If you have fleeting racist thoughts that you try to overcome, you may be a good person. If you try to justify your racism, even in your own mind, you share those views with other people, or you don’t say anything when other people share their racist views, you are not a good person. You might not be a bad person, you could balance out to be average, when your racism is weighed against the rest of your makeup. Most people are kind to their relatives and not actively hostile to strangers, but being a good person is not the default state; it requires real attempts at self improvement.
Can a woman who has sex with someone other than her husband be a “good” person?
I was gonna do a whole list of these rhetorical questions, but that would be an annoying exercise, and I’m sure the one example suffices.
Of course racism in a person is widely considered to be a character flaw and racism is generally considered to be highly undesirable in individuals and in society. It’s something we often consider to be a moral ill, obviously.
But to moralize to the point where the presence of a single drop (or whatever qualifies as “enough”) of racism in an absolute pass/fail purity test is to engage in just the kind of bigoted, small-minded thinking that spawns racism in the first place. I mean, sure, pat yourself on the back that at least your hateful bigotry has a more defensible base (in that anti-racism is better than pro-misogyny or whatever), but if you’re going to actively dehumanize entire swaths of people, you haven’t really understood the problem and most certainly aren’t contributing to a benevolent solution.
Sometimes racism is so ingrained in your community that it’s hard for people not to be racist.
This isn’t the case with racism as much, but imagine someone who grew up in a community where everyone taught him being gay is wrong and sinful. That’s his parents, his church, his teachers, his friends he grew up with, the woman he married, and even Bill, his mailman for twenty years.
At that point being against homosexuality isn’t about hating gay people, but more about not becoming an outcast in the community you grew up in.
I know a lot of people who are amazing if you never talk to them about politics or religion, and I think its because of this reason.
I agree and to me it points back to the question of how ‘racism’ intersects exactly with moral wrong.
Post after post speaks of ‘a little racism’, or trying for self improvement against it, without an agreed definition of what racism actually is, or which manifestations of it are moral failings. Say a particular individual interprets the scatter plots of standardized test scores as evidence of a racially correlated genetic difference in intelligence. I believe many people would call that view ‘racism’. But even if so, is it a moral failing to have a particular interpretation of data, and why exactly?
There are other interpretations of that data arguably more valid (but I think it fair to say it’s not 100% obvious either way). But more/less valid interpretation of statistics is not a moral failing as I understand morality. Then it might get to “but that conclusion will lead your subconscious to make you treat individuals unfairly, which is wrong”. Or, “your subconscious moral failing about race is what led you to that (morally) ‘wrong’ interpretation of the data”.
But ‘subconscious’ and ‘morality’ are hard to sensibly put together. Morality as I understand it is about conscious acts (and perhaps conscious thoughts). A consistent view which says our actions are dictated by forces over which we have no control, like our ‘subconscious’, must reject the concept of morality. But without it I don’t know what ‘bad person’ means.
A long history of Christian philosophy/teaching echoes the repeated theme here that ‘bad person’ is basically somebody who (consciously) refuses to recognize and try to right their wrongs. It’s not just somebody who commits wrongs, or else there’d be virtually no such thing as a good person. Some of the posters w/ that theme might be Christian, others probably aren’t: it’s pretty much standard ‘Western’ morality independent of actual religious belief. But what’s confusing to me here is what aspects of ‘racism’ are morally wrong, what’s special about race as reason/excuse to treat (as in acts) others in a way you wouldn’t want to be treated (ie act wrongly), and how to fit morality and ‘bad person’ together with ‘subconscious’.
My parents, who are in their 70s and have lived in virtually all-white small towns all their lives, at times say awful racist things. Yet they have always befriended the 2% of non-whites in the community and open their hearts and home to everyone and anyone.
I used to lecture them about saying racist things (to no avail), but finally came to terms thru looking at how they actually treat folks. It’s a weird paradox.
To add: I’m gay and my parents are ardent GLBT champions and every summer seem to host at least one gay wedding in their backyard (which is plunk in the middle of Mormon Central).
Two of their grandkids are also gay, what a gift they have in uber-supportive grandparents. Life is weird…