{"id":34822,"date":"2018-01-18T09:16:45","date_gmt":"2018-01-18T13:16:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/lovejoyfeminism\/?p=34822"},"modified":"2018-01-19T17:00:17","modified_gmt":"2018-01-19T21:00:17","slug":"racism-is-not-a-synonym-for-hatred-or-why-ron-pauls-comments-fall-flat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/lovejoyfeminism\/2018\/01\/racism-is-not-a-synonym-for-hatred-or-why-ron-pauls-comments-fall-flat.html","title":{"rendered":"Racism Is Not a Synonym for Hatred: Or, Why Rand Paul’s Comments Fall Flat"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

In the wake of the uproar over Trump\u2019s demeaning comments about Haiti and several other non-white countries, Rand\u00a0Paul had this to say<\/a> about Trump\u2019s views:<\/p>\n

\u201cI know personally about his feelings toward Haiti and Central America because when I was not a candidate for president and he wasn\u2019t a candidate for president I went down there on a medical mission trip,\u201d he explained, \u201cI did about\u00a0200 cataract surgeries with a group of surgeons in Haiti, and the same in Central America.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd when we asked Donald J. Trump as a private citizen to support those trips,\u201d he continued, \u201che was a large financial backer of both medical mission trips, so I think it\u2019s unfair to sort of draw conclusions from a remark that I think, wasn\u2019t constructive is the least we can say, and I think it\u2019s unfair to all of a sudden paint him as \u2018oh well he\u2019s a racist,\u2019 when I know for a fact that he cares very deeply for the people of Haiti because he helped finance a trip where they were able to get vision back for\u00a0200 people in Haiti.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Look! A\u00a0magic formula for turning racists into not-racists!\u00a0All they\u00a0have to do is donate to charities doing work in black and brown countries!<\/p>\n

Except that that\u2019s not actually how any of this works. At all.<\/p>\n

People give money to charities for all sorts of reasons. Sometimes they do it to look good, for the praise and acclaim they get. Sometimes they do it for the tax write-off. And yes, sometimes\u00a0they do it because they genuinely want to help people\u2014but even that does not make a person not racist.<\/p>\n

It is possible for a person\u00a0to want to help people in a marginalized group and simultaneously believe that the people in that\u00a0group\u00a0are less intelligent and less capable than members\u00a0of their\u00a0own group. In fact, that belief itself can motivate such charitable giving!<\/p>\n

Have you ever heard of the \u201cwhite man\u2019s burden\u201d?<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

In the image above, published in Judge<\/em> in 1899, the U.S. and Great Britain carry baskets laden with colonized people of color over the stones of superstition, ignorance, vice, and barbarism, up a hill to the waiting arms of \u201ccivilization.\u201d In a poem published the same year<\/a> that coined the term \u201cThe White Man\u2019s Burden,\u201d Rudyard Kipling urged the U.S. to follow Great Britain\u2019s lead and take up the burden of civilizing the native peoples of the Philippines\u2014\u201cHalf devil and half child\u201d\u2014which the U.S. had just\u00a0colonized by means of\u00a0a bloody and brutal war that had taken hundreds of thousands of lives. For their own good, of course.<\/p>\n

That, after all, was the argument\u2014that U.S. and Great Britain engaged in bloody colonial campaigns\u00a0to help uplift and save \u201csavage\u201d peoples. I am not\u00a0suggesting\u00a0that medical missions to Haiti are the same thing (though it is important to make sure medical missions and other charitable efforts actually help a country, rather than furthering their problems, as can happen when they are done badly or irresponsibly). Instead, my intent is to note that one can be horrifically racist and still believe (or at least claim) that one actually wants to help<\/em>\u00a0and uplift<\/em> the people they are horrifically racist against.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a sort of paternalistic racism, if you will.<\/p>\n

Have you ever heard the phrase\u00a0\u201ckill the Indian and save the man\u201d? The idea was that if we could strip Native American children of their culture and beliefs, and by so doing\u00a0\u201ccivilize\u201d them, we could save them\u2014from themselves, from their people, from their \u201csavage\u201d cultures.\u00a0At the time, this\u00a0was considered the compassionate<\/em> solution. It\u00a0was the solution put forward by reformers! Others argued that this was simply\u00a0not possible and that extermination was the only true solution to the Native American \u201cproblem.\u201d<\/p>\n

It was the reformers, then, who\u00a0ripped Native American children from their families, transported them to boarding schools on the other side of the country, and\u00a0brought us before and after pictures like this:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

See, wasn\u2019t that nice of them? They\u2019ve \u201ccivilized\u201d these three \u201csavages.\u201d Yes, and robbed them of their culture\u2014the children in these boarding schools were not allowed to speak their native language, or practice their religions or traditions.\u00a0And yet to\u00a0all appearances the people who pioneered these boarding\u00a0schools\u00a0genuinely believed<\/em> that what they were doing was best for these children. They thought that they were doing these children a favor, presenting them with the opportunity\u00a0to lead\u00a0\u201ccivilized\u201d and productive lives.<\/p>\n

This is why we must get past the idea that racism is synonymous with hate. Historically, racism has generally been enmeshed in ideas about superiority and inferiority, not a personal hate. I\u2019ve read sermons by Southern pastors in the 1940s who claimed up and down that while they supported segregated schools, Jim Crow laws, and bans on interracial marriage, they weren\u2019t racist, they couldn\u2019t be<\/em> racist, because Uncle Charles and Aunt Bertha were black and had always been the dearest friends and helpers to their families, and there was no one they respected more.<\/p>\n

