Racism isn’t about feelings

If you stop someone on the street and ask them, “What does it mean to be racist? And what’s wrong with racism?” you’d probably get an answer something along the lines of, “Racism is a feeling of hostility that some individuals have toward members of other races, and it’s harmful because, when they express that hostility, it hurts the feelings of others.” (Or perhaps, “It offends other people.”) In other words, racism is about individuals having feelings that are likely to create bad feelings in other individuals.

It’s one of the least useful, and most damaging, ways of thinking about racism and what it does.

For instance, it flattens various actions, as though they’re the same—if racism is about hurt feelings, then my feeling hurt that you called me racist seems just as important as your feeling hurt that I said something racist.

It also prohibits third parties from being able to call out racism (or mischaracterizes their objecting to racism as “being offended”–still about their feelings). If racism is a problem because it hurts the feelings of members of the race who’ve been “insulted,” then no third party has the right to say, “Hey, what you said was racist.” After all, they weren’t insulted, so their feelings weren’t hurt. There was no harm.

I have a friend whose mother is from Mexico, and my friend self-identifies as bi-racial Latina, but she doesn’t fit the physical stereotype that racists tend to have about Latinas, and so she has often found herself in a group of people where someone says something racist about “Mexicans.” If she objects to the racism without revealing that they’re insulting her, then she gets called “politically correct” and they double down on their racist claim, saying something like, “Well, you know it’s true.”

If she reveals that she’s in the group they’re attacking, then they apologize. But they don’t apologize for thinking the racist thing, or for saying it, but for saying it in front of her.

Each of those responses—refusing to listen to someone objecting to racism on the grounds that person is just being “politically correct” and apologizing, not for being racist, but for being racist in front of her– seems like a reasonable response to them because, having been taught that racism is harmful because it hurts the feelings of people of that race, it would seem that a person not of that race has no real reason to object, and their only injury to someone of that race was an injury to her feelings by saying racist things in front of her.

But the harm of saying something racist is not that it offends or hurts the feelings of individuals in the maligned race. It isn’t that they say those things that’s the primary problem; it’s that they think them. I’m occasionally mistaken for Jewish, which I’ve discovered when people have tried to make me feel bad by flinging an antisemitic slur at me. What they did is wrong, but not because it hurt my feelings—it didn’t—and not because they expressed hostility to Jews. It’s wrong because racism is not an emotion–it’s a set of beliefs, ones we don’t necessarily know we have. And those beliefs harm our world because anti-semitism is a persistent ideology that erupts periodically into extraordinary violence, and into individual acts of violence on a regular basis.

It isn’t just the feelings; it’s the beliefs. Racism isn’t just about hostility—it’s about beliefs, about Jews as masters of international finance, African-Americans as criminal, Latinx as lazy, Asians as not really American. People are hurt by those beliefs because those beliefs become the basis for how we deliberate on juries, vote, hire, fire, drive, rent.

To frame the problem of racism as though it is a question of individual feelings (racists feel hostility, and objects of racism feel offended) misses the whole point of our shared world being damaged by racism. People who object to racism aren’t doing so because of feeling hurt or offended, but because racism is harmful.