by Alan J. Levine

acism—an unpleasant-sounding word that stands for something nasty—is one of the most emotive words in contemporary speech. Unfortunately, it has also become one of the most overused words in the English language, and as a result, it has largely been emptied of its original meaning. The word has been stuffed so full of spurious ideas as to lose the specific meaning it once possessed. But the original meaning, or meanings, of racism still coexist to some extent with the newer ones, and it is the former that gives racism the emotional charge it still has. Racism, like imperialism, has proven a protean and often destructive concept that can be expanded out of recognition and mislead as much as it enlightens. Both words have been used to justify twisted delusions of victimization. In the case of the latter word, the United States last September received a particularly spectacular and bloody lesson demonstrating the extremes to which such delusions can lead. Likewise, tracking the changing definitions of racism over the last century casts considerable light on some alarming social developments.

The term racialism was introduced—though not commonly used—early in the twentieth century to describe prejudice based on real and alleged racial differences. Racialism was shortened to racism in the 1930s (to the distress of some grammarians), but it was still rarely used. Most people who wrote on racial issues seem to have preferred terms like “racial hatred,” “race prejudice,” or “racial doctrines.” Social historian Jacques Barzun, in his influential 1937 book Race, favored the term “race thinking,” while historian Louis Snyder, in his widely read critique of theories of racial superiority published two years later, also entitled Race, still used racialism. In the 1950s, racism became more popular, and still more so in the succeeding decade, when, however, its meaning began to change rapidly and drastically.

Hatred or Doctrine?

There were, however, subtle differences even in the “traditional” use of racism. Most obvious, but often overlooked, there was a distinction between construing “racism” as racial hatred or hostility, and using it to describe theoretical claims that one “race” or other—which might not even exist in the eyes of most lay persons or scientists, was intellectually, or in some other way, superior to others. Why these things were blurred at an early date may become apparent shortly. In 1967, the British writer Michael Banton summarized the predominant traditional definition of racism as the belief that “man’s behavior is determined by stable inherited characteristics deriving from separate racial stocks having distinct attributes, usually considered as standing to one another in relations of superiority and inferiority.” Shorter, less elaborate formulations can be found in most older dictionaries. Thus, racism was seen as a particular doctrine or set of doctrines. Political activists used it in a similar way with a more emotional edge; Martin Luther King Jr. once defined racism as “a doctrine of the congenital inferiority and worthlessness of a people.”

Some scholars placed even more emphasis on the element of hostility in defining racism. Historian Christine Bolt, in an excellent 1971 study, Victorian Attitudes to Race, defined it as “the hostility that one man feels for another because of his colour alone.” By then, this definition was already being supplanted by even more radical interpretations.

It is worth noting that when the term racismwas introduced in the 1930s, racial prejudice by whites against “colored” peoples, or doctrines of the latter’s inherent inferiority, were not typically the immediate target of racism’s enemies. The main targets in that period were the Nazis’ racial ideology and practices. The doctrine of Nordic “Aryan” superiority to other whites, primarily Jews and Slavs, but also to the Mediterranean peoples, was quite rightly perceived as the most immediate problem. The Nazis, moreover, left little distinction between theory and practice for their enemies and victims to see. The supposed “racial differences” between the white groups then under discussion were slight or nonexistent in the eyes of most people other than Nazis. Nazis, of course, held that “colored” races were inferior to whites, but they had too little to do with them for this aspect of their doctrine to be of much importance. Practical considerations led them to make their Japanese allies “honorary Aryans.”

Only after the Allied armed forces disposed of the Nazis did racism come to mean almost always hostility toward people of very different colors or physical types. Christine Bolt’s formulation of racism, albeit historically inadequate, shows how completely the older emphasis had already been forgotten by the 1970s.

