Are you racist? Take this quiz to find out.

3 thoughts on “Are you racist? Take this quiz to find out.”

1. Thanks for offering me the possibility to react to your article.
   Let me introduce myself. I am Marc, a 60 year old Dutch white male, teacher in history.

   In search for more information on Denzel Washingtons frase ‘It’s not color, it’s culture’ I came across your article. The reason I wanted to know more about Denzel’s phrase, is that I myself have come to the conclusion that racism does not exist as a societal phenomenon, but merely as an idea that has effected peoples thinking in such a way that they are no longer capable of observing actual societal features or problems.

   It’s not only the phrase ‘racism’, but also the phrase ‘dicrimination’. Let me elaborate on this last phrase. As you know, the literally meaning of ‘discrimination’ is to make a distinction. As you know the phrase originates from the science of mathematics, as many phrases used in societal discussions are lent from some kind of science.

   In present day societal context, discrimination has come to mean “to uneven treatment of persons or groups on the basis of characteristics of persons or groups that are not relevant in a given situation” or something like that.

   This has entered law: “discrimination between people or groups of people in even cases is unlawful’. The law therefore prohibits discrimination in such cases where people apply for any job or want to take part in any social act like going to the cinema.
   The fact that law has interfered with features occuring in society is highly problematic. First because law has the power to either prohibit or to steer in one way or the other behaviour of individual people or groups of people. Secondly because law, as it were, freezes over societal features. A certain law is always grounded on the perception of a certain societal phenomenon that the drafters of that law may find desirable or undesirable. In this way a society is not able to solve a certain problem on its own or in a natural way.
   To my opinion, law expresses the failure, incompetence or lack of freedom of any society to solve its problems on its own.

   The reason why I was attracted to your article ‘Are you racist?’ is that you use a definition of racism by Dictionary.com. To define racism is of the utmost importance if you are to have sensible discussions about this subject.

   You give six societal phenomena. The reader has to decide wheather each of them are racist or not. Then you give three possible outcomes to determine the reader is racist or not. You than say that if the reader says all six phenomena are racist, the reader is not racist at all.
   At first hand I tend to agree with your conclusion.

   But than I got to think. Is it not true that all six features share one thing, namely the fact that it entails discrimination? Is it also not true that the six features are shrouded or supported in either some law or general opinion?

   There is really no agreement about what the term ‘racism’ actually means. If you enter both terms ‘racism’ and ‘meaning’ in Google, you are presented about fifteen dictionaries, each with its own discription. Some will overlap, some won’t.

   Let’s stick to that of Dictionary.com, and dissect it.
   “a belief or doctrine that inherent differences among the various human racial groups determine cultural or individual achievement, usually involving the idea that one’s own race is superior and has the right to dominate others or that a particular racial group is inferior to the others.”

   1. racism is a belief
   2. this belief entails ‘inherent differences among various human (racial) groups determine cultural (or individual achievement),
   3. involving the idea that one’s one racis is superior
   4. and has the right to dominate others
   5. or that a particular racial group is inferior to the others.

   I hold the view that the term ‘racism’ actually only covers the numbers 1 and 2 in the above definition.

   Racism is first of all a belief, not a scientific fact. It’s important to stress this fact. Although many 19th century scientists worked with this term, it was Darwin who in his Origin of Species (1859) divided all living creatures into races, singling out all of mankind as one single race sharing the same characteristics.
   Darwin vehemently rejected the way his cousin Francis Galton used parts of his theory, such as ‘natural selection’ to project the framework of ‘race’ to mankind, thereby dividing the whole of mankind into different ‘races’.

   Any kind of scientific thinking when launched needs to develop in fertile ground. The problem is there are many types of ‘fertile ground’, even those which are not scientific at all, such as the semi-scientific aims of Galton and the like.

