"Define Racism"

It's a Socratic point, and one that brings us back around to the kinds of problems that Socrates tried to illustrate during his life.  (That video in which the discussion was taking place, by the way, is a vivid warning of what kinds of genuinely terroristic tactics are available.)

In the Euthyphro, Socrates is after a definition of piety.  Euthyphro is prosecuting his own father for murder; he claims that it is pious to do this because his relationship with his father should not blind him to the justice of the prosecution.  Socrates suggests this is merely an example of something pious, not a definition of piety itself.  Euthyphro decides that piety is doing what the gods love, and impiety doing what they dislike; Socrates presses him to explain whether the pious thing is pious because the gods love it, or whether -- and this is crucial -- they love it because it is pious.

There's a similar problem with racism.  A lot of people accused of racism don't actually even believe in race.  How can you be a racist if you reject that race represents something biologically real?  The answer is that you take (or endorse) actions that disproportionately harm people of some races and not others.  Yet this assumes the validity of race as a form of analysis; if race isn't real, why would you try to cash out its effects in terms of the harm 'to races' whose reality you have already rejected?

The best answer seems to be the one floated by Charles Mills and others, which is that race can be rejected biologically but not socially.  Socially, race is real even if in fact there are not "races" in any meaningful biological sense.  Then, rejecting race as a social phenomenon because you rejected it as a biological phenomenon is a category error, a serious philosophical mistake.

That still leaves us with problems.  Given that the social phenomenon is based on an incorrect view of human nature and biology, we might wish to move to a more correct view.  Yet because we have to continue to evaluate things in terms of the social account of race, we end up baking that view into our future.  We can't leave it behind if we have to carry it with us, and constantly check ourselves against it.  How do you build a society without race if you're judging progress by constantly referring to race?  It's dead weight, but treated like a lodestone.

The second problem is that the social view is often incoherent, which makes it a poor lodestone anyway.  In the discussion linked, the woman is charging racism based on the fact that a man suggested that this kind of violence was unsurprising in Mexico.  There are two sets of problems with that.

The first is that Mexico includes people of many different genetic heritages, who are even less plausibly 'one race' than, say, denizens of Scotland (many of whom, these days, are from the Indian subcontinent).  The fact is that the Mexican government has been involved in a decades-long fiction about 'La Raza' designed to paper that over.  Yet if we can eliminate racism by constructing new races, well, why not start doing that here?  Rather than continuing to recognize existing social definitions of race in America, might we not instead follow Mexico and institute a new 'American race' that ignores genetic heritage? 

The second problem is that violence in Mexico is unsurprising for reasons that are severable from race, 'race,' or La Raza.  If you're unsurprised by a violent assault in a country largely run by extraordinarily violent criminal cartels, well, why wouldn't you be?  There's no reason to rope biological commentary into it.  Mexico is violent because it is badly governed, especially in terms of the absence of a Second Amendment.  The people endure the cartels and their violence not because they are genetically primed to do so, but because they are disarmed.  The police are assassinated not because they are inferior or corrupt, but because the populace cannot provide them with effective support.  They're too terrified to work with the police because they are kept defenseless.

The second problem, in other words, turns out to be that the incoherence of the definition ends up allowing it to be used in places where the concept is actively damaging to attempts to fix the problem.  "It's all racism" suggests the problem is in people having a negative view of the chaos in Mexico, rather than the problem lying in the absence of positive steps to empower the citizens to defend themselves.