“Cultural Racism”: Biology and Culture in Racist Thought
Lawrence Blum
Abstract
Social scientists in the US have documented a significant decline in the degree to which whites will acknowledge belief in the biological inferiority of blacks, a bedrock belief underpinning the Segregation system.For example a 1997 poll found that only 10% of whites said that "most blacks have less in-born ability to learn" 1 However, social scientists have also documented a continued willingness of whites to attribute negative characteristics to blacks, but to view those characteristics as cultural, rather than biological, in character.Lawrence Bobo and Camille Charles note that between half and of US whites still express negative stereotyping of blacks and Latinos.But "rather than viewing blacks as less intelligent, one might assert that they tend to be lazy and lack motivation, or that their group subculture is deficient." 2Thinking about a group's alleged deficiencies in terms of biological characteristics would generally be regarded as quite different from thinking about them in terms of cultural characteristics.In this regard, the trend Bobo and Charles note can be seen as an important shift in the way blacks are regarded by whites.Yet some scholars view "culturalism" (as I will call it) as reflecting only a new way of talking about racial groups, not a form of thinking significantly distinct from the earlier attributions of genetic inferiority. 3 In this understanding the culturalist view in question has also been called "cultural racism."1 The figure was 27% in 1977, so it has continued to decline with increased distance from the Segregation era.