   At the end of the 19th and the first half of the 20th century all kinds of people where enthralled by Darwins concepts of ‘natural selection’ turning it into ‘survival of the fittest’ and ‘the law of the fittest’, concepts Darwin never applied to mankind as such.
   To give it the appearance of science, people like Galton entered into measurement of kind of bodily features like skullmeasurement, the measurement of the color of the eyes, hair, length, etc. To these kind of features also belangs the colour of skin.

   Between 1859 and around 1945 these ‘racists’ were to be found in both America and Europe. The theory of ‘racism’ is thus an exclusively western phenomenon. That does not mean that to discriminate on ground of skincolour does not exist anywhere else in the world. To the contrary.

   ‘Racism’ in America was mainly focused on skin colour. In Europe it was focused on all other bodily features, but not skin colour.
   The idea of racism got its present day form since 1960/70, when the ‘racist’ policies of the Third Reich were examined and rejected as vile and incorrect in the West. As you see, I put the term ‘racism’ in parantheses. It is known Hitler discribed himself and his policies as racist, and was proud of it. But there’s something odd when you compare the practice of racism of the nazis with the concept of ‘racism’ we in Europe hold today, since 99,99999% of the victims of the nazis shared the same colour of skin with the perpetrators of this genocide.
   True, there were also non-whites murdered. There are pictures made by the nazis of black soldiers in the french army when it got defeated in 1940. In these pictures these black soldiers were filmed in the same disqualifying way the jews were portrait in Germany in the 1930s. But one has to think twice here: were black soldiers and jews shown in their actual being? Or were they portrait conforming the nazi concept of black soldiers in the french army or jews?

   Even more: the nazis held the view jews were not inferior at all but rather their opposite equal who were supposed to be out to eradicate the german nation. There’s a striking dissimilarity to Hitlers first advance to antisemitism in the 1920s and the later nazi racist policies of the 1930s and 1940s. In his book Mein Kampf Hitler gives an example of what he than called his encounter with ‘the kaftan-jew’: “When I walked one time in the innercity, I bumped into an appearance in a long kaftan with black locks. Is this also a jew?” and “I looked at the man, but the longer I look that strange face and investigated each feature, the question I than asked myself ‘is this also a German?’

   Note that what Hitler discribes here are all cultural features, the dress and the way a jew wears his hair. Even the discription of facial features can be conceived as cultural. We know that in his later policies he concentrated on facial features of jews and others to discriminate them from the proper german. We also know Hitler and the nazis attributed the term ‘racism’ to this distinction. I hold the view that was incorrect and that Hitler discrimination of jews can only be cultural.

   The fact that Hitlers racism was bare nonsens is also supported by other phenomena. Such as the distinction made between germanic and slavonic nations: both phrases ‘germanic’ and ‘slavonic’ refer in fact to language, not to fysical appearances. Therefore outward differences between European people, which are few, do not support the reasoning that cultural differences are grounded in ‘race’. This is important, since not only the jews but in the end all slavonic nations had to disappear as well.

   Another fact which turned nazi racism into actually a laughing stock is the fact that the nazis during their occupation of Poland, Lithuania, Belorussia and so forth, found all these people had blond hair and blue eyes, the criteria with which the nazis thought to be typical for the germanic ‘race’. Although three million Poles and three million Russians were murderd in concentrationcamps (the actual number killed in those camps is not six million but fourteen million), the nazis set out to arianise (that is to give the predicate ‘german’) to Poles and Russians.

   There’s more to say, but I hope this is sufficient to conclude that nazi racist policies were actually bare nonsens: there was no societal problem involving racial causes.

   For twenty years after 1945 Europeans went silent about the war. In fact all the nations were in shock and incapable of grasping what had just happened. Then during the 1960s and 1970s all children of the afterwar Babyboom grew up to adults and began asking their parents what they had done during the war. Had they been supporters of Hitler or did they fight him? I now see that for many parents this was an impossible question to answer since most of them did nothing at all since they had no tools to fight with, nor precise information of what was going on. So all of these parents, after having had to experience so much distress during the war, now had to face false accusations of their own children.

