Common White Fallacy #6: Unfalsifiable belief systems about race

A common fallacy of white people is to have a belief system about a non-white racial or ethnic group that cannot be falsified. Wikipedia defines falsifiability as follows:

Falsifiability (or “refutability”) is the logical possibility that an assertion can be shown false by an observation or a physical experiment. That something is “falsifiable” does not mean it is false; rather, that if it is false, then this can be shown by observation or experiment.

In other words, it is not uncommon for a white person to have an unfalsifiable belief system about race, and when shown evidence that refutes a held belief, the given white person engages in absurd rationalizations that “protects” the belief system from any possibility of refutability. For most white people, to be called racist entails being called a bad person, and since the self-concept of oneself as bad is unacceptable for most people, the given white person cannot accept the possibility that he is racist.

Often, the following scenario occurs:

1. A white person believes some generalization about people of colour, i.e., all people of race R have property P.
2. A person of colour of race R tells the white person that she does not have property P.
3. The white person makes some accepting or concilliatory noises towards the person of colour, but then continues to believe that all people of race R have property P.

An example of this is when a white person makes the claim that all black people listen to rap music. If a black person says that she does not listen to rap (but listens to classical music instead, for example), the white person may accept the claim, but then rationalize, “but then you’re not really black.” This white person’s belief system about what kind of music all black people listen to becomes unfalsifiable, because if there is any black person who refutes the generalization, that person suddenly becomes “not black”, and the white person’s sweeping generalization is preserved.

Now this is a relatively obvious example. The white person will not always offer the rationalization that the person is “not really” a member of the group the white person generalized about. (This specific fallacy is known as the no true Scotsman fallacy.) Sometimes the white person will read the dissenting comment as an anomaly or even an alternative opinion that somehow does not interact with the validity of his generalization.*

Unfalsifiable belief systems are problematic, because they are prior assumptions that cannot be tested with reality. Of course, beliefs like “all people of race R have property of P” can be tested and are falsifiable, but when the person who has the belief rejects any evidence that could possibility refute it, the person’s belief system is unfalsifiable and he cannot be reasoned with. Unfortunately, white people are often unconscious that they are making these kinds of invalid rationalizations to preserve their self-concept as a non-racist (or anti-racist) person.

Ironically, some of these white people believe that white people are more “rational” than non-white people when discussing race, because they are unable to see their own irrationality.

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* This is also referred to as “not listening” to people of colour or not taking people of colour seriously.

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Related post:

• Common White Fallacies when Dealing with People of Colour by Restructure!

Who has the right to speak about racism?

There have been two recent, thought-provoking posts on Racialicious about who is allowed to speak about racism. In May I Be Offended on Your Behalf? Tami of What Tami Said, who is black, recalls some negative experiences with non-black people speaking about black experience. Because of this, she held herself back from writing a post about racism against Asian Americans. She wants allies and the mainstream to be sensitive and intolerant of race bias, but also she wants them to keep their privilege in check. She then questions this and asks if she (or anyone) has the right to be offended on someone else’s behalf.

In A Question of Authority, Fatemeh Fakhraie of Muslimah Media Watch was advised by somebody not speak to about racial issues “past a certain point,” because Fatemeh can pass for white. She was annoyed by this, because one of her identities is being a Middle Eastern woman, she knows many Middle Eastern women, and she also does her homework on the subject. Similar to Tami, Fatemeh is annoyed when some white people speak for people of colour. In particular, Fatemeh mentions white academics and non-profit workers who speak for Middle Eastern and South Asian women, when Middle Eastern and South Asian academics and activists are capable of speaking for themselves. However, she wonders if a South Asian professor of African American studies has the authority to speak about issues facing Black Americans. She also points out that being from a particular background does not make one a “spokesperson” or “expert” on everyone of the same background. She asks: (1) What defines an authority on the subject? (2) Who has the right to speak as an authority on a race or ethnicity? and (3) Who gets to decide who’s an authority or not?

LM, a commenter on A Question of Authority, made an interesting point:

Anyone has a right to speak; whether they’re an authority is a separate question.

Why does it matter who is speaking? The truth-value of a proposition is independent of its speaker.

If there are such things as truths about racism and what we call “race”, then these truths exist independently of who speaks about them and regardless of if anyone speaks about them at all. The real problem here is not who is speaking, but what is being said.

