September 15, 2024
What is racism?
By Arnold Cusmariu
I enjoyed Matt Walsh’s movie, as did the audience in the theater where I saw it. He skewers DIE mythology very effectively, showing with example after example that a good deal of what’s going on here is just plain money-grubbing opportunism. Also coming through loud and clear is the foolishness of whites who take DIE nonsense seriously. The self-flagellation scene (no kidding) had me howling with laughter.
Because a movie is not the place for academic analysis, Walsh could not very well include an interview with someone, such as a philosopher specializing in moral theory, who is qualified to explain that “racism” isn’t just a dangerously loaded term; it has multiple meanings that should be distinguished carefully. Failing to do so will guarantee that the logical fallacy of equivocation is committed.
A good person for Walsh to have interviewed on the subject of racism is Thomas L. Carson, who taught philosophy at Loyola University Chicago for many years, now retired. Among Carson’s several books is Lincoln’s Ethics (Cambridge University Press, 2015), to which I contributed comments in draft — Tom and I went to Brown together.
Eight concepts of racism can be extracted from definitions Carson presented in a chapter titled “Was Lincoln a Racist?” Carson says (p. 338) that his definitions “draw on important work in contemporary philosophy.”
Racism-1: Believing that members of a group with certain racial characteristics are morally or intellectually “inferior” to members of groups that lack those racial characteristics.
It is racist-1 to believe that blacks are morally or intellectually inferior to whites or Asians (for example).
I’d venture to say a comparatively small number of people hold racism-1 beliefs.
The left throws racism-1 accusations at Republicans without a shred of evidence.
more
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2024/09/what_is_racism.html
