Complaining about racism in part is complaining about something written right into the human genome. We all favor our kin, and the closer kin they are, the more we favor them.
At the bottom of this is something that doesn’t even have an English name: I call it “family-ism”. It’s the condition in which I think the Sun shines only on my children (and grandchildren), whilst your children and grandchildren are annoying wastes of space, at best.
We actually admire the above. People who think “family is everything” get films made about them, even though the family be evil Borgia or Tudor or Corleoni. The last one is fictional but you know it anyway, do you not? Gambino, if you like.
One step up from family-ism is clan-ism. Clan as in Irish clan wars, O’Neill vs. O’Donnel, Fitzgerald vs. Butler. And in the U.S., Hatfields vs. McCoys. In fiction, Montegues vs. Capulets. This is still not at a level where we disown it or are ashamed of it. It’s still too close to the bone and the blood. But we are here beginning to see the need for government, as clans cannot be trusted to administer justice in disputes any more than families can. Tribalism is a somewhat neutral umbrella for disputes here and at larger levels. But tribalism can give you Hutu vs.Tutsi. They speak the same language and you can’t tell them apart by sight. Doesn’t matter.
Up a bit in scale and at last we get nationalism (complete with jingoism and ordinary patriotism) and so on. Now it’s very uncomfortable, but many uncondemned people exist who defend their own countries, “right or wrong”. Who cannot figure out that when the US drops bombs indiscriminately on Berlin or Dresden or Baghdad citizens (women and children included), it’s just as much terrorism as any terrorism. Being an American doesn’t make you incapable of committing terrorism. And there is no authority that can insulate you from the ethical badness of killing civilians for poor reasons, and torturing prisoners.
Up a bit more in scale and we have the politically correct liberals who have decided that nationalism and clan-ism can be ignored, but that somehow racism and ethnocentrism and religious bigotry are the attitudes that are immoral (!) What? It’s all the same thing. We live in a world where people beat each other to death over affiliation for some soccer team. Whatever your bias is against some other group of humans, you have this problem. There are no grades of this problem except grades of bias. That includes the bias for your own family.
So here is my thesis: Unless you’re willing to abjure all traces of family-ism and clan-ism, tribalism and nationalism, including the idea that your kids, grandchildren, and your own “people” (whoever they are) are special to god almighty, then you have absolutely no right to complain about racism, ethnocentrism, and bigotry. You’re already part of those problems. You ARE the problem. You’re just looking at the problem from the bottom end, where the atoms are. You are locusts, complaining of lack of food. The problem, dear human, is you. And your snot-nosed obnoxious brats, and so on, forever.
