Guest Post: Gandhi

This post was penned as a response to my comments in "Winning the Race" below. Gandhi is a friend and loyal reader, and has the honor of being the only person to ever redesign InstantReplay in my absence. I'd also like to take a moment to congratulate him on his family's victory in the recent Indian elections.

Diaries of an Interracial Racist I have had a number of arguments with people over what the terms “racist” or “prejudiced” actually mean. I generally hate it when people give me dictionary definitions for words when I am in a debate with them. This is mainly because the intent of the person giving the definition is to demonstrate that they are not biased in their use of the word, while twisting its meaning to suit their arguments. However, everyone has biases and biased people write dictionary definitions; one can easily find two very different definitions for a word and choose his favorite to punctuate his “unbiased” opinion. Having said that, I am going to give a dictionary definition for the word “racist”. I tried to be as objective as possible in doing this, so I typed “dictionary: racist” into Google and hit the “I’m feeling lucky” button to pull up the first match. This is what I got: “a person with a prejudiced belief that one race is superior to others”. This is not an adequate definition without having properly defined the word “prejudiced”, which is “being biased or having a belief or attitude formed beforehand. [example: ‘a prejudiced judge’]”. From these two definitions I will now extrapolate a new definition for the word “racist”: A person who has a bias [formed by 1) the media, 2) gossip, and 3) his personal history of direct and indirect interactions with people of other races] that influences him to perceive different tiers of likeability among people based on their varying features and skin color. I grew up in an interracial family. My dad was born in Bombay, India and my mom was born in California – complete opposite sites of the globe; to date I have only met three people in the world who share my ethnicity. From the time I was young, our home was often a haven for single mothers and international students. I can rarely remember a time that there wasn’t someone from another country living with our family, and my babysitters included people from Kenya, Sri Lanka, Germany, India, Japan, and England. By the time I was 14 I had visited India five times. My best high school friend was a Russian immigrant. I still remember meeting an English man who had spent probably the better part of his live as a missionary in South Africa. Although I don’t recall his name, I’ll never forget the words he gently said while talking about the reason for Apartheid in his country. “We’re all a little bit racist”, he said. Despite all the exposure I have had with people of vastly different cultures, I will be the first to admit that I am a little bit racist. I still have a hard time relating to black people. I absolutely hate it when white people ask me, “Do you speak Indian?” (There is no such language). I make ethnic jokes about Chinese plastic, French snobbery, Russian mail-order brides, and arrogant Americans (like me). I make assumptions about new people I meet based on my previous encounters of others who looked somewhat like them. A certain amount of stereotyping is normal, but we have control over the attitudes we form from those stereotypes. As Salim said, liberals want us to become “more race-conscious” and “more quota-based” as a way to solve this problem. In a way, they are not so far from the truth. We should be conscious of other people and their needs, though quotas are a bad way to handle this. But rather than being “more race-conscious” (which could mean a number of different things), we need to start by being more conscious of our own racism. That’s one reason I absolutely despise liberals like Jesse Jackson, who takes every opportunity to make race a political issue. He can get away with calling a white person a racist because his color makes him immune to the accusation. I suspect that privately he’s more bigoted than Strom Thurmond was. Should we endeavor to “become colorblind”? The answer to this is beautifully illustrated by the story of a little American boy walking with his mother though an Arab market, who says “Mommy, why is everybody brown?” One of the great things about young kids is they don’t yet have all the biases that we have, and they’re candid about any differences they see between people. This is not a bad thing, and if the colorblindness test is a measure of how racist we are, then we would inaccurately call that little boy a racist. I live in New Hampshire, where blacks account for less than 1% of the population. If I was really colorblind in the friends I chose, statistically all my friends should be white. On the contrary, we should actively seek to make friends who are different, and the body of Christ should reflect diversity in every way. When Paul writes in Galatians 3:28 that “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, because you are all one in Christ Jesus”, he is not saying that men and women aren’t different, or that we should pretend they aren’t different – he’s saying that gender difference does not have an effect on God’s love for us. Since race is an innate characteristic just as gender is, we can extend this to say that whites and blacks (though often different in many ways due to the culture that accompanies each race) have equal value before God as individuals. Regarding the government’s role in fighting racism, I believe a libertarian approach would be best in most circumstances. (Even laws providing extra penalties for “hate crimes” can cause problems, since there is enormous pressure to implement these penalties any time there is a crime involving two races.) Historically, immigrants and minorities have ultimately done better for themselves in America with intuition rather than government help. Although individuals should not be colorblind, this way of thinking might make a lot of sense for the government. Government aid should be directed at specific social, cultural and geographic areas rather than at specific racial groups. This solution may sound oversimplified, but it is a good way to start replacing the current system that exacerbates racism in America.