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Motivated by a Manifold market on whether racism is bad [1], I thought it might be profitable to argue the opposite. Alas, having drafted my argument, I don't think it is appropriate to post in a place where my ID is tied to my real name. So here is an argument, advocatus diaboli:
Racism is just the expression of an ingroup bias for one's ethnic group, like an ingroup bias for one's own family. What I discovered living in a foreign culture is that people tend to have an ingroup bias to their own ethno-cultural group, and Westerners call this racism. It is easier to communicate with people of shared language, and people of the same cultural background will have shared interests. People of shared ethnic group are more likely to share values, and more likely to agree on topics political and personal. This isn't even a conscious thing: in my experience people of a shared ethnic group are even more likely to make strong eye contact with each other.
The bias is similar to how (most) people have an ingroup bias for their own family: I don't see my siblings often, but when we meet we connect strongly, and discover inadvertently that we face similar challenges and overcame them in similar ways. If my sibling confesses to me of a misdemeanor, I am not likely to hold it against them, and if they confessed to me a felony I'm not sure I would report them. If they are in need, I would help them with minimal complaint, and although we disagree vehemently in politics, we still love each other. My family is my ingroup. This is not a bad thing, it is just the way things are.
Now at the social level, that ingroup bias for family has its drawbacks: nepotism is common and harms society as a whole, and as I would be willing to help my sibiling get away with a crime, so does that closing of ranks around family horrific enable horrific acts, domestically, in the wider society, and even at the level of public policy and the economy. However, on balance the ingroup bias for family is a great thing (there is a reason why evolution has selected for it!). People take care of each other, they love each other, loneliness is diminished, and we trust each other more.
This is also what I see as an outsider in the foreign culture: people take care of each other, they love each other, they find companionship with each other, and they trust each other more because they share ethnic and cultural bonds. And while those bonds disadvantage me as a foreigner in their society, they have provided an evolutionary advantage, and I can't deny envying them life in the hamlet their forefathers made.
[1] https://manifold.markets/levifinkelstein/is-racism-bad
Pretty much all legitimate justifications for racism rely on inaccurate proxies for other things we actually care about. I think you can make arguments in favor of using it in the absence of better knowledge, but once more direct signals have been acquired the race no longer serves a useful purpose.
Since I am white and was raised by white parents among mostly other white people, I can reasonably expect that the average white person is more likely to be similar to me than the average black person. We'll be more likely to have similar cultural knowledge, values, habits, etc. But my black neighbor who I actually know and happens to be a christian pastor has way more in common with me than the average white Californian.
In the past race was a very strong proxy for nationality, culture, and loyalty. In modern times it is a weak signal unless you live in a predominantly monoethnic country.
This is true in principle, but in practice, you will never get enough of more direct signals to completely discount the priors coming from the race, and this is if you even get a chance to collect more direct signal at all: collecting signal itself is not free, you cannot run background checks on every passerby on the street.
The race is a sort of highly universal prior, and it carries immense amount of residual predictive value even after controlling for more direct predictors.
Of what? If I meet a black pathologist, knowing that they're a pathologist tells me much more about them than knowing that they're black.
Likewise, if I see a white junkie, knowing that they're a junkie tells me much more about them than knowing that they're white.
By “residual value after controlling for other predictors”, I meant something like, if you have two pathologists, one of them being black tells you something additional on top of the fact of him being a pathologist, eg. that they are likely to be less competent at their job than their white counterpart.
Sure, it tells you something "extra", but it's something both immoral and, while perhaps it might in a very localized way be a net benefit in terms of information gain, it's long-term super unhealthy and harmful. I mean, if we're leaving the immoral part to the side and talking about pure utility, making a habit of utilizing those residual values (even assuming they are reliable) is problematic both for you and for society both in the medium to long term. Why? I don't think I need to explain the societal part, as societally accepted racism even when used as a background process rather than a primary process is a significant evil and limits overall prosperity and tends to hinder interpersonal and economic interactions in disproportionate ways - but personally there's harm too. Racism has such a virulent and problematic history that I don't think we can rely on ourselves to "limit" racism to merely residual value only. It's a pipe dream. Our brains simply don't work that way.
There is little substance in your comment other than repeatedly claiming that racism is bad because it’s immoral, and it’s immoral because it’s evil, and it’s evil, because it’s problematic. If taking race into account when making consequential decisions about reality is considered racist, even if we only do it to the statistically justified extent, then I simply don’t agree about it being gravely immoral, because we do the exact same thing with hundreds of other characteristics all the time without an ounce of queasiness, eg. cultural origin, or education history, or density of facial tattoos, or clothing worn.
Your best argument here is where you claim that it’s too easy to assign more weight to this piece of evidence than it is actually warranted. This is true, but this is also true about other characteristics, discriminating based on such does not get such a privileged treatment, so why should I care much?
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