The recent fervor over the shootings in South Carolina has crystallized a thought that I've been working on for some time. I think people are talking about the wrong thing. The biggest problem in this country isn't the Second Amendment, nor is it the Battle Flag of the Army of Tennessee. It isn't the Republican Party, although they may well be the worst of two great evils, and their compulsion to talk nonsense about the motives of Dylann Roof has made them look really, really bad. The biggest problem in this country isn't even racism, but rather the way racism is viewed.
Think about this: if you believe you are superior to me because your parents were Jesus Christ and Joan of Arc, that's a delusion. It's probably a symptom of mental illness. How come if I believe that I am superior to you because my parents were white people, that's an opinion? It's equally nonsensical, and its underpinnings are equally implausible, if not more so. Biologically, race does not exist--we can't say the same of Jesus and Joan with such scientific certainty. If one is the product of an unwell mind, mustn't the other be as well?
In addition to making little sense, treating racism as an opinion is also incredibly destructive. After all, an opinion is something that can be held without being favored by the preponderance of facts, because most of them can't be proven or disproven. I think grape jelly tastes wonderful, and my neighbor won't touch the stuff; my neighbor thinks red motorcycles look better than black ones and I paint all of mine black in defiance. In the end, we have to let it go because we can't prove our side. You may think that the government is capable of solving the biggest problems in our lives today, and I may think that's the biggest load of hogwash I've heard since Backstreet Boys music, but at the end, those are opinions, which means that we're left to respect them, or, at least, acknowledge that we're each entitled to them. Even if racism is viewed as outdated, so are 1960s Thunderbirds. For someone who believes that the past is superior to the present (a legitimately unprovable opinion), then outdatedness is a positive quality. At some level, we require ourselves to allow racism to persist because it falls into a category of ideas that can't be wrong all the way--even though one of its major logical underpinnings is categorically wrong, disproving the idea at its very foundation.
Not only that, but treating racism as an opinion may very well drive people with racism to want racism to persist. In today's world, it has become increasingly taboo to hate, but opinions are the one thing we are still allowed to hate people for. People can group others by beliefs and attack them without consequence. "Democrat," "liberal," and "progressive" are pejoritives in some places, "Red" and "Nazi" as intense as "racist" in most. That may sound like a good thing as applied to racism, and to read it written by someone like me, who has hated racism and racists most of his life, it definitely comes off as hypocritical to suggest otherwise, but in practical terms, there are few ideas worse than that of responding to racism with hate. You can't use hate to change people. Even if you do manage to change them, it won't be in the way you were hoping. I'm now into my fourth decade of being hated because I'm weird, and yet after absorbing so much of that hatred, and spilling the rest back out onto whoever was available, I am not at all less weird. I have more weird ideas than ever, but now with a side of misanthropy. If one anecdote does not suffice, consider this: despite some people using "Democrat" as an insult, they are more or less as popular as their rivals. Consider the centuries of hatred that have utterly failed to make black people look any different. Hate may feel pretty good, (okay, fine, you got me...it does feel effing awesome) but it just doesn't work.
What can work, if done intelligently, is to change people with compassion. The fields of religion and psychology have developed numerous experts in this pursuit. The way to end racism is to find the people who have racism and treat them. Do so with kindness, with respect, with professionalism, so they will keep coming back. They need the treatment. Nobody needs the hatred.
That's kind of awesome, if you think about it. How many illnesses can be cured entirely by education?
