From a 2020 interview:
Jennifer Grossman [03:20]: What do people mean when they talk about structural racism? What is sort of the origin of that even terminology comes from and what is what’s your perspective on it? What does it mean?
Stephen Hicks: Yes, well, we’ll start with the racism itself, which is an intellectual and a moral abomination. It’s a kind of primitive cognition, and in many cases it is a problem of self-esteem.
Racism is a kind of collectivism where you group people into what you take to be racial groups and think that there are significant normative differences between the racial groups, that some are cognitively superior and some are morally or culturally superior. And sometimes that can spill over into the idea that they should have different political standings, and so forth. All of that is wrong and corrupt.
We are first and foremost individuals. The most important things about us are our own beliefs, that we’ve chosen for ourselves, our own goals, our character, our habits. So there’s an obvious dehumanization that’s built into any sort of racism that says the first and most important thing about you is some collective group membership and I’m going to treat you on the basis of that. That’s an injustice. We are individuals, and first and foremost we should be treated as individuals.
There are issues, of course, about whether racial categorizations are real or not. I don’t think that’s a philosophical issue. No. When we perceive ourselves, we can see differences in hues, and sometimes in facial structures. And we wonder about the right way to categorize those things when we’re children. And very quickly, though, I think that becomes a scientific issue to be sorted out by people who are geneticists and biologists, and so forth.
But I think from a philosophical perspective, it’s very clear—in terms of what philosophy offers—that you are a rational being, that you need to think for yourself, that you need to figure out the way the world works, that you need to work on your character, that you should respect other people’s rights—all of those things are general and universal to all to all human beings. So I, for the years that I’ve thought about this, I don’t see any philosophical significance in any sort of racial categorization.
The way I think about it sometimes is: a lot of people will focus on issues of intelligence differences. And one of the things that should be obvious is that people of all races can be more or less intelligent. And that there’s something suspect about someone who spends a lot of time worrying about racial differences in intelligence. But at the same time, suppose we were to take someone we all agree was a super-smart guy, like Albert Einstein. Suppose, scientifically, we were able to prove that Albert Einstein is exactly 2.3 times more intelligent than I, Stephen Hicks, am. What would the significance of that be? Would that mean he gets to vote two times and only get to vote one time, or that somehow he has different virtue character traits, and so forth? All that would be completely irrelevant.
So now racism. This is all by way of preamble to your question about all of the terminology surrounding the topic, and some of it is legitimate, some of it, of course, is suspect. And some of it is a matter of smuggling in agendas into an already fraught, ideological concept.
So, it’s clear that one kind of racism is just individuals having beliefs about other individuals and wanting to categorize them based on racial categorization differences. So we can talk about racism at an individual level. And I think that’s the most important and prevalent version of that.
But we also know that historically, racial differences have been used among institutions. Some businesses have had formal segregation policies that were not forced upon them by legal frameworks, [for example] separate rooms for people of different racial categories, and so on. We also know that there has been legal racism where there are different laws for different races, and so on. So I think there is some legitimacy to the concept of institutional racism: that is to say, if you have an institution—a business institution, a religious institution, a sporting association, which is a kind of institution, or a government, which is a kind of institution—if they have as part of their formal policy and their formal practice racism built into them, then that’s an institutional racism. And it’s wrong, right? So it should be something that that we fight against and when we should have cause common cause with people—even if they have different philosophical understandings and solutions and so on—to form strategic alliances for eliminating any form of racism that are there.
Structural racism, I think, is a more suspect concept, because in all of my readings, that concept comes out of certain kinds of sociologies that tend not to see people as individuals. There’s lots of historical sociology, going back to Comte and Marx in the 19th century, that tends to see individuals not as real but as formed by the social structures into which they are born. And those structures tend to eliminate agency. Exactly what these structures are and how they operate and how they undermine or override or shape us—is all quite mysterious, and I don’t think any of that is philosophically true or sociologically true.
But the people who are now—several generations later—working within those sociological traditions will use a label like structural racism. And they don’t typically mean formal rules or practices by institutions. They do mean this more shadowy, semi-Hegelian, semi-Comtean, and semi-Marxist kind of labeling. And I don’t think that’s a legitimate label.
Now, I do have to be open: If there is some version of structural racism that means something different than legal racism or a formal institutions having a policy or practice—I’m open to that argument. But I haven’t seen it. I’ve only seen it coming from suspect philosophical traditions.
The full interview is here:
Related: Thomas Sowell’s “Affirmative Action: A Worldwide Disaster,” in the Philosophers Explained series.