Friday, October 21, 2011
Spectrum of Racism
Our class and blog discussions about Lincoln's possible racism have been very interesting to me. It seems like not all of us are working with the same definition of racism. I think that if a person in power (in this example, a white person) upholds or reinforces unequal power dynamics between the races, then they did something that was racist. It doesn't mean that the person, at their core, is "a racist". We have defended Lincoln by essentially saying "it's not as if he was as bad as a lyncher", but not being a lyncher doesn't mean you are not racist. If we view racism as a spectrum, lyncher would probably be all the way on one end. But there are a lot of points between "lyncher" and "100% not racist". Lincoln did say some racist things. He isn't as bad as a lyncher, or someone who never thought to oppose slavery. But that doesn't mean he wasn't racist at all, it just means he wasn't as racist as he possibly could have been. I'm not really invested in proving Lincoln was racist (most white people are at some point), but I just wanted to explain my view of racism as a spectrum and see what you all thought.
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Good distinction. Race theorists have tried to distinguish 'racial' from 'racist' words or acts as one way to see this spectrum more clearly. Using this standard, we can probably agree that some of Lincoln's words and attitudes have a distinctly racial flavor (hardly surprisingly, given where he's from) without necessarily qualifying as racism, understood either as personal bigotry or oppressive institutional process.
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