In fact,\u00a0many slave-owners in the antebellum South\u00a0absolutely<\/em> claimed that they cared deeply for the African Americans they enslaved. Some of these individuals may have said this as a cover, to defend their horrific practice of human chattel slavery to critics in the North. Many of them, though,\u00a0likely\u00a0believed their own paternalistic rhetoric.<\/p>\n

Have a look at this, written by<\/a>\u00a0George Fitzhugh in 1857:<\/p>\n

\n
\n
\n

The Negro slaves of the South\u00a0are the happiest, and, in some sense,\u00a0the freest people in the world. The\u00a0children and the aged and infirm\u00a0work not at all, and yet have all the\u00a0comforts and necessaries of life\u00a0provided for them. They enjoy liberty, because they are oppressed neither by care nor labor. The women do little hard work, and are protected from the despotism of their husbands by their masters. The Negro men and stout boys work, on the average, in good weather, not more than nine hours a day. The balance of their time is spent in perfect abandon. Besides, they have their Sabbaths and holidays.<\/p>\n

White men, with so much of license and liberty, would die of ennui, but Negroes luxuriate in corporeal and mental repose. With their faces upturned to the sun, they can sleep at any hour, and quiet sleep is the greatest of human enjoyments. \u201cBlessed be the man who invented sleep.\u201d \u2019Tis happiness in itself \u2014 and results from contentment with the present, and confident assurance of the future.<\/p>\n

We do not know whether free laborers ever sleep. They are fools to do so, for whilst they sleep, the wily and watchful capitalist is devising means to ensnare and exploit them.\u00a0The free laborer must work or starve. He is more of a slave than the Negro because he works longer and harder for less allowance than the slave and has no holiday, because the cares of life with him begin when its labors end. He has no liberty, and not a single right.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Notice the comparison Fitzhugh makes between blacks and whites\u2014that white men would die of ennui if they had the license and freedom of slaves. Many of the arguments made by men like Fitzhugh\u2014that they cared for<\/em> their slaves, and that blacks were happiest<\/em> in slavery\u2014rested on a claim\u00a0that physical and intellectual differences between blacks and whites rendered freedom untenable for blacks, who would prove unable to care for themselves and sink back into the \u201csavagery\u201d of Africa.<\/p>\n

Even those who didn\u2019t give as much credence to the idea of innate differences argued that African slaves in the U.S. needed additional generations of \u201ccivilizing\u201d before they would have shed enough of their \u201csavage\u201d cultural baggage to be able\u00a0to function well in a civilized country. Some argued that being a slave\u00a0in a civilized country was better than being free\u00a0in a barbarous, \u201csavage\u201d\u00a0place like\u00a0Africa\u2014that really, they\u00a0should be grateful<\/em>, and that we\u2019d done them a favor by bringing them here.\u00a0Others saw slavery as\u00a0a way of \u201ccivilizing\u201d and \u201cimproving\u201d\u00a0their race, preparing them for eventual freedom, when they would be\u00a0at long last ready.<\/p>\n

Perhaps our understanding of what it means to be racist was reset by the Holocaust. Hitler, after all, didn\u2019t set out to \u201cimprove\u201d the Jews or engage in racial uplift.\u00a0Unlike antebellum slave-holders and turn of the century advocates of Native American boarding houses, he didn\u2019t claim to have the best interests of the Jewish people in mind. Instead, he fomented hatred, making the Jews a scapegoat for all of Germany\u2019s problems.<\/p>\n

And then came the civil rights movement, with its accompanying images of angry, yelling white people in the U.S. South. And that became what racism was\u2014hatred. Except that if you had actually talked to those white people, I very much suspect that most of them would have said they didn\u2019t hate black people\u2014not at all! I very much suspect that many of them\u00a0would have said\u2014and some of them actually believed\u2014that segregation was better off for everyone\u2014including black people<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Part of the problem we\u2019re having in this country right now is that a large segment of the population\u2014including individuals like Rand\u00a0Paul\u2014define racism as hatred. Trump, after all, would not have donated to a medical mission to Haiti if he hated Haitians, therefore he is not racist. But this severely limited definition of racism would have rendered us incapable of grappling with the arguments of antebellum slave-holders, or turn of the century advocates for Native American boarding schools, and that should give us pause.<\/p>\n

How we understand words matters.<\/p>\n

I have a <\/b>Patreon<\/b><\/a>! Please support my writing!<\/b><\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Historically, racism has generally been enmeshed in ideas about superiority and inferiority, not a personal hate. I’ve read sermons by Southern pastors in the 1940s who claimed up and down that while they supported segregated schools, Jim Crow laws, and bans on interracial marriage, they weren’t racist, they couldn’t be racist, because Uncle Charles and Aunt Bertha were black and had always been the dearest friends and helpers to their families, and there was no one they respected more.<\/p>\n

Click through to read more!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":845,"featured_media":34824,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[208,448],"class_list":["post-34822","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics","tag-race","tag-racism"],"yoast_head":"\nRacism Is Not a Synonym for Hatred: Or, Why Rand Paul's Comments Fall Flat<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Part of the problem we're having in this country right now is that a large segment of the population---including Rand Paul---define racism as hatred.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/lovejoyfeminism\/2018\/01\/racism-is-not-a-synonym-for-hatred-or-why-ron-pauls-comments-fall-flat.html\" \/>\n<meta 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