Is racism valid? No. You already know one of the reasons why. The other reason may be one you have not considered.
Racism 1.0 is old-time racism: the idea that if a person has some readily identifiable physical characteristic — skin color, ancestry, facial features, or anything similar — that person is somehow inferior. This form of racism existed for much of human history because it was convenient. It gave people an easy way to feel superior, and it provided a convenient justification for hating, mistreating, exploiting, or even enslaving those labeled as “inferior.”
Racism 2.0 is the modern version. It is more sophisticated and often comes wrapped in academic language, but it still begins with the same basic mistake: judging people by group identity instead of individual reality. Some modern race-based theories, including some forms of Critical Race Theory, can fall into this trap when they treat a person as morally suspect, guilty, privileged, oppressed, or virtuous because of a body characteristic rather than because of that person’s actual conduct, choices, and character.
The vocabulary has changed, but the underlying move is familiar. One group is still treated as morally tainted because of what it is, and another group is treated as morally elevated or uniquely victimized for the same reason. However polished the argument may sound, any system that assigns moral status by race is still operating on the old racist assumption that you can know a book by its cover.
That is the racist idea we already recognize. All green people are this. All purple people are that. Being a purple person myself, I can say that this sort of thinking is both lazy and destructive.
But there is a second problem, and it runs even deeper. Racism depends on the assumption that there is nothing more to a person than the body. If the body is all there is, then judging people by visible physical traits may seem plausible. But if human beings are more than bodies, racism collapses at the root.
In actuality, a human being is an interesting mix of body, mind, and spirit. You could describe a person as a spirit using a mind while inhabiting a body, with the spirit being the most important of the three. The body is an animal body, subject to the laws and urges of animal bodies. The spirit, with its own purposes and intentions, uses the mind — a composite of experience — to help direct that body.
The more successfully the spirit uses the body to achieve its purposes, the happier, more productive, and more successful that human being will tend to be. The more the body degrades the spirit, or uses the spirit merely to achieve animal purposes, the less happy, less productive, and less successful that person will tend to become.
If the spirit is the most important part of this composite being, then any philosophy that disregards or denies it is a loser’s game. Racism is one such philosophy. It denies the best part of what makes us human. It reduces people to bodies, categories, and labels. It turns human beings into a form of sentient cattle, and the future prospects for any culture that thinks of people that way are bleak, no matter how intelligent its language may appear.
Denying or disregarding the spirit degrades the person. But racism, in any form, degrades the racist just as surely as it degrades the target of that racism. In treating other people as sentient bags of cells, the racist has also reduced himself or herself to the status of the merely physical. Racism is the degradation of humanity.
To enhance a person, and therefore to improve humanity and its cultures, we must recognize the spiritual side of human beings and sort out how to help that side achieve its purposes. We cannot fall back on outmoded ideas like racism, however modern, academic, or plausible they may be dressed up to seem.
Abandoning our racist past is not hard in principle, but it does require a different way of seeing people. We are not cattle. It is time for all of us — racists and victims alike — to throw off the yoke, wake up, and reach for the stars.