Following the distribution of racist flyers in Abbotsford, a Rally Against Racism and Bigotry was held on Sunday. Associate professor in UFV’s philosophy department Peter Raabe opened up about modern racism, why it should be treated as a mental illness, and how race really doesn’t exist.
How would you define what racism today looks like?
Racism today is very well hidden, and I say this for North America, I’m not going to point fingers to any particular country. I think the thing is that people realize that having racist attitudes is not considered to be cool in our society and yet I think a lot of people still believe in racism; they still hold racist beliefs.
How have the racist beliefs people hold changed over time?
I think there are people who still consider other colours to be inferior, and yet there’s this phrase of political correctness where they say “I have to be politically correct so I can’t show the fact that I believe there are inferior races.” Political correctness is just a term for being respectful to people and there are people who really don’t like having to be respectful and having to consider everyone as equal and so they have racist and sexist and homophobic beliefs that they keep to themselves, but they still hold those beliefs.
Would you say there’s different levels of racism?
Yes, I think so. I think there are people who act on those beliefs, and there are people who believe and in a sense don’t associate with people of different colours. They don’t respond to people of different colours, which is not as negative as someone who actually goes out and beats up somebody who is of a different colour. I think people in the Southern States are much more expressive about their racism than we are in Canada. We are polite people here so we keep that to ourselves but a lot of people still have racist beliefs.
How would you say the kind of racism like the distribution of the KKK pamphlets differs from racist views the average person who might never actually do something like that has?
I think the pamphleting and postering and things like that, the person is reacting from fear. They have racist beliefs, but they certainly wouldn’t come out and say so in public, but they would poster and hand out pamphlets and so on anonymously through the mail. It’s very similar to bullying in social media where the person can use a made up name so that no one can tell who they are. It’s nasty because it is anonymous and so it’s safe. It’s a safe way to express racism overtly, outright, but it’s anonymous so they can get away with it because no one will point a finger and say “There’s that racist.” And they won’t get arrested for doing it because nobody knows who they are.
How would you argue that race doesn’t exist?
One of the strongest arguments is the genetic argument because racism often starts from “they’re genetically different than we are,” whomever you’re pointing at. There’s research in various universities that have said that they’ve studied human families the same way they study animal families and they say that racism is an arbitrary division of family into smaller divisions by skin colour, and it’s an illegitimate form of science. If you look at genetics, people are genetically diverse individually but there’s no group that’s genetically diverse from any other grouping in humanity, so there are no large scale differences in genetics between one group of people and another group of people, and that comes from scientific investigation. But racism doesn’t work on science, racism works on belief. Racism is a mental illness because there is a refusal to correct faulty reasoning. You’ve got good reasoning that’s based on science, but people refuse to accept it and that’s where it starts to become a problem in terms of psychopathology.
Do you think we can eventually get to a point where racism is commonly seen as a mental illness?
I certainly hope so. There’s no mention of racism as a mental illness in the diagnostic manual, it doesn’t occur. These disorders are mentioned in the DSM [Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders] and they apply to racism. The whole concept of racism as a mental illness is not being discussed in the literature anywhere, and it’s not in the DSM either because there’s such a resistance in society to name racism because so many people are racist and it would offend a lot of people who are in high positions.
Why do you think people have such a hard time accepting racism as a mental illness?
The mental disorders in the DSM are put there, it’s a general agreement, and it just tells me that the people on the board, who are mostly white men, haven’t agreed that racism and the connected faulty reasoning should belong in the DSM. That’s the only way that it’s not there, because this board of white guys have not yet agreed that these diagnoses ought to be in the DSM as racism. That’s how it works, the things that appear in the DSM don’t appear there magically. There are people that make decisions, and the people are older white guys. It’s not surprising that racism is not there.
Why do you think people have such a hard time overlooking race?
Racism is a form of power over others. It’s taught to children and it’s very difficult to unlearn something that you’ve learned as a very young child. You can unlearn racism but it has to then require the person to admit to themselves that they have racist views and that they might be wrong and to listen to other people’s explanation of why racism is wrong. Because it starts at a young age, because parents teach their children how to be racist and peer groups teach their members of their peer group how to be racist, it’s very hard to get over that and it’s not enough sometimes to use logic and argument. It’s an emotional investment that people have in that belief.
Do you think sometimes racism isn’t necessarily a view against a specific skin colour, but against the views a community holds?
Yes, and this is where religion comes in because people are racist against religious groups too. I use the word racism, but racism is just having a biased opinion about a particular group and that’s usually based on stereotypes. There are religious groups that are considered to be inferior, like the Muslims are the target right now — it was the Jews for awhile — that are considered to be inferior people. Racism is generally assumed to refer to colour, but there’s all sorts of biases that have all sorts of “isms” behind them, like sexism. There’s a lot of different biases that people hold that work the same way in terms of logic.
Like the rally that was on the weekend, do you think rallies and protests have an effect on racism?
I don’t think so. I hate to be negative about it, but the thing is rallies attract people who already agree and it’s a show of force, a show of beliefs to people who are racist. But I think what happens is racists look at these rallies and find them threatening, and then they say, “See, those people of colour are threatening.” To me, I think to overcome requires one-on-one connections with people who are racist and sometimes it takes a long time to get someone to overcome their personal racist beliefs. It’s not done overnight and it’s not done by protests. The protests are good in the sense that the general public sees people out there who are concerned and empathetic enough to go out and actually protest, but I don’t think it changes the minds of people at all.
What can students do to combat racism in their community, even as something that’s been taught?
If you’re of the mindset that you’ve learned from your parents and your peers to be accepting and not to be racist, the best thing students can do is to react to someone who says something racist or acts in a racist way. You’re a role model and you have the chance to say something that might convince the racist person that he or she is not acceptable in the group that they’re being racist within. That takes courage. It takes courage for a student to respond to homophobia, sexism, racism, so on, because the worry is “I’m going to be the odd person out, I’m going to look stupid if I say something.” But that’s the best way to combat racism, one-on-one like that, not attacking the person or calling them names or anything like that, but in a respectful way questioning where these beliefs came from and why they have those beliefs, and showing them a better way to look at humanity that doesn’t involve racism.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
