Blog #10: Racism as an Insult

Racism is a difficult concept to describe, as it is more than a catalogue of vicious words or gestures or attitudes. It is personal as it pertains to identity, be it the one being rejected or reaffirmed, but it is also of the group, as it pertains incongruous belief systems made salient by widely recognizable and immutable tags. In this class, we’ve analyzed racism as precisely that, the unequal treatment or negative attitude against an individual based on skin color (which includes a massive logical gap that assumes that skin color definitively determines one’s values).

Racism can be interpreted as an insult meant to of affect a large, albeit anonymous, group of people. In a way, the insulter is protected by the fact that he is not addressing one specific person, but rather a group.

I think that racism, like any insult, is actually just a representation of the insulter’s inner weaknesses. The fact that one prematurely judges another based on skin color indicates that this individual also judges self through skin color. Logically then, this person probably has a lack of originality or personality.

The truth is that we all want to be loved by others but who is willing to give this love away for free? That is why people turn to insults, because it makes us feel better about ourselves at a cost to others (if they won’t love us then we will take that love by force). Therefore, in a sense racism is actually a sign of weakness- a failure to identify what is beautiful about you below the skin, which must naturally translates to failing to identify what is beautiful about others, below the skin.