We still believe
W H I T E  is better

Our society is in a strange position: We constantly make distinctions based on race, and we assume that racial differences are important. Yet we deny that we are “racist” when we do this.

Sure, there are racists out there, but I’m not racist. I mean, “all men are created equal.” Women too. Racism is bad.

Racism wasn’t always so unpopular. White people, especially “progressive” types, used to buy into the idea that white people are the cream of the crop, the best hope of all humanity. They were racist and proud of it. What’s interesting, though, is that the expressions of racist belief have become embarrassing to us later generations - yet the belief itself somehow persists.

[The past] Historian Richard Slotkin, in his book Gunfighter Nation, remembers a popular 1890s writer named Theodore Roosevelt. TR’s history books and memoirs of Western life depend heavily on the Aryan or Teutonic “master race” theories of the day:

Roosevelt insists on the importance of class differences and characterizes them in almost racial terms. He identifies the competition of race-like classes as the force that drives civilization upward through its several stages. At each stage, the demands of the historical moment foster the emergence and triumph of a distinctive biosocial ‘character’ or ‘type.’ The type is identified by its distinctive social attributes, which suggest that it is effectively a class or cultural entity, but Roosevelt assumes that its differences must be rooted in ‘blood’ or heredity and that it is genetically transmissable to future generations.

. . . As stage succeeds stage and class succeeds class, those who do not form part of the newly empowered elite are either destroyed or subordinated. Roosevelt’s West is a Darwinian arena in which ‘races’ representing different phases or principles of social organization contend for mastery. Mexicans and White hunters displace Indians; Texan cowboys displace hunters and Mexicans and are subordinated by the most efficient Texans -- who in turn bow to the superior managerial skill of eastern capitalists. But even these new classes will go the way of Boone and Crockett when different conditions and superior forms of organization appear. The lesson Roosevelt draws from his historical fable is that no race or class can stay the march of history, and that those who seek to do so are the foes of progress. . . .

[The present] When we talk about TR today, if we want to remain respectful, we have to screen out the fact that he thought racism and imperialism were good and laudable. Because these days racism and imperialism are considered “not nice,” and talk of a “master race” makes us feel squeamish.

But the squeamishness doesn’t come from a rejection of TR’s beliefs. If that were the case, we could simply say that TR used to believe such-and-such, but most of us have rejected that ideology (along with the divine right of kings and what have you).

But while we reject TR’s language, we still act on his belief in racially determined “character” and its corollary: white supremacy. We just do it in such a way that our egos can take it. We hate it when non-white folks make us feel guilty. Yet we are convinced of one of two things:

1. White is better than non-white, and always will be.
2. Non-white can become as good as white.

The second belief is as racist, and as race-obsessed, as the first one. But it is fundamental enough to be invisible to the vast majority of us. What’s more, even non-white Americans often believe one of these two things.

You want evidence?

• We think it is natural for people of different skin colors to be antagonistic. (It isn’t. Think about it: Why should it be? And yet even those of us who “work for racial justice” assume that we are struggling against “human nature.”)
• We think race exists in nature. (It does not. It’s a cultural construct. The caucasoid, negroid and mongoloid skull types do not even indicate “subspecies” of Homo sapiens, yet we continue to use them to classify types of human -- because if we do it often enough, they imply an important “natural” distinction and thus help justify our ideas of race.)
• The scientific obsessions that are characteristic of European and American culture have often reflected our racial obsessions. Some of them we can now regard with detachment and even humor (such as phrenology); some we can see with detachment if we make an effort (eugenics, “Social Darwinism”), and some we are still too obsessed with (genetic engineering).
• The same goes for our unique political obsessions; we can view Nazism with detachment (in fact we are at great pains to distance ourselves from it), as well as Victorian British imperialism, but we are still tempted to take up the white man’s burden when it has a more palatable contemporary label. In domestic politics, we don’t like to talk about race (though we like to pretend to talk about it). But being obsessed with it, we need code words -- “inner city,” for example, or “family values” (meaning “white, or as good as white”).

Racism doesn’t necessarily mean hatred. Unexamined assumptions will do. After all, that’s what “prejudice” means: an unexamined assumption.

People don’t give up racism because they feel guilty. Guilt only makes them hide it.

People give up racism because they no longer believe that “race” is an essential difference between people.

[The future] That's all I wrote. Now here is some good, recent stuff to read. Do you have the nerve to read it?

• Spinning into Butter: Rebecca Gilman’s play about racism is “a pitiless mirror where audiences see themselves.”
• How Race Is Lived in America: Race relations are being defined less by political action than by daily experience, in schools, in sports arenas, in pop culture and at worship, and especially in the workplace.
• Is Integration Possible? Arguably the biggest dilemma facing America’s democracy. The Poverty & Race Research Action Council invited some people to tackle the subject, and this is what they said.

[The End]

Any careful and thoughtful comments? If so, please send e-mail.

Article by Rob Collins
This page updated Tue 25 July 2000
First version posted to an INTP discussion list 1 May 1998

Visitors since 10 Jun 1999:

Postscript: TR in his own words

No hard-and-fast rule can be drawn as applying to all alien races, because they differ from one another far more widely than some of them differ from us. But there are one or two rules which must not be forgotten. In the long run there can be no justification for one race managing or controlling another unless the management and control are exercised in the interest and for the benefit of that other race. This is what our peoples have in the main done, and must continue in the future in even greater degree to do, in India, Egypt, and the Philippines alike. In the next place, as regards every race, everywhere, at home or abroad, we can not afford to deviate from the great rule of righteousness which bids us treat each man on his worth as a man. He must not be sentimentally favored because he belongs to a given race; he must not be given immunity in wrong-doing or permitted to cumber the ground, or given other privileges which would be denied to the vicious and unfit among ourselves. On the other hand, where he acts in a way which would entitle him to respect and reward if he was one of our own stock, he is just as entitled to that respect and reward if he comes of another stock, even though that other stock produces a much smaller proportion of men of his type than does our own.

• TR’s speech on Lincoln and the Race Problem
• Selected Works of Theodore Roosevelt online