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Have you ever considered how racism affects your daily life? To know how racism affects your life you must first understand what racism is. Racism can be defined in a number of ways. The way you judge a group of people by the way they look. It could be the way you treat a group of people because you think they are not smart. What makes a class of people show racism toward another class of people? Are they born that way? Is it something that develops in their heart? I will be comparing Kwame Anthony Appiah’s Racisms to Thomas Shelby’s Is Racism in the “Heart”? to explain how racism is developed in the mind and manifests change in the heart.
Appiah discusses the issues of racialism, intrinsic racism, and extrinsic racism. He defines racialism-“ that there are heritable characteristics, possessed by members of our species, that allow us to divide them into a small set of races, in such a way that all the members of these races share certain traits and tendencies with each other that they do not share with members of any other race.”(Appiah 471). According to his explanation putting people in different classifications are not exactly right. It just gives people a pass on being racist. There are two types of racism and they are intrinsic and extrinsic (Appiah 472). Basically, a person displaying these types of racism doesn’t have any reasonable explanation to believe that everyone should be treated the same. “For intrinsic racists, by my definition, are people who differentiate morally between members of different races because they believe that each race has different moral status, quite independent of the moral characteristics entailed by its racial essence.”(Appiah 472) In their mind, it doesn’t matter what qualities another race may have they are different. So that leads me to ask the question, can a person have racism in their heart?
Shelby believes that racism is not manifested in the heart. “If this is acknowledged, we must recognize that the “heart” does not have to be involved in order for an action or institution to be racist, and unjust because racist.”(483) This pretty much states that racism has to do with what a person has been through personally. Something has happened to a person to make them have racism toward a particular group of people. It could be a person’s attitudes and not their beliefs that make them racist. (479) The argument here simply is saying that sometimes a person doesn’t have racism toward a particular person but maybe it’s the person’s action that may be the real reason for them not being liked by the person. According to Shelby, “If Stephen (a white person) dislikes Andre (a black person), then we don’t yet know whether Stephen’s dislike for Andre is racist. If it is simply because Andre is having a love affair with the woman Stephen loves (who happens to be white), then this is not racist, provided Andre’s “race” is not an aggravating factor.”(480) What I believe Shelby is trying to say by this analysis is trying to disguise someone’s dislike for you with racism, there could be a legitimate reason for them not liking you. In “Is Racism in the “Heart”? Shelby asks, “Us to consider a different type of racist. She has no ill will toward blacks but learned as a child to believe that they are “naturally” disposed to violent, irresponsible, and indolent, and now that she is an adult, she uncritically continues to hold on to this belief, much as she does certain of her religious beliefs and many of her social values.”(483)
Appiah would refer to this woman as “sincere extrinsic.”(483) This type of thinking can lead to her letting it affect the way she feels about a certain group of people that she may encounter in her everyday living experiences. It could also very well develop in her heart as well. Shelby mentions, “ If this is acknowledged, we must recognize that the “heart” does not have to be involved in order for an action or institution to be racist, and unjust because racist. It is sufficient for the existence of racism that individuals with racist beliefs act on those beliefs in their private lives, the marketplace, or the public sphere. Such actions lead to and perpetuate oppression-an unnecessary, systemic, and underserved burden that is imposed on one group as a result of the actions of another-and they have this result whether or not they are performed with a racist heart.”
In conclusion, I can see how the information I read about both authors can go hand in hand with each other. Fully understanding what racism means can make you wonder if it’s in a person’s heart. I would have to say that I agree more with Shelby’s viewpoint. The example he gave of the woman who was taught to view black people a certain way agrees with my viewpoint about racism being taught. I don’t no one is born to hate. But I also believe that what you feel in your heart can influence how your mind thinks. What’s in the heart is eventually put into action. This was a great read for me because it made me reevaluate what I thought about racism.
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