Niebuhr on racism

More from Barton Swaim’s review of the Library of America’s new edition of the works of Reinhold Niebuhr, giving the theologian’s analysis of racism.

From Barton Swaim, Sifting the Wheat From the Chaff – WSJ:

The shorter pieces in “Major Works on Religion and Politics” are to my mind more consistently insightful than the book-length ones. “The Race Problem,” for example, a short essay published in 1942, strikes me as fresher and more telling than almost anything said or written in recent times on the subject of race. Writing at time a time when the federal government was sending Japanese-Americans to internment camps, but also with an eye to the plight of Southern blacks, Niebuhr contends that racism is a form of group pride, “the sinful corruption of group consciousness,” and group pride will not be erased from the human heart.

Racism, he writes, “is prompted by the inveterate tendency among men to generalize about individuals in another group upon the basis of the least favorable evidence in regard to them.” Our failure to see racism as the ugly manifestation of a tendency we ourselves struggle with, he argues, keeps us from appreciating the depth of the problem and so fools us into trying to eradicate it by simplistic methods. “If we imagine that race pride is only a vestigial remnant of barbarism, which civilization is in the process of sloughing off; if we do not understand it as a perennial corruption of man’s collective life on every level of social and moral achievement, we are bound to follow wrong policies in dealing with specific aspects of the problem.”