   I remember that in my childhood in the 1960s Germans were to blame for all that happened during WW 2. That changed during the 1970s. Together with questioning their parents, the whole of society picked up economic revival. Between 1965 and 1975 every household got their first refrigerator, their first car, toaster, etc. But also their first tv-set with only one (!) channel. On this tv national programmes were displayed. But this was also the time in which the young generations took over power from their parents. This is called ‘the long march through the institutions’. In the 1960s en 1970s, when the attrocities of the communist era in the Sovjet Union were still unknown to most of western Europe, communism was popular. At the same time the general view was held that it were in the main the Americans and English who saved Europe from nazism. That’s why american culture got so popular in western Europe. (the fact is though that 4 out of 5 german soldiers were killed by Russians. So in fact Europe was liberated mainly due to Russian fighting).

   These youngsters in the early 1970s were confronted with documentaries on television in which nazi attrocities were displayed. Since these youngsters effectively had silenced their parents and the whole generation who were themselves youngsters during the nazi occupation, including politicians and all kinds of authority, these youngsters took moral control themselves. When they watched in abhorrance those documentaries with those piles of bodies in concentrationcamps they arrived to the conclusion that ‘racism’ was the cause of nazipolicy and that it should not be allowed to ever happen again. What then happened was purely coincidence.

   In exactly the same period 1965-1975 the Holocaust was processed, western Europe got acquianted with the first influx of immigrants. First from Italy and Spain. These workers returned home after their job was done. Than companies searched for labourers from muslim north Africa and Turkey. Be aware that most west Europeans had no idea what islam entailed. Unlike the Spaniards and Italians before them, these workers did not return home after their job was done. That was a strange situation, but since European youngsters had counted out their parents and authorities as beakens of moral authority, they began to moralise themselves and came to the conclusion that these alien migrants had to be accepted in our societies since we rejected racism. And, of course, these migrants had a different colour of skin. So to argue for the return of these migrants to their own country became equivalent to the argument of their eradication of the face of the earth. Since we now had adopted (25 years after the Holocaust!) that ‘racism’ was not what we wanted, these migrant had to stay.

   Note that no one took notice from the tremendous cultural differences between islamic cultures and those of the west. Note also that, while in the 1960s the Germans were still the bad guys who produced stacks of dead bodies, in the 1970s it was us who were guilty of it, since western Europe had had its colonial era in which 11 million Africans were transported to the Americas. In the 1970s the overall conclusion of the nazi Holocaust was that ‘we’ were guilty of ‘racism’ all along!
   The next step taken during the years 2000-2021 is of course that ‘we’ are guilty of ‘racism’ because we are white.

   Jim, do you see the all out bare nonsens of this reasoning?

   Youngsters are youngsters and by definition hardly capable of sound judgement. They had disqualified their parents and authorities and went their own blind way into cultural oblivion. With that they lost their identity as westerner.

   Today the youngsters of the 1960s and 1970s have been in control in all political arenas (like the EU for example) for about thirty years and set out agendas based on this hideous anti-racism. For exemple the former Irish commisioner and special representative for migration to the UN Peter Sutherland (died 2018). In 2012 he was invited for the british commision of foreign affairs. There he explicitly told English parlement that the EU should “do its beste to undermine the homogeneity of its member states.”
   It resembles Joe Biden when he told his audiences during the 2020 campaign that the USA could easily host another 2 million immigrants from South America.

   Meanwhile I await the new exterminationcamp ‘New Auschwitz’ where whites will be butchered by whites.

   Yours sincerely,

   Marc Bouwman

2. This has to be the most thoroughly researched and persuasive comment I’ve seen on mine or any other blog I’ve read in recent memory. Thank you so much for your input. It is appreciated.

3. Damn Marc, what a great research you have done. So detailed response.

Comments are closed.