It had, however, influenced a critical aspect of later thinking. The Nazi experience and reactions to it did not, as is sometimes claimed, “discredit” racism in the eyes of most of the Western world, or at least its educated elite; that had already occurred earlier, in a long process that began well before World War I. But the Nazis helped obliterate any distinction between advocating racial hatred and merely suggesting that there might be real genetic differences between human groups, or even that such a hypothesis might be investigated. The Nazis left in their wake a widespread tendency to assume that any ideas of the latter sort must be just as invalid and hate-inspired as their own ideas about Jews and Slavs. In this period, the idea of a general white superiority to nonwhites died out quite rapidly.

Thus, after the end of World War II racism came to refer to a somewhat different thing than it had earlier. In the United States, campaigners against racial prejudice and doctrines of superiority equated the hatred of blacks to the Nazi idea that Nordics were inherently better than other whites. They objected, quite rightly, to the conflation of race, language, and culture, and to the assumption that any particular group that had not performed impressively in the past was therefore innately inferior. Racism, they argued, confused biology with culture. Some also argued for various degrees of “cultural relativism” which denied that the cultural achievements of any group were greater than those of any other, but that idea does not seem to have been taken very seriously by most people in the 1940s and ’50s. And, in contrast to later practices, these critics generally found it necessary to formulate their ideas intelligibly. They took ideas seriously, even ones that they despised, and they marshaled rational arguments to counterclaims that Negroes were inferior to whites. The contrast between the arguments deployed against such ideas in the 1950s and the hysterical and incompetent response in the 1990s to the claims made in The Bell Curve (1994), a controversial study by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, is both enlightening and depressing, an indication of how far intellectual standards have fallen in the last forty years.

Meanwhile, an alternate usage of racism that differed greatly from the standard Western one was developed by Communists. They described racism as a social attitude deliberately fostered or created by the ruling class in the capitalist-imperialist world to stigmatize some groups and make it easier to exploit them. According to communist ideology, racism, like practically every other evil, was caused by capitalist imperialism, had not existed before it, and would not survive it: it was a purely modern, purely Western development. Certain elements of the Marxist-Leninist theory of racism influenced or were shared by Western leftists, notably the idea that racism was purely modern and that there was no racism among non-Westerners.

Conceptual Change

The complete redefinition of racism in the West began in the late 1960s and was part of a general conceptual shift in thinking about race relations and many other issues. It was related to a drift of opinion leftward—though some of the ideas involved horrified earlier generations of leftists—and a general disenchantment with Western society. Probably the most important elements of this shift, for our purposes, were a much more expansive definition of racism and greatly exaggerated claims of its prevalence. This shift was already observable in the first half of the 1960s, typified by Charles Silberman’s remark in his well-known 1964 book, Crisis in Black and White, that the United States, “all of it, North as well as South, West as well as East—is a racist society, in a sense and to a degree that we have refused, so far, to admit, much less face.” Some curious features of this line of thinking, which became increasingly popular, are worth noting:

1. It became popular precisely at the moment when the attack on racial discrimination was achieving triumph after triumph.

2. It identified the whole of the United States with the South, although liberals and civil rights leaders had, until then, stressed that the South differed from most of the nation in its treatment of blacks, and had successfully exploited the revulsion of the rest of the country against Jim Crow laws and other Southern peculiarities.

3. It transformed racism from an aberration to a fundamental characteristic of America and Western civilization.

Associated with the talk of a racist society was the development of ideas of collective guilt. Present-day whites were somehow responsible for the earlier mistreatment of blacks, American Indians, Asians, and others. The development of this idea has not been properly studied, but contemporary observers such as James Burnham and Jacques Barzun noted in 1964 and 1965 that this was a recent, disturbing development. Although they viewed this phenomenon from rather different perspectives, both agreed that it was not just novel but incompatible with traditional liberal ideas. Nonetheless, despite its direct contradiction of the basic principles of liberalism, collective guilt became a fundamental element of the thinking of many liberals and leftists.

Theory of Institutional Racism

All these changes accompanied and prepared the way for even looser definitions of racism. The most critical step was the development of the concept of “institutional racism” in the late 1960s.

