Back when I was young (no sniggers, please), and the rising forces of
Political Correctness were threatening to take over the world, I thought
the whole PC thing was just a straightforward witch hunt, which is to say,
an attack on a nonexistent enemy imagined up by the witch-hunt leaders for
the sake of self-promotion. Some time later I learned just how recently
the battle against racism had been won, and even encountered some
still-active remnants of racism in some of my older
(grandparent-generation) relatives, after which I had rather more sympathy
for the PC activists - I still thought that what they were doing was wrong
and harmful, but at least I had a better idea of why, historically, they
were doing it.
However, one opinion which hasn't changed between then and now is that
noticing races, even for the purpose of combating racism, is
counterproductive. Things may have been different during the 1960s, yes,
even during the 1970s, but by the time I was growing up the ONLY reason I
knew that races even *existed* was my exposure to newspaper articles
telling me it was wrong to be racist. As we all know, and as Tooby and
Cosmides recently reverified, humans are obsessed with factions. Those
contaminating newspaper articles switched on my faction-tracking brainware
and I didn't manage to shut it off until years later.
As I recall, I never permitted myself to consciously think of races as
valid factions, thanks to a diet of anti-speciesist science fiction. But
managing my unconscious reactions was - at that age - a lot more
difficult. These articles about racism switched on my faction-tracking
brainware; they caused me to begin noticing and tracking for the first
time which color someone was. Then there was the idea that it was okay to
be proud of one's race as long as it was a minority race, and the spate of
studies showing this or that alleged minority superiority, and the
refutations by the scientific advocates of colorblindness, and the
factionalist social articles showing that <ethnic> still had a higher rate
of poverty and criminal arrests, and so on. Even though I always reminded
myself that these studies were worthless, doing so meant that the
article's content was rising to mind and being fed into the
faction-tracking brainware.
I lost my innate colorblindness because of these idiot race-affirming
anti-racist articles. And then I had to go through a lot of pointless
struggle in order to get it back. As far as I'm concerned, when things
reach that point for my generation, it means that any further affirmation
of "race" as a concept is counterproductive, even for the purpose of
redressing past wrongs. Maybe it's too late to do this for my generation,
but as far as I'm concerned, a generation should grow up not knowing that
race ever even existed until they learn about it in high school at the age
of seventeen.
Now I'm sure that there are still some lingering afteraffects of past
racism, but the point is that you don't have to acknowledge race in order
to address these problems. If an undue number of <ethnics> are living in
poverty, you don't have to organize a nonprofit to help <ethnics>;
organizing a nonprofit to help people in poverty works just as well. (It
does have to be a nonprofit, though, and not a government program, for
reasons I expect we all know by now.) So I get ticked off whenever people
try to make out like "colorblindness" somehow equates to ignoring real
problems. If <ethnics> are in <trouble> it can be observed and dealt with
as <trouble>, not <ethnic trouble>. People who argue against
colorblindness seem to think that there are only two options, either
explicitly trying to deal with <ethnic trouble> or pretending that <ethnic
trouble> doesn't exist. Colorblindness consists of ignoring the <ethnic>
and dealing with the <trouble>.
Because there are still some remnants of real racism in America, not to
mention the rest of the world, there may perhaps still be a place for
continued anti-racism. But there's also a place for pure colorblindness.
And that place is my generation.
You'll note that, throughout this entire post, I never once named a
particular ethnic group. I wouldn't want anyone to start unconsciously
tracking factions.
-- -- -- -- --
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/
Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Sat May 11 2002 - 17:44:31 MDT