Adam Kotsko on Generalizations

Adam Kotsko on Generalizations

A very insightful and understated analysis of generalizations, with a particularly scathing analysis of how racist big Others function in American society:

At its most insidious, this “nuanced” form of racism amounts to an accusation that it is really the black people who are all a bunch of racists — they hate whites, they don’t want to join the cultural institutions we’ve so generously opened up to them, we bend over backwards and look what gratitude we get…. These “subtle,” supposedly “non-racist” points are the way white racism circulates in more respectable circles today; the figure of the openly racist hick provides a nice inoculation against feelings of guilt (“I’m not some hick racist — but I’m just saying…”).

The claim that one is not personally a racist thus completely misses the point. Despite the violence they sometimes engage in, the people who are self-consciously virulent racists are arguably the least dangerous on the grand scale — it’s actually the continual disavowal of the existence of racist structures that keeps them inscribed in the white symbolic order. That is to say, it’s precisely because no individual white person directly “is” racist that “white people” are racist.