Racism is a catch-all term that is vague and doesn’t specify much about what is actually going on in the supposed “racist”. Racism is based in the idea of using race as a basis for primary judgments of self or others; treating people first as members of a racial group and only second as individuals or as members of other groups either voluntary or involuntary.
There are extreme racists who really are animated and possess by active, reasoned beliefs about the superiority of certain races and the inferiority of other races, but most racism is “benign”. I say benign not because of the effect this racism has but because this kind of racism (the most common kind) isn’t based on active or reasoned beliefs, but instead is based on a kind of negativity:
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negativity of information (lack of knowledge)
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negativity of familiarity (lack of contact and exposure)
Most racist people just have a lack of information about the race they despise (for example blaming “blacks” for higher rates of crime and drug use in inner cities and black communities without understanding how “white” society created and perpetuates unequal conditions and disparities such as poverty, stigma, low education access and the war on crime, all of which works to create the higher levels of crime and drug use), in combination with a lack of exposure to people of that race. Together 1 and 2 form a lack of empathy and a lack of desire to engage or seek out people, situations or new information that would result in weakening their racist biases. This third term of “lack of empathy and engagement” that arises from 1 and 2 is the real basis of most racism.
This lack of empathy and engagement indicates a closed personality and a propensity for in group vs out group thinking. Due to the closure of personality in combination with in group and out group thinking, racists tend to prefer more authoritarianism in society and tend to be more authoritarian as individuals. Racism is a kind of psychological methodology of prescriptive valuing, one that necessarily prefers lack over substance: lack of information, lack of familiarity and exposure, lack of empathy and will to engage and to grow and learn, lack of openness, lack of tolerance of change and difference, etc.
Conservatives/republicans score much higher on measures of authoritarianism than do progressives/democrats. It is no surprise that racism is more acceptable and less punishable within the political right than the political left; political correctness exists in part to establish and respond to implicit social norms surrounding the ideals and values of society with regard to equality, tolerance and ethical treatment, which in part means treating people first as individuals and only second as members of groups. Political correctness is very good an enforcing norms when it comes to racism, but this also creates a contradiction in so far as it becomes to some degree necessary to treat racist people as members of the group “racists” and to disregard or minimize individual factors involved in their “racism”. This is partly why the concept of racism is so rarely examined in detail: the political right obviously has no desire to critically examine the concept of racism due to the cognitive dissonance this would cause them due to how they already are predisposed to reasons 1 and 2 above, and are already more prone to authoritarianism which includes a willingness to accept censorship, repression and other harsh authoritarian tactics that militate against openness and truth-seeking, but also on the other side there is an unwillingness of the political left to critically examine the concept of racism because that would require prioritizing an understanding of racists from the angle of their individuality and the actual causes behind their racism, treating them as individuals first and only as racists second, which is something that creates its own cognitive dissonance for those on the left (not the true Left, but what passes for it in today’s social liberalism/democrats).
Anyway, since racism (and other biases such as homophobia and misogyny) is fundamentally negative it requires a stimulating animus from outside itself in order to become active; this animus is usually fear, anxiety or anger. Three strong emotions are produced externally to the person and externally to the racist/biased construct, but are then fed through that construct in order to activate it and fill it in with power. The racist/bigot is required to continuously become fearful, anxious or angry in order to keep his personality alive. It’s also possible to use pride, pleasure or vanity to animate racist/biased personality constructs, this is what happens when the racist self-identifies with his own race to achieve positive self-worth and a sense of moral righteousness, namely an existential certainty. Now the construct is complete: the racist loves himself (and those of his own race) and hates others (of the hated racial group/s). Strong recurring emotions will still be needed to keep this construct functioning.
The best way to combat racism is to educate people from an early age about what racism is and by contrast what the high values of rational progressive “classically liberal” western civilization are; the second piece is to expose people to other racial groups in order to mitigate lack of exposure and familiarity, thus establishing the humanness and commonness (alikeness to oneself) of people of races other than one’s own; the third piece is connected to these two, and involves social integration in many areas including education, employment, housing, and city planning in order to achieve familiarity and exposure but also to mitigate the effects of historically entrenched racism and racial disparities that persist recreating the conditions for racism to keep flourishing from generation to generation.