The problem is that most people outside the racial group being spoken about simply lack the racial knowledge specific about that group. Not only that, but many people who fit this category are unaware of the extent of their racial ignorance; they believe that they are knowledgeable. Kruger and Dunning (1999) published a psychology study titled, “Unskilled and unaware of it: how difficulties in recognizing one’s own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments” (PDF)(HTML). The study showed that the participants who were particularly incompetent in a particular subject or skill grossly over-estimated their competence in that subject or skill.

If we accept the hypothesis that people incompetent in a knowledge domain generally have inflated self-assessments with respect to their competence in that knowledge domain, and if we combine this with society’s expectation that white people are more competent and knowledgeable in general, then that white presumptuousness about race that feels all-too-common is an unsurprising result. Obviously, personally observing hundreds of white and black people shake hands does not give you access to the inner thoughts of non-whites with respect to handshaking preference; watching BET heavily does not make you especially knowledgeable about black culture; reading The Joy Luck Club does not mean you understand Chinese American culture; and even if you had studied race for over a dozen years, no white person—or even black person—is the spokesperson for black people. Unfortunately, many white people think that it’s that simple, that people of colour can be understood through prototyping, stereotyping, and generalization.

Like other subjects considered difficult, race and racism are complex subjects. Even if you want it to simplify it by embracing racial color blindness so that you don’t have to think about race, it doesn’t make race simple. Even if you want to simplify it by embracing multiculturalism and celebrating differences, it still doesn’t make race simple. It’s a lot more complicated than that, and there are a billion little things that cannot be generalized in addition to the few things that can be generalized that make up people’s racial experiences. It’s great to look for patterns, but be educated about rigorous empirical methods, because it’s not that simple. For example, personal observation is not a good way to draw conclusions about people outside your racial group.

Where does authority come from? Authority comes from knowledge.

Again, the truth of a proposition is independent of who the speaker is. The reason that academics are often authorities on specific types of knowledge is that they are often right, or at least they are generally more knowledgeable than everyone else. Somebody who has studied a specific subject (such as a scientific discipline) intensely for several years is going to be exposed to more knowledge about the topic than somebody who knows of the subject only through fictional portrayals on TV, for example.

My dad once commented that he thought that scientists were presumptuous, because they make scientific claims about evolution. He believed that his opinion that evolution is illogical (based on the false assumption that evolution is about moving from the primitive to the advanced) is as equally valid as that of a biologist’s. I thought that he was presumptuous for thinking that biology was that easy, that biologists spent years of advanced study without ever coming across his type of criticism, because they had never thought of it before or even debunked it in high school biology. Of course, when I suggested that he read an introductory book on the topic of evolution, he refused, believing that one does not have to study evolution to know that it’s crap.

You should always question authority, but if you find yourself dismissing the the claims of people who have studied a subject for years or lived an experience for years, believing that these views are not worth considering, you are the one who is presumptuous, not the “experts”.

Society confers a type of authority on those who are knowledgeable (generally). Although there are good reasons for conferring authority on to academics, authority is more about how society works than about truth per se. Knowledge and truth are more closely tied to one another, but what counts as “knowledge”?

Is personal experience a type of knowledge?

Yes, but personal experience is imperfect knowledge.

The hasty generalization is a fallacy, even if you are a person of colour. People of colour are individuals, and have a myriad of different racial, ethnic, and cultural identities intersecting with other identities, such as gender, sexual orientation, class, and nationality. In addition, there are people of colour who arrogant, stupid, and cunning enough to try to be the spokesperson for their racial or ethnic group, and there are many white people who will accept what they say uncritically.

The problem here is that sweeping generalizations about people are false even when they are about people of colour. (Imagine that!) People are not homogenous, and statistical analysis can be assumed to be necessary in population studies of people of colour as well. People of colour don’t literally live in a different world from white people which defies the laws of physics, statistics, and logic.

White people need to be critical of self-appointed spokespersons of colour, because generalizing from one instance to all instances was never an effective empirical method as far as generating truth is concerned. This should not be a racial issue, but it is, because of racialization.

