Edward Chang

Dr. Jared Bishop

September 16, 2015

Public Speaking

Outline Neoracism
1) Introduction
a) Good afternoon to you all. My name is Eddie Chang and Ill let you in on a little
secret. I hate my last name. Chang.
i) What do you think about when you hear that word? Replace the a in
Chang with an i and we can go on and on with racist jokes. You hear my
first name, Eddie, and youd be first inclined to think about Eddie Murphy
or Eddie Bauer or maybe even Prince Edward Island in Canada.
(1) You can already insinuate certain characteristics about me because of my
last name and discerning the fact that Im Asian leads to many
assumptions about those certain characteristics.
b) Those listening may think that Im going to talk about racism because it is
something that has affected the lives of people like me, but its not the good ol
normal racism Im perplexed with. To be honest, at this school, I dont receive
any cruel discrimination or even think about it in my daily life. Its just there.
However, I have begun to note a different mindset in the racial category. In the
changing dynamic world of today, I am concerned with neo-racism.
i) Neo-racism whats that? It, without a doubt, sounds like futuristic type
racism, but it doesnt deal with the races that we all are familiar with on a dayto-day basis. Racism, as a word and ideology, has existed for numerous
centuries and many of us would like to assume that racism or discrimination
has existed for as long as humans have existed. However, in the age of today,
we have given birth to another form of racism, alongside its predecessor, that
not only concerns itself with races, but also other parts of our daily lives that
change with us every passing day.
2) Body
a) Racism, not only exists as a theoretical phenomenon, but also as a truly social and
historical one. With racism we have forms of violence, contempt, intolerance,
humiliation, and exploitation surrounding the stigma of others such as name, skin
color, or religious practices. It arose first from the mimicry of scientific discourse
in alluding that there is visible or biological evidence to characterize racist
doctrines as truth and fact. A certain race of individuals believed it to be
scientifically posited that one was superior than the other and used demagogic
theoretical elaborations for their benefit, disparaging the other race carrying those
stigmata across their physical being.
i) The existence of slavery has marked itself in many countries history and the
embodiment of slavery is the easiest indicator of the racism were used to.
ii) In our age of modern education, we look back at history and condemn these
quack scientific assumptions, knowing that they were intentionally mandated.
We establish antiracist beliefs in the hopes that we can be appreciative of all
races rather than being close-minded peers. Somewhere along the lines of

history, we went from being blatant prejudiced beings to prejudiced beings

that isolated the idea of discrimination and circumvented it as much as
possible.
b) However, as Etienne Balibar noted, What seems to pose a problem here is not
the fact of racism, as I have already pointed outpractice being a fairly sure
criterion (if we do not allow ourselves to be deceived by the denials of racism
which we meet among large sections of the political class in particular, which
only thereby betrays the complacency and blindness of that groupbut
determining to what extent the relative novelty of the language is expressing a
new and lasting articulation of social practices and collective representations,
academic doctrines and political movements (Balibar 20)
i) With the degradation of normal racism, there then are cultural patterns and
phenomena that are created from the antiracist movements and racist
movements in their own sense.
(1) In the literal sense, yes, we have birthed a certain culture from the
intolerant actions that once were such as the popularity of
BlackPeopleTwitter humor or the idea that white people cant dance or
that Asian people cannot drive. I mean Im not going to deny the last
statement entirely, other than me being the anomaly of course. Although,
these cultural stereotypes are not the normal, biological racist forms from
before, they were formed by chance moments in cultural development and
have become a part of our daily culture today. In this sense, racism birthed
its own subsector of what we call culture. This could be positive or
negative, in how one could perceive these social ideas, but what isnt
realized is that culture can also function like ones nature. It can have the
particular function of locking individuals and groups into a genealogy, into
a determination that is immutable and intangible in origin. However, this
is not the main interpretation of neo-racism.
ii) Balibar outlines certain consequences of the new neo-racism, which are the
two turn-about effects. We first realize that the behavior of individuals and
their aptitudes cannot be explained in terms of their blood or even their genes,
but are the result of their belonging to historical cultures. This is what we
have somewhat noted before.
(1) On the other hand, the second turn-about effect is this, if insurmountable
cultural difference is our true natural milieu, the atmosphere
indispensable to us if we are to breathe the air of history, then the abolition
of that difference will necessarily give rise to defensive reactions,
interethnic conflicts and a general rise in aggressiveness.
(a) This can be seen as a displacement of the problematic. We go from the
theory of races or the struggle between races in human history,
whether based on biological or psychological principles, to a theory of
race relations within society.
(i) For example, if you want to TRULY avoid racism TODAY, you
have to avoid that abstract anti-racism, such as Black Lives
Matter movement, which fails to grasp the psychological and
sociological laws of human population movements, rather you

must respect the tolerance thresholds, maintain cultural

distances or act as if every single individuals are the exclusive
bearers of a single culture. The idea that there is a proper antiracism shows the growing divide between cultures or people,
rather than races on a metaphysical level. Its at this point that
Balibar refers to the differentialist/neo-racism as a meta-racism.
1. For example, French racist doctrines have included forms of
the doctrines of Aryanism, anthropometry and biological
geneticism, but the true French race ideology, rather, is the
idea that the culture of the land of the Rights of Man has been
entrusted with a universal mission to educate the human race.
This mission has corresponded with the practice of assimilating
dominated populations and a later need to differentiate or rank
individuals or groups in terms of their aptitude foror
resistance toassimilation. It was this simultaneously crushing
form of exclusion/inclusion which was deployed in the process
of colonization and the strictly French variant of the White
mans burden.
(2) What then comes from the second turn-about effect, if we can return to it,
is the division of historical cultures into two main groups, the ones
assumed to be universalistic and progressive, and he other supposed
irremediably particularistic and primitive. A structure of inequalities,
formed by the main difference between cultures, will be reproduced in an
industrialized, formally educated society that is increasingly
internationalized an open to the world.
(a) This sounds very progressive and nice, but we can start to see the
formation of a new hierarchic theme: the ideology that the cultures
supposed implicitly superior are those which appreciate and promote
individual enterprise, social and political individualism, as against
those which inhibit these things (spirit of community). Those other
cultures, that may not instill the belief of the spirit of community, may
be seen as obstacles in the acquisition of culture and in the apparent,
but not so real, undermining of racism.
iii) Neo-racism, may be nothing more than a transitional ideological formation,
that will give way to, to a greater or lesser degree, an aspect of psychological
assessment of intellectual aptitudes and dispositions to normal social life,
and a battery of cognitive, sociopsychological and statistical sciences used to
measure, select, and monitor a balance between hereditary and environmental
factors. A post-racism, in other words.
c) Conclusion
i) We, although we have engaged in prophylactic action against racial
discrimination, have created our own form of racism: neo-racism. Through
anti-racist movements and anthropological culturalism, a new hierarchy forms
through the lines and although neo-racism isnt the revolution we all thought it
would be to abolish racism itself, it will affect the way we think and interact
with those around us, culturally and socially. In an age where we have a

violent desire for immediate knowledge of social relations and the propensity
to misrecognize those true social relations, we must be wary of newly formed
metaphysics between the ways we view each other.