@Setanta,
Setanta wrote:
Many years ago, while reading more deeply into American history, I was often dismayed by the evidence of a deeply ingrained racism in our society. Many years after, I saw the evidence that it is the same in other cultures. That did not lessen my dismay. For example, I have always admired Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., our 26th president. I never thought I'd like him personally, but I admired his performance in office--that is, until in a fit of pique against Taft, he ran as a third candidate in 1912, and thereby handed the White House to Woodrow Wilson, who was without any doubt a confirmed racist of the Lilly White variety.
But then I read a biography of Margaret Sanger, which alleged that Roosevelt had described her as a race traitor. I was able to confirm this at a university library by reading earlier biographies of Roosevelt in which the authors had no qualms about repeating his remark. Roosevelt thoroughly embraced the concept of "the White Man's burden" (see the poem by Kipling). To Roosevelt, Sanger was a race traitor for promoting birth control--when as far as he was concerned, the world needed as many white babies as possible so that they could one day grow up and regulate the lives of the muddle-headed brown and yellow and black babies.
You're never going to find any shortage of racism and other forms of collectivism, because that is how simplistic minds work. People look at a cloud and think about it as a cloud and not as a system of countless individual water molecules interacting with each other.
It takes a rigorous, intelligent mind to critically reflect on the assumption of group unity, homogeneity, and so forth. People long for a simpler world view for the sake of mental expedience and racism, like nationalism, sexism, etc. gives them that false-yet-comforting clarity. It is so comforting that they fight against the prospect of having to acknowledge that there are individuals with individual lives that make up what they perceive as the 'race,' nation,' or other collective.
The idea of needing more or less babies of any category based on categorical assumptions is in itself a departure from individualism. Fortunately, we now have the concept of culture as a way of understanding collective behaviors and identities as being an interface between humans and their collective perceptions of each other, but even culture has become racialized and collectivized by the same mindset that reduces individuals to races for the sake of simplicity and clarity, however false.
Still, once we start focusing on the individual level, we still see that individuals are subject to certain cultural factors more than others not because of something inherent or genetic about their bodies, but because of how they are socially situated. E.g. we can't assume that poor people will want access to high intellectual achievement when given the opportunity even though there is nothing biological preventing them from striving to focus their minds and make the necessary sacrifices. They might just develop different priorities based on enculturated perceptions of what's meaningful and important vs. what isn't, and to them having access to cultural wealth historically reserved for those allowed in 'the Ivory Tower,' isn't important as having access to the social status, money, and other privileges that come as fringe benefits to being an academic intellectual.
So, yes, racism is disappointing as are other forms of collectivist thinking/projection, including nationalism, but the question is whether you can imagine one nation, class, race, ethnic-region, or other category as being less collectivist/racist without automatically applying the very collective/racist gaze you're trying to be critical of.