This term was first popularized by Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton in their 1967 book Black Power, although it seems to have circulated a bit earlier. Carmichael and Hamilton never defined institutional racism, but they meant by it the deliberately biased operation of institutions, as distinct from individual personal prejudices. That relatively narrow and careful usage of the term institutional racism, however, did not last very long. The notion of institutional racism was quickly expanded beyond recognition. The sociologist James Jones formulated perhaps the most common definition in the 1972 edition of his influential book, Prejudice and Racism:

. . . those established laws, customs, and practices which systematically reflect and produce racial inequities in American society. If racist consequences accrue to institutional laws, customs or practices, the institution is racist, whether or not the individuals maintaining those practices have racist intentions. Institutional racism can be either overt or covert (corresponding to de jure and de facto, respectively) and either intentional or unintentional.

In a more general formulation of his concept of racism, Jones explained that there were three levels of racism: individual (that is, the behavior of individuals who were biased), institutional, and cultural. We will deal with the last concept shortly, but it should be noted that only the first category corresponds with what was originally meant by the term racism. Jones denounced institutional racism as more general, insidious, and debilitating than individual racism. Elsewhere, Jones grumbled that President Ronald Reagan was at fault for arguing that racism had to be proven, and thereby implicitly contradicting the institutional racism idea that unequal outcomes for different racial groups are ipso facto evidence of discrimination, even in the absence of intentional bias.

A look at some variants of Jones’s definition may be of interest. John Farley defines institutional racism as “racism which goes beyond individual thoughts and actions, in which social institutions such as the family, church, school, and government create patterns of racial injustice and inequality and reinforce racial ideas.” In a related vein, Andrew Hacker ruminates that American institutions begin with an institutional bias against black job applicants, “since the presupposition is that that most blacks cannot or will not meet the standards the organization has set.” Joe Feagin and Hernan Viera, in White Racism (1995), after providing a definition of “white racism” very similar to that of James Jones’s institutional racism, explain that white prejudices are “embedded in the culture and institutions of a white-centered society.” Rather in the same way as Andrew Hacker, they suggest that “white control of powerful institutions signals white domination to all members of our society.”

Several points may be made about the notion of institutional racism. Most obvious, perhaps, is that even the advocates of the concept cannot produce anything but an awkward, lengthy definition of it. This is no accident, for it is inherently imprecise and unwieldy. It divorces racism from actual intentions or even deliberate actions. It treats racism as a sort of free-floating phenomenon that, despite the airy talk of “institutions” and “social structures,” cannot be precisely located. Second, its application is very much “catch as catch can.” It defines actions as racist solely in terms of their alleged consequences. It is so broad that it would be hard to find anything in American society that is not institutional racism. Third, the apparent test for “racist consequences” is purely “disparate outcomes,” the lack of proportional representation in all sectors of American society. There are two problems with this notion. One is that proportional representation is an inadequate test of whether any group has been or is being discriminated against. Different ethnic, religious, and other groups tend to “clump” in certain sectors and occupations while being “underrepresented” in others, regardless of whether the groups involved have been discriminated against in the past. It is obvious that past discrimination against blacks is a factor in their present occupational structure and socioeconomic status, but there is simply no way to know what positions they would occupy in a society where race had never been a factor. The concept of institutional racism also blurs the difference between past and present. The effects of past discrimination might be responsible for the paucity of Ph.D.s among present-day blacks, but this does not prove that colleges and universities discriminate against blacks now. In fact, for the last thirty years they have done exactly the opposite.

Just how institutional racism actually operates is never adequately explained, and the idea is difficult to reconcile with several trends in American society over the last few decades. How, for example, can institutional racism be pervasive in a society with numerous antidiscrimination laws and affirmative action, and in which antiracist messages have vastly outnumbered racist propaganda, at least since the 1930s?

These writers’ comments strongly imply that racism is practically a consequence of democracy in a society dominated by whites. If “institutional images” are “overwhelmingly white” and whites dominate most powerful institutions, this surely is an obvious consequence of the fact that most Americans are white. That would be the case even if all discrimination and prejudice vanished, and even if proportional representation and equal outcomes for all groups were attained. Institutional racism is thus, by implication, either blatantly defeatist . . . or something worse.

