Time to target Privilegism

This year, there have been many documentaries on US television looking back at the racial discrimination of the past. The height of the civil rights movement was during the mid 1960’s and many programs have commemorated fifty-year anniversaries of various events.

As well as filling in gaps in my education, the programs have certainly provoked thought. Usually, I end up in disbelief that humanity was so base only fifty years ago, during my own lifetime, and in the richest country on earth.

Rampant racial discrimination tarnished almost every aspect of society only fifty years ago. Blacks had to fight against enforced separation on buses, and to bring something approaching equality in schools and the workplace.

Given where society in the West has reached now, it seems almost incredible how backward we were then. But, as well as mourning the sins of the past, we can also celebrate the extraordinary progress made in such a short time.

Racism has moved from being systemic, general, then hidden but widespread, then grudgingly accepted as wrong, now widely seen as unacceptable and even actively confronted by most of us. That is a lot of big steps achieved in a short period of years.

Now we have FIFA campaigns, and ostracizing of Donald Sterling to show how overt racism has become wholly unacceptable. Even the antics of John Terry a couple of years ago seem unthinkable now.

Nonetheless, we cannot declare victory. There are parts of the world where racism is still systemic. Most kids in Asia still desire to lighten their skin. And, even in the West, there are still huge differences in outcomes.

While implementing behaviours and structures that overtly discriminate have been outlawed, the results of these past behaviours still drive outcomes. It is very obvious here in the US, where school performance, housing quality and crime signal a society that is still starkly divided.

What made us racist? It is worth trying to answer the question, in order to work to remove it, and also to check whether other discriminations may still exist and how we might combat them. There are many factors.

We are frightened of the unknown and unfamiliar, and can react by making fun of it. Fear played a factor in many of our early racist behaviours. But fear cannot really explain sustained racism.

Once we move beyond fear and grow familiar with difference, we react to peers and other influences. It can make us feel more secure as part of a group if we define that group by some characteristics and reject those who don’t comply. That slows down progress, especially as media and older role models tend to lag behind. Our parents were racist, so it feels natural for us to follow them, until we have enough evidence to make us see its folly. Some shameful leaders, notably but not exclusively religious ones, talk about maintaining traditions as an excuse.  Again, this inertia factor will reduce over time, and cannot explain sustained structural racism.

Another factor is greed. Greed comes from a desire to maintain the status quo because it suits us and we are threatened by change. Part of the fear of change can be a fear of reprisal, whereby the injured party turns the tables and demands reparation for past wrongs. Greed lies behind a lot of immigration fears. It can also manifest itself socially: we don’t want to see our house value threatened by black neighbours or our golf club status challenged by a black daughter-in-law. Greed is harder to break down, but it will eventually, since most of us are decent enough to see its wrong-headedness.

So we need a factor that we use to justify our views. That is a belief in superiority, or at least a patronization of differences.

At its heart, we used to think it was OK to belittle black people because somehow we had evolved further. We could list excuses for this – our superior education, moral fibre and so on – which helped us to justify the belief. As a result, we could claim we were showing pity others when we were really patronizing them. And we could justify discrimination too, on the grounds that somehow they were not ready, whether it was to vote, or perform management jobs, or appreciate culture.

Now isn’t this hateful? Before you claim you could never think like this, just check back. Have you ever made or accepted remarks about Roma (gypsies) and their way of life?

I believe this belief in superiority is the factor that makes racism and other discrimination persist. With all the other factors, we can’t really find excuses than hold water. With this one, the excuse is still weak, but it can still stick.

For of course we can find empirical evidence to support such beliefs. Educational attainment is generally lower for first generation immigrants (though by now working class whites are the lowest attaining group of all). Africa and the Middle East have terrible problems with governance.

I read a piece recently which helps to explain why. It introduced me to Epidemiology, a newly fashionable and useful science. A study tried to explain why alcoholism and poor marital relations persist in Glasgow. There is evidence that it goes back a hundred years, when housing was so poor that families were crammed into pitiful space. This drove men to the pub and away from regular discourse with their wives. And, crucially, that tendency has persisted through generations, passed by a mixture of genes and environment.

This makes sense to me. Advantages persist across generations. Where we are born and how we are brought up (especially early months) determine a lot of our fate, and now we learn that not just our parents, but also the starts of our grandparents and great-grandparents matter too. Advantage has hysteresis, so it tends to stick around. It takes a long time to turn around a supertanker.

So what we see as superiority is really the result of privileged history. I have focused on racism but this applies to all the other forms of bias. Happily we have recently made great progress in many of these areas too over the last fifty years, though so much more remains to be done.

Even those determined for merit to rise should take pause from this argument. The Economist defends private schooling because it pushed the elite forward faster, promoting human development. But surely our evolution would be better served, over multiple generations, if that merit stripped away the effects historical accidents? So rather than token programs to let in a few gifted kids from tougher backgrounds, the selection should be actively skewed to make it harder for those coming from privilege to get in than for those without it.

I think the time has come to lump all the biases together, and work at their common root cause, that of a false belief in superiority. National and religious superiority are nowadays the worst examples. Does God really bless America (over the rest of humanity)?

Let us campaign against privilegism, or at the least challenge our own privilegist behaviours and views. Probably 99.9% of my advantages were due to the accident of birth. How can I ever disdain another human (except maybe those like Bush or Cameron who would score 99,99%)?

Public policy is hugely skewed in favour of the privileged, since we vote for it for exactly the same reasons we used to be racist. Each time we complain of a tax or yawn when we see boats capsizing off Lampedusa we can reflect a bit more and gradually challenge others, just like we learned to with racism. Let us be clear also that a small government or libertarian agenda is little more than a privilegist one. Instead, the purpose of global government should be to skew the paying field in the other direction. This is not about forced equality or communism, but a rebalancing of opportunity.

Perhaps in fifty years time we will be able to enjoy retrospective TV programmes, marvel at how backward we used to be, and celebrate our wonderful progress against privilegism.