Once again, the issue is not about deference to racial authority between whites and non-whites, but about racial truths versus racial falsities, racial knowledge versus racial ignorance. Often whites make false or misleading statements about a different racial group even when they have good intentions, but it is the wrongness that is the problem, not the fact that they said it. When the white woman told Tami that “any black person who saw it would be offended”, the statement itself is absurd, even if it was told by a black person to another black person who disagreed that it was offensive.

Similarly, there are non-whites like Michelle Malkin, Irshad Manji, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and my archenemy Chinese Canuck who often make generalizations from their personal experience to an entire group of people. While their personal experiences are of course valid, their generalizations are not. The problem is not who is doing the talking; it is what is being said.

Everyone has the right to speak. Whether you are knowledgeable or correct is a separate question.

Discussing “white identity” out of context perpetuates racism.

Although whiteness (contingent social construct) is invisible to the vast majority of white people (a contingent category of people), simply making whiteness explicit and visible is not necessarily antiracist. Making whiteness (contingent social construct) explicit does not in itself challenge the construct, but may instead strengthen it. Particularly, portraying the contingent social construct of whiteness as a necessary social construct reinforces racism.

White identity is defined by othering of people of colour.

The vast majority of white people (or persons with white privilege) are not consciously aware of the contingent social construct of whiteness, but they are very much aware of it subconsciously or implicitly. White people are implicitly aware of this contingent social construct, because it is constructed by calibrating whiteness as normal and othering people of colour. People of colour are considered “ethnic” and their culture is considered “cultural”, while “white people” and “white culture” are considered (implicitly) the negation of what people of colour supposedly represent. To even denote a people or cultural practise as “ethnic” suggests that there are people and cultural practises that are “not ethnic”, which is why the distinction is created in the first place.

In other words, the (implicit or explicit) social construct of whiteness works together with denoting people of colour as the Other, i.e., not of the national heritage, culture, or identity of “white”-majority nations. “White identity” is mainly a negative definition. When a person of white privilege addresses another person of white privilege, “white” is defined implicitly as not “blacks”, “Asians”, “minorities”, or “those people”. When a person of white privilege addresses a person of colour, “white” is defined implicitly as not “you people.”

Portraying whiteness (contingent social construct) as whiteness (necessary social construct) is racist.

Perceiving people of colour as having a “race” is the standard white narrative. Perceiving white people as having a “race” is more common with people of colour, but this perception is often based the recognition that people with white privilege have extra advantages. (For example, majoring in philosophy is sometimes considered very “white”, but this is based on the recognition that white people on average have a higher socio-economic status relative to people of colour within white-majority countries. When people say that majoring in philosophy is very “white”, it is not a statement about genetic differences in mental capabilities between “whites” and “non-whites”.) Hence, when people of colour are pointing out whiteness, they are not necessarily claiming that whiteness is something biological or that it is necessary to the fabric of reality.

Although making whiteness (contingent social construct) explicit may be subversive in that it usually makes people with white privilege uncomfortable, discussing “white identity” out of the context of white privilege and racism presents whiteness as a necessary (or natural) social construct. “White identity” is defined by othering people of colour, and a focus on whiteness that omits this aspect (from an antiracist perspective) reinforces the status quo, the idea that the white-versus-other divide has nothing to do with inequity. Hence, the act of making whiteness (contingent social construct) explicit but out-of-context (i.e., not as a criticism of racism and white privilege) perpetuates racism.

Whiteness is not a necessary social construct.

The term “whiteness” has at least two different meanings, which should not be confused with each other. One meaning of “whiteness” refers to the contingent social construct of whiteness; the other refers to the necessary social construct of whiteness. Whiteness (contingent social construct)—which can also be called and understood as whiteness (current social construct) for practical purposes—exists and is foundational to racism. However, there is no such thing as whiteness (necessary social construct). The social construct of whiteness is not necessary for society to exist. Whiteness is not a necessary truth; it is a merely a contingent truth. Race currently exists as a social construct, but it does not have to exist as a social construct.

(Obviously, racial color blindness and avoiding racial categorization does nothing to challenge the social construct of race, as it merely allows people unaffected by racism to deny that there is a problem. In addition, although the statement “race is not the problem, racism is” is true, this statement is still made within the narrative that only people of colour are raced or racialized, which is still another contingent truth. A better articulation that emphasizes the unnecessary racialization of people of colour over the idea that racializing people of colour is necessary would be: “racialized people are not the problem; racialization is.”)