Cultural and Symbolic Racism

The hunt for racism in America has gone well beyond even the assertions of institutional racism. Jones’s Prejudice and Racism lists some nineteen sorts of racism, although some may be variants of the same type. The most interesting and important categories are “symbolic” and “cultural” racism. Jones defines symbolic racism as the intersection of antiblack sentiments with a “strong endorsement of the traditional U.S. values of individualism reflected in the Protestant work ethic.” Although he does not quite say so directly, there is a strong implication, reinforced by remarks elsewhere in his book, that any expression of patriotism or support for traditional values is racist. He grumbles, “Even now conservative patriots are calling for a reaffirmation of what the United States has stood for—liberty, equality, justice and individual rights. Historically, these values have been reserved for those with white skin. When black Americans look at what the country has stood for, they see many practices whose reaffirmation they would die to prevent.” Other critiques of symbolic racism invoke certain stands on policy matters—such as opposition to affirmative action, welfare, and forced busing—as proof of racism. If a person thinks that children might benefit more from money spent inside their schools than on buses and diesel fuel, he is a symbolic racist.

Jones defines cultural racism as “the individual and institutional expression of the superiority of one race’s cultural heritage over that of another race.” He devotes a whole chapter to the concept, adding yet another definition: “Cultural racism comprises the cumulative effects of a racialized world-view, based on a belief in essential racial differences that favor the dominant racial group over others. These effects are suffused throughout the culture via institutional structures, ideological beliefs, and personal everyday actions of people in the culture. . . .” Like institutional racism, cultural racism seems to be an all-pervading “substance without substance” reminiscent of the phlogiston, caloric, and ether postulated by the scientists of past centuries—in addition to conflating culture with race.

Jones’s further assumption, that different racial groups within the United States necessarily have different cultures, may be popular, but it is less than blindingly obvious. Scholars as different as Pierre Van den Berghe and Audrey Smedley have reasonably concluded that when one controls for variations of class and educational attainment, there are no significant cultural differences between white and black Americans. Some decades earlier, Gunnar Myrdal bluntly suggested that, insofar as there were cultural differences between whites and blacks, “Negro culture” was but a “pathological variant” of the dominant culture.

Jones’s assumption that pride in American culture (as he blithely ignores those elements contributed to it by blacks) is racist has been made more explicit and carried to a greater extreme by others. J. M. Blaut, for example, in The Colonizer’s Model of the World (1993), declared that cultural racism has basically supplanted what he calls “classical racism,” meaning overt arguments in favor of biological inferiority. Blaut argues that any belief that Western culture is superior to others constitutes cultural racism. Paul Kivel, in Uprooting Racism (1996), explains that “white racism” is not only “about economic and political domination, it is also about cultural hegemony.” Feagin and Viera, in White Racism, blandly refer in passing to “racist notions of genetic or cultural inferiority” as if the two were equally dangerous and untrue.

Frank Furedi, in The Silent War (1998), carries this argument still further. Discussing, and attempting to minimize, the change in Western opinion on racial matters in the era between the World Wars, he argues that

The interwar shift towards culture [that is, to recognizing that culture was not the same as race, and that differences between groups might be cultural rather than biological] did not necessarily lead to the abandonment of racial thinking. Far more significant is that shared characteristics distinguish one group from another. These characteristics need not be biologically based to convey a sense of inferiority, and culture, regardless of how it is interpreted, contains within itself a tendency to include/exclude.

In other words, any expression of pride in Western achievements, or any view that does not embrace an extreme version of cultural relativism, amounts to a thinly disguised continuation of racism. We finally have achieved racism without race!

