Liberal commentator Jemele Hill is calling nearly half of the country racist. A few hundred people accused Trader Joe’s of racism for branding its Mexican food products under “Trader Jose” (Jose is the Spanish form of Joseph), and Trader Joe’s is giving in.
“Racist” and “racism” are words that different people define differently. You’re obviously free to have your own definition. But if your definition of “racist person” includes 100 million of your fellow citizens, including millions of black and Hispanic voters, it is not a definition that is going to sway many people. If these millions of “racists” are dubbed thus for an act (backing one deeply flawed man over another deeply flawed man with very different policy prescriptions) that they may have taken for 10,000 different reasons, then the word becomes meaningless.
Here’s the definition of “racist” Hill endorses:
Thisssssssssssss https://t.co/eFzMWyCSIP
— Jemele Hill (@jemelehill) July 19, 2020
The relevant portion here is “one who is supporting a racist policy through their actions or inaction.”
A definition of “racist” as a noun that leans on “racist” as an adjective is not terribly informative. But even if you granted that President Trump’s immigration policy or criminal justice policy is racist, or if you characterized his racially loaded and insensitive talk as “a racist policy,” then using this definition of racism to cover voting for Trump is still a real stretch.
If we take Hill literally, she is arguing that either (a) anyone who votes for Trump supports all of his policies (which may also include all of his rhetoric) or (b) anyone who fails to vote against Trump is, through inaction, supporting all of Trump’s policies and rhetoric.
This is not the way voting in a democracy works. It’s not really the way any sort of decision-making works. When we teamed up with Stalin to win World War II, we weren’t endorsing the gulags.
We ought to be afraid of ideologies that demand all or nothing and posit that inaction and action are morally equivalent.
More concretely, if we join Hill and the critics of Trader Joe’s in broadening the definition of “racist” to mean “anyone in the other party” and “a joke with ethnic dimensions,” then we’ve changed the moral weight of racism. Most people simply cannot hold hatred in their hearts for 100 million people. Most people can’t think it’s awful that a box of taco shells says “Trader Jose.”
So if you make Trader Jose and voting for Trump racist, then you are changing racism from a “very bad thing” to a “sometimes bad thing.”
Right now, almost everyone wants not to do racist things. But if Hill and Trader Joe’s succeed in redefining racism, then folks would rationally feel differently.
That’s not a good thing.
