It all depends on what you mean by racism. I’ve heard people use the word to condemn one kind of bigotry while cheerfully practicing another, and that double standard makes my blood boil.
People who condemn one kind of bigotry while practicing another usually have a reason why theirs is different. The target group is less sympathetic, or the people doing the sorting are on their own political side.
I don’t accept either excuse. Judging a person by the category you’ve sorted them into, instead of by who they are, is the same error whichever group is on the receiving end.
The mechanism is identical regardless of which way it faces, and pretending otherwise is just the same categorical thinking wearing a different coat.
That standard has to apply everywhere or it’s not a standard at all. Prejudice against Black people is prejudice. So is prejudice against white people. So is prejudice against men, against women, against Christians, against Muslims, against the working class, against older workers, against younger workers, against people with disabilities, against veterans, against people whose politics are the wrong politics, against people because of their body size or their accent or because they once had trouble with the law.
Every one of those runs the same program: take a category, attach a set of assumptions to it, and apply those assumptions to an individual before you know the first real thing about them.
The individual disappears behind the label. That’s the error. It doesn’t get less wrong because the category is currently an acceptable target.
So when someone tells me it’s fine to make sweeping, dismissive statements about an entire group of people because that group is fashionable to dislike at the moment, my answer is the same as it always is. Degrading an entire class of people based on the color of their skin is the definition of racism.
It doesn’t matter which skin, which class, which direction the contempt is flowing. The standard doesn’t bend to fit the mood of the decade.
I’m fine being stubborn about this. I’d much sooner be called rigid than apply one standard to the groups I like and a looser one to everyone else. Once you allow yourself one convenient exception, you’ll find a reason for the next one, and pretty soon the principle’s gone.
In the world I’d want, we’d judge each other by our behavior and our character. What a person does, what they’ve built, how they treat the people around them. The color of their skin, their religion, their culture, their politics, the group somebody else assigned them to before they ever opened their mouth, none of that would count, because none of it tells you anything reliable about the individual standing in front of you.
Those are the only things that should matter: what a person does and has done. Everything else is noise.
People Can Think What They Want
Plenty of people who agree with me up to this point part ways with me over free expression, which I strongly believe in. People can think what they want. They can hold ugly, mistaken, malicious beliefs, and in this country they can say them out loud, put them in a book, make a film about them, and that freedom is the system working.
The alternative, a government deciding which thoughts and words are permitted, is a far more dangerous thing than any individual bigot. There are countries that have decided to criminalize certain forms of expression, and however well-intentioned that sounds, it edges toward the thought police of George Orwell’s 1984. There are places in the world where saying the wrong thing about the government can get you arrested or executed.
I’d rather live in a country where someone is free to say something repugnant than in one where an official decides what I’m allowed to say. Freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of expression.
These protect the speech you hate, because that’s the only speech that ever needs protecting. Nobody tries to ban the popular opinion.
That conviction costs me something. It means defending the right of people I find contemptible to keep talking. I do it anyway, because the day I let someone else decide which speech is too ugly to allow, I’ve handed them the power to decide about mine.
You’re not required to listen. You don’t have to read the racist newsletter, watch the channel that infuriates you, or give your attention to anyone whose entire project is putting other people down. You can simply turn them off and point your energy somewhere better. Freedom of speech has never meant a right to your audience.
The Cost Nobody Counts
I care most about the practical cost sitting underneath the moral argument. Every time prejudice stops you from engaging with a person you’ve already pre-judged and dismissed, you lose something, sometimes small and sometimes enormous. It might be a friendship, or a person who would have made your world bigger and more interesting before you wrote them off.
That’s the cost, and it’s mostly invisible to the person paying it. The category does its work silently. You never meet the people you’ve already decided not to meet, so you never find out what they would have been to you. The loss doesn’t announce itself. It just makes your world smaller, one avoided person at a time, and you go through life assuming the smallness was simply how things were.
I’ve spent a good part of my life refusing to let a label pick my friends for me, and it’s given me back far more than it ever cost. That’s why this matters to me more than any abstract argument about who’s prejudiced against whom.
So instead of spending your life cataloging who’s being prejudiced toward whom, spend it on the people who are doing good, building things, and helping others.
Challenge bad ideas with facts when the conversation is worth having. Learn the difference between rhetoric and evidence. Understand what a logical fallacy is. And when someone isn’t willing to have an honest, fact-based conversation, stop spending your energy on them and move on to people who are good for you, good for your family, good for your community.
If you focus on the positive, you’ll tend to see the world in a more positive light, and you’ll tend to do more good in it.
The Main Question
So, to answer the question, “why do some people think racism is okay?”
Almost everybody draws the line somewhere, and a great many people draw it conveniently. They condemn the prejudice aimed at groups they like and excuse the prejudice aimed at groups they don’t. They’ve simply decided that their preferred direction of bias is the righteous one. I call that hypocrisy, and it’s worse because it usually arrives wrapped in a smug sense of moral superiority.
The harder, more consistent position is to apply one standard everywhere and judge people as individuals, full stop, no exceptions for the directions that happen to be socially acceptable at the moment. It costs you the comfort of an easy enemy.
It gives you back a much larger world. I think that’s a trade worth making, and I’ve spent a good part of my life making it.
I’ll keep making that trade for the rest of my life. Anyone who wants me to judge by category can call it naive or stubborn or whatever else they like. I’m going to keep judging people one at a time, by what they do, because that’s the only decent way I know to treat a human being.
I write about all of this at length in my forthcoming book, Everybody’s Prejudiced: How We Judge, Why We Do It, and What Rational People Choose to Do About It. Coming soon.