pledged to testify against anyone who tries to use her work to prove discriminatory intent in court. Other psychologists have questioned the whole approach. For instance, U.C.-Berkeley psychologist Phillip Tetlock thinks that Banaji’s test doesn’t prove anything about discrimination in real-life situations: “We’ve come a long way from Selma, Alabama, if we have to calibrate prejudice in milliseconds,” he argues. […]
Reverse racism
Glenn Beck took the fear of anti-white racism to new extremes when he accused President Obama of being a racist, but political hacks have for decades used accusations of reverse racism as part of a well-documented, cynical political strategy. For instance, in 1990 North Carolina Sen. Jesse Helms turned the polls around in his race against challenger Harvey Gantt* by playing the reverse race card. In Helms’ advertisement, a pair of white hands crumples a rejection letter while ominous music plays and a voice-over intones, “You needed that job … but they had to give it to a minority.”There are real instances of anti-white racism, such as Louis Farrakhan’s crude diatribes against “white devils.” But they are relatively few and rarely amount to more than impotent blustering. Affirmative action—often tarred as reverse racism by its opponents—doesn’t qualify. Affirmative action is an imperfect but pragmatic effort to promote integration in the face of the effects of past and ongoing discrimination. There’s plenty of room for legitimate criticism, but suggesting that affirmative action is a form of racism is disingenuous and turns what should be a level-headed debate into a shouting match.
Do we agree?