Racism and Individual Responsibility

 I wrote a piece for Newsweek about how fashionable it is to talk about racism as if it's something we are born with, something that is endemic to skin color. Some of the most popular writers--think anti-racism and white fragility--seem to suggest that for white or light-skinned people, racism is something that they will always uphold whether they want to or not, simply because they were born with less pigmentation, because they move through the world with the immutable characteristic of "white" skin. But such a fact would mean that we are, then, less responsible for racist behavior. If we're born with it, we can't in a philosophical sense be absolutely responsible for it. Children's books about becoming anti-racist don't help, no matter how trendy they are. There are so many beautiful stories about and written by important Black figures that do more to fight racism, in my opinion.

But I'm mostly concerned about the question of ethical responsibility here. If you've followed my scholarly work you know that Emmanuel Levinas is central to how I see things. I don't *always* do the right or best thing, and I certainly don't always get it right (I am, after all, continuously learning), but I try to always keep Levinas's ideas about responsibility at the forefront of my thinking and writing and, hopefully, my own behavior.

For Levinas, we aren't simply responsible for all of our own actions, but also for the responsibility of the Other. It's a tremendous burden in some ways, I suppose.

At any rate, it seems to me that arguing that humans are born racist makes people less responsible for racist behavior. Racism is not imprinted on our DNA. It is learned and cultivated in racist environments. We must be responsible for our actions rather than our biology if we want to build a more inclusive and equal society.

From the piece: "It should be obvious that taking away the culpability we bear for racist behavior, just like insisting that babies and children should notice people's race before anything else, is dangerously close if not downright identical to the justifications and processes that enabled the overt racism of darker times."