Racism

Racism is the practice of judging people by ancestry rather than by their own character and actions. Objectivism treats it as the crudest form of collectivism and as an epistemological failure before it is a moral one: it holds that the content of a mind is inherited, which is a denial of the fact that knowledge must be acquired by a volitional process.

“Racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism. It is the notion of ascribing moral, social or political significance to a man's genetic lineage — the notion that a man's intellectual and characterological traits are produced and transmitted by his internal body chemistry.”
~ Ayn Rand, "Racism", The Virtue of Selfishness

Why it is an epistemological error first

The distinctive Objectivist claim is not merely that racism is unkind. It is that racism gets a fact wrong about what a human mind is.

A man is born with a capacity to think, not with the results of thinking. His convictions, his knowledge, his standards, and his character are formed by choices he makes over a lifetime. See Volition and Concept formation. Racism asserts the opposite: that the content of a mind arrives through the bloodstream. In that form it is a version of the doctrine of innate ideas, and it carries the same consequence as any other determinist account. If a man's mind is set by something he did not choose, then praise and blame have nothing to attach to.

This is why the Objectivist objection does not rest on the empirical question of whether statistical differences between populations exist. Even a real group average tells you nothing about the person in front of you, and a moral judgment is a judgment of a person. See Justice. The error in racism is the inference from a group to an individual, which is invalid whatever the group statistics turn out to be.

The individual as the smallest minority

Racism's political form is the treatment of people as interchangeable specimens of a group with claims, grievances, and entitlements of its own. Objectivism denies that any group has rights beyond the rights of the individuals composing it. See Rights and Individualism.

“The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.”
~ Ayn Rand, "Racism", The Virtue of Selfishness

This has a consequence that cuts against the usual political alignment. A defence of a group's interests as a group, however sympathetic the group, is the same operation as racism performed with a different sign. Rand condemned racial quotas on exactly this ground: a quota decides a person's fate by ancestry, and reversing which ancestry benefits does not change what is being done. Her later lecture "Global Balkanization" extends the argument to tribalism generally, of which racism is one instance.

Racism and the state

Rand distinguished sharply between racism practised by government and racism practised by private individuals.

Segregation laws, racial classification in law, and any state action that assigns rights by ancestry are violations of individual rights and must be abolished. There is no property-rights defence of them, because the government owns nothing and exists only to protect rights equally.

Private discrimination is a different case. Rand regarded it as contemptible and irrational, and said so in the strongest terms, while holding that a private owner has the right to dispose of his own property on irrational grounds, and that outlawing private discrimination substitutes one collectivism for another by making a person's ancestry a legal claim on someone else's property. See Property rights and Initiation of force. This distinction is the source of most of the confusion about her position, and it is a distinction, not a hedge: she supported striking down the segregation laws and opposed extending the same statute to private conduct.

Capitalism and racism

The forum returns often to whether capitalism causes racism or dissolves it. The Objectivist answer is that racism is a pre-capitalist inheritance sustained by statism, and that a free market penalises it.

The mechanism is that trade forces a judgment about performance. An employer who hires by ancestry rather than by ability pays for the mistake in output, and a competitor who does not, does not. The historical association between capitalism and racism runs the other way, in Rand's account: slavery, colonial exploitation, and legal segregation were maintained by force and law, not by markets, and the freest societies have been the ones where tribal identity mattered least. See Capitalism and Statism.

This is an argument about tendencies, not a claim that a free market makes racists disappear. What it claims is that under freedom racism costs the racist, and under statism it becomes a way of getting a share of what the state distributes.

Pride, ancestry, and self-esteem

A recurring question is whether it is racist to take pride in one's own race. Objectivism's answer follows from what pride is: pride is the reward for a moral achievement, an assessment earned by what a person has made of himself. Ancestry is not an achievement. Taking pride in it is not so much malicious as empty. It is an attempt to draw self-esteem from something one did not do, which is the same error as taking pride in inherited wealth or in a nation's history one had no part in. Admiring specific achievements by specific people, including one's own forebears, is a different act and an entirely proper one.

Common misunderstandings

That the position amounts to "not seeing race". It is not a claim about perception. Ancestry is a fact like eye colour; what is rejected is treating it as evidence about a person's mind or as the basis of a moral or legal claim.
That opposing anti-discrimination law means endorsing discrimination. Rand denounced private racism as evil in the same essay in which she opposed legislating against it, and treated the two questions as separate: what is contemptible and what is properly illegal are different categories.
That the philosophy has a position on group differences in intelligence. It does not, and it does not need one. The question is empirical, and the moral principle that a person is judged as an individual holds either way.
That "reverse racism" is a contradiction in terms. On this account racism is the practice of assigning significance to lineage, so it has no privileged direction.
That racism is fundamentally an emotion, so arguing about it is beside the point. Emotions are consequences of a person's convictions and appraisals rather than primaries. See Emotions.

Discussion

References

Rand, Ayn. "Racism". The Virtue of Selfishness. New American Library, 1964. First published in The Objectivist Newsletter, September 1963.
Rand, Ayn. "Global Balkanization". The Voice of Reason: Essays in Objectivist Thought. New American Library, 1989.

External links

Racism at the Ayn Rand Lexicon