CHAPTER 1 Racisms Kwame Anthony Appiah If the people I talk to and the newspapers I read are representative and reli- able, there is a good deal of racism about. People and policies in the United States, in Eastern and Western Europe, in Asia and Africa and Latin America are regularly described as "racist." Australia had, until recently, a racist im- migration policy; Britain still has one; racism is on the rise in France; many Israelis support Meir Kahane, an anti-Arab racist; many Arabs, according to a leading authority, are anti-Semitic racists;1 and the movement to establish English as the "official language" of the United States is motivated by racism. Or, at least, so many of the people I talk to and many of the journalists with the newspapers I read believe. But visitors from Mars-or from Malawi - unfamiliar with the Western concept of racism could be excused if they had some difficulty in identifying what exactly racism was. We see it everywhere, but rarely does anyone stop to say what it is, or to explain what is wrong with it. Our visitors from Mars would soon grasp that it had become at least conventional in recent years to express abhorrence for racism. They might even notice that those most often accused of it-members of the South African Nationalist party, for example - may officially abhor it also. But if they sought in the popular me- dia of our day-in newspapers and magazines, on television or radio, in novels or films-for an explicit definition of this thing "we" all abhor, they would very likely be disappointed. Now, of course, this would be true of many of our most familiar concepts. Sister, chair, tomato - none of these gets defined in the course of our daily busi- ness. But the concept of racism is in worse shape than these. For much of what we say about it is, on the face of it, inconsistent. It is, for example, held by many to be racist to refuse entry to a university to an otherwise qualified "Negro" candidate, but not to be so to refuse entry 3
4 Kwame Anthony Appian to an equally qualified "Caucasian" one. But "Negro" and "Caucasian" are both alleged to be names of races, and invidious discrimination on the basis of race is usually held to be a paradigm case of racism. Or, to take another example, it is widely believed to be evidence of an unacceptable racism to ex- clude people from clubs on the basis of race; yet most people, even those who think of "Jewish" as a racial term, seem to think that there is nothing wrong with Jewish clubs, whose members do not share any particular religious be- liefs, or Afro-American societies, whose members share the juridical charac- teristic of American citizenship and the "racial" characteristic of being black. I say that these are inconsistencies "on the face of it," because, for example, affirmative action in university admissions is importantly different from the