Whiteness, the Ultimate Evil

It might seem that these thinkers have reached an all-consuming definition of racism that cannot be surpassed. But that is not quite the case. Recent racism-hunters have fastened on a sinister, hitherto unrecognized evil: “whiteness.” This concept is expounded in Paul Kivel’s Uprooting Racism, by the circle of writers connected with Race Traitor magazine, and quite a number of recent scholarly studies. As Kivel puts it, “Whiteness is a concept and an ideology which holds tremendous power over our lives, and in turn to keep whiteness center stage.” The precise nature of “whiteness” is not quite clear, but Kivel says that people should “Assume racism is everywhere, every day. . . . Slavery, genocide and racism were built into the structure of all the institutions of our society and were everyday occurrences.” Race Traitor’s editors explain further: “The white race is a historically constructed social formation. It consists of all those who partake of the privileges of the white skin in this society. Its most wretched members share a status higher, in certain respects, than that of the most exalted persons excluded from it . . . ” The stated purpose of their magazine is to spread the following insight:

The key to solving the social problems of our age is to abolish the white race, which means no more and no less than abolishing the privileges of the white skin. Until that task is accomplished, even partial reform will prove elusive, because white influence permeates every issue, domestic and foreign, in U.S. society.

The racism-is-everywhere school, already implicit in “institutional racism” and notions of collective guilt, is here carried to its logical extreme. By this line of thinking, white people are all guilty, unless, perhaps, they are “new whites.” A “new white,” according to the authors of Teaching/Learning Antiracism (1997), a text published by Columbia University’s Teachers College, “is a person who increasingly recognizes that whites are the problem in race, that racism is carried by white power, closed structures, and ethnocentric culture.” A specimen of this type of new white is quoted as saying, “I think that I finally understood how whites are either racist by commission or racist by omission, because there is no middle ground.” As Alan Kors and Paul Gottfried have documented in articles in Reason and Insight, brainwashing along these lines is in progress against students at a large number of colleges and universities.

Some radical writers specify that the real evil is “white” racism, but in practice, and even in theory, they do not recognize any other racism. They elaborate at length on the insight that blacks cannot be racist because racism is about power and blacks do not have power. As Feagin and Vera put it, “from the perspective we take in this book, black racism does not exist . . .. There is no black racism because there is no centuries-old system of racialized subordination and discrimination designed by African-Americans to exclude white Americans” from participation in society’s benefits. Even the somewhat more genteel and usually more logical Jones complains that black racism is an “oxymoron,” for “racism concerns a belief in racial superiority, and the implementation of values and practices that advantage one’s own race and disadvantage others. Furthermore, racism is attached to the power to impose those beliefs on the outcomes of others . . .. Labeling whites as ‘flawed,’ as Malcolm X did in his ‘blue-eyed devil’ charge, attempts to change how race is viewed. It is an antiracist strategy, not a racist one.” In other words, even naked hatred of whites, when expressed by blacks, is not racism but “antiracism,” while almost anything associated with Western society or individual whites, however apparently free of connection to race, is racism. It would appear that the idea of racism has finally come full circle. From an isolated social ill or evil doctrine that might be gotten rid of without much trouble, it has been turned into a disembodied force pervading all of Western society (and a club with which to beat that society). Conflating culture and race, just as believers in the older racial doctrines did a century or more ago, the noisiest self-appointed foes of racism have become, for all practical purposes, racists themselves. They merely despise a different race—often their own. This new form of racism is arguably even more perverse than the old.

All sound thinkers should be loath to cede useful terms to those who would hijack them for sinister purposes. But it is hard to avoid concluding that in this case the hijacking has succeeded or at least has gone so far as to introduce an impossible amount of confusion into discussions of race. The term racism has now been so perverted and emptied of meaningful content that serious people should avoid using it. Those interested in undertaking serious discussions of the problems for which the term racism was originally coined would be well-advised to use terms such as racial prejudice, hatred, bigotry, and discrimination. They may be a bit longer, but they are still clear and specific. And they have not yet suffered the perversion that has befallen racism.

Alan J. Levine is a historian specializing in Russian history, international relations, and World War II.

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