A couple decades ago, I wrote the Race Man's Home Companion. Today, people are asking questions of the sort that should be answered with a bit more specificity. So I offer the following updated framework. Feel free to use it.
Racial Theories:
All racists, and all racialists are attuned to Racial Theories.
A racial theory establishes the conventions around which races are defined. The aim of racial theories is to establish a well-accepted truth about race. These may be scientifically studied and many statistics, stories, myths and traditions may be cited. The point of the acceptance of racial theories is to establish by any means that race has meaning.
A racial theory doesn’t necessarily have to a genetic origin. It may have, according to its arguments, some cultural origins. So racialists will have difficulty accepting that an African could easily speak Mandarin or that a Pacific Islander could easily play European Classical music. This would be true according to the racial theory that each race has a ‘natural’ culture.
A racial theory seeks to be explanatory of behavior and at the very least establishes a baseline core property of any race. All racial theories seek credibility either through science, law, politics, ‘cultural construction’, myth, convention, tradition or any means at hand.
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Racialism:
The Racial Realist
The belief that there are differences between human beings which are inherited such that they can be ordered into separate races in such a way that each race shares traits and tendencies which are not shared by members of any other race. Each race has an 'essence'.
All forms of racism build from the premise of racialism. Notice that racialism is not saying anything 'good' or 'bad' about races just that mutually exclusive races absolutely exist and divide the species. The racialist would argue that you could trace the bloodlines of blacks throughout history and that you can definitely determine the 'blackness' of any human being according to his racial 'essence'.
If you take a 23 & Me test and you are surprised or you feel that you have learned something more meaningful than what your horoscope says, this is racialism.
A racialist does not necessarily believe that the races, as we understand them in America are complete. He may say that there are, in actuality, 37 races. We just don't know what they are yet. The racialist's point however is that race, whatever it turns out to be, is deterministic of human behavior and that we need to know.
A racialist will discount psychology.
If you ask a racialist what is the essence of a race, they will have some answer or search for some answer, but they will not say that makes a race better or worse. A racialist searches for and finds meaning in racial theories and incorporates them into their worldview. The racial realist will not claim to be a racist, their explanation says "That's just the way it is."
Racism:
Type One: Extrinsic or Soft Racist
The extrinsic racist says that there is a moral component to the 'essence’ of a race which warrants differential treatment. These differences are, to the extrinsic racist, not particularly controversial. The extrinsic racist, while maintaining the belief for example that blacks are stupid, might not feel anything wrong with befriending a black. The extrinsic racist might very well applaud the black who proves himself not stupid and call him a credit to his race.
The extrinsic racist looks for the core meaning of a race as something that race owns, and must be convinced that they don’t know what race means. But they are content to let other people have their own ideas about race, and are always willing to grant exceptions to individuals of any race.
Type Two: Intrinsic or Hard Racist
The intrinsic racist says that the moral 'essence' of a race establishes an incontrovertible status for the race. No matter what an individual member of a race does he should be treated just like the rest of his race. The intrinsic racist would argue that the black is inevitably stupid so he finds clever ways to hide his stupidity (maybe through athletic prowess or spirituality) in order to gain other's confidence or that this intelligent person is simply not actually black, or what he demonstrates is not actually intelligence.
The intrinsic racist is willing to expend considerable amounts of energy in order to take extrinsic racism to the next level, which is to be politically, socially or religiously active and to evangelize for establishing the destiny of various races in the world.
Type Three: Racial Supremacist
The racial supremacist requires for his own peace of mind and the moral righteousness of the world, to be active in the establishment of racial law and racial order. The supremacist recasts the history and future of humanity through the lens of conflict between mutually incompatible pure races with mongrels and others caught in the middle.
The supremacist seeks to establish by any means, peaceful or otherwise, a social and legal hierarchy of superior races over their inferiors. From their point of view failing to do so risks permanent chaos and human dissolution. This hierarchy may be local, national, regional or global, but the supremacist needs the destiny of races to be established with immediacy. The supremacist operating in a non-supremacist society will accept any happenstance that leads to, or appears to lead to their desired outcomes.
Here is a framework that tells you pretty much everything you need to know about racism, racialism and racial theories.
A special note.
There is a contingent with the political opinion that the absence of explicit and identifiable contemporary racial discrimination is irrelevant to the proper racial balance of any environment. I interpret this to be a fallacy owing more to a 'blank slate' hypothesis which suggests that all cultural and environmental factors can and should be adjusted to produce racially representative outcomes. I would like to call this a soft racism, but I think it is tortured thinking that fails to account for what is known in psychology and what can successfully be engineered in society. If you call it racist, that's ok with me, but I'd err on the side of befuddlement.
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