Post-modern racialism

I do not consider myself to be a post-modern racist, for much of the same logic that I do not consider myself to be an indirect racist. According to Taylor, “Post-modernism here involves flattening difference, insisting on the unity of the human family and the declining significance of race, in ways that obscure the way various stratifying mechanisms continue to do their work” (Taylor Kindle Locations 1984-1986).  Being a biologist, I am in agreement with some of what post-modern racialism involves. Further, I am not sure if all of the aspects of post-modern racialism are bad. Taylor clearly states that the racialism he speaks of is not biological, since there is no biological basis for racialism. I do think that this fact should carry some weight though when it comes to ideologies based on “race”. For this reason when I think of races I may tend to “flatten difference, insisting on the unity of the human family”, because we are biologically one race/species. At the same time, I try my best to understand the significance of race in shaping our current institutions. While I am unaware of the significance of race in its entirety, I have learned/am learning the significance of race in providing people with their social location. Thus I do not decline the significance of race or attempt to obscure the underlying social mechanisms that lead/contribute to social inequalities based on race even though I do believe that we should all be treated equally.

In my opinion, Taylor’s ideas become too convoluted for me to fully assess whether I think he would classify me as a post-modern racist or not, and depending on whether I have interpreted him correctly, whether I agree or disagree with his idea of post-modern racialism. Earlier in the reading Taylor laid out race-thinking as “a way of assigning generic meaning to human bodies and bloodlines” (Kindle Locations 579-580). He then went through chapter two and discussed how race is permeated with different social categories such as socioeconomic status, ethnicity and gender. Now in chapter three, my interpretation of Taylor’s “post-modern race” focuses almost entirely on the “patterns of advantage and disadvantage” (Kindle Locations 2086-2090). Where being a “multiculturalist, eager to celebrate different foods and holidays and dances” (Kindle Locations 2086-2090), makes someone in effect a racist. I may be misinterpreting Taylor’s idea here, and perhaps he only means that being a multiculturalist in congruence with denying the role that race can have in varying social institutions makes one a post-modern racist. However I feel that more of an emphasis on this disregard and less of a condemnation of integrating race-thinking with other social categories would have made his argument more clear. As Taylor eventually says, “race doesn’t do its work alone” (Kindle Locations 2278-2279). Thus, with my current understanding, I accept the main notion of post-modern racialism but only if it is in conjunction with the merger-thesis.