J. C. liked me on his truck because I worked hard. The other climbers at Urban Foresters did too, but they only got me when he didn't show up. You didn't mess with J. C. The first day we were out together he tied in, climbed up, dropped the branches and the trunk, then sat in the truck as I dragged every last piece of the tree through the chipper. I didn't say a word as he drove us back to the yard; he didn't have to.

A couple of weeks later, while we were eating lunch in the cab of the truck, he saw fit to teach me a different lesson. ‘Do you know the difference between a black person and a nigger?’ I looked down at my sandwich as he continued. ‘One acts white. The other goes around wearing jerseys and sagging his pants and stupid shit like that.’

J. C. wore his commitment to white supremacy on his sleeves, or more accurately, where his sleeves might have gone. When J. C. wore a tank-top, which he always did, he proudly sported images of half-naked, hooded women superimposed on swastikas. They flanked a large devil inked across his chest. I'm not sure how much of the ink came from behind prison walls. But I knew J. C. spent his formative years serving a ten-year sentence for something having to do with meth. One of the other guys told me J. C. once beat another inmate within inches of death on orders from the Aryan leadership.

The guys also said that J. C. took a shit at work each morning ’cause his old lady wouldn't let him stink up the bathroom at home. I assumed they meant his wife, but come to find out he wasn't married. The mother of his daughter let him live in the house, provided he didn't mess it up.

* * *

These are troubling times. Police are (still) dropping black bodies in the streets, caught on video, with stunning regularity. Even when charges have been brought, convictions have not. Wealth and health inequalities persist; skin colour continues to profoundly shape opportunity in the United States, despite the fact of a black president. Our jails and prisons are packed with black and brown bodies, and the hope for criminal justice reform has itself taken a beating. All manner of protests – from citizens in the streets to quarterbacks taking knees – are meant to call attention to the fact that black lives matter. Meanwhile, millions of voters helped to elect a president endorsed by the KKK and advised by a leader of the ‘alt-right’.

It's fair to say that racism is on the collective conscious. But it's also fair to say that not everyone agrees about how to tackle it or even what, precisely, it is. We can all agree (I hope!) that J. C. is racist, and so was the ‘lesson’ he sought to impart that lunch hour. But we may not all agree about why. There are two main views on the matter: the moral view and the political view. A close look, however, reveals a need for fresh thinking about what makes something racist and what's to be done about it.

The moral view has it that racism is primarily a matter of individuals’ attitudes. J. C. is racist because he believes that black people are inferior, hates and disrespects them; his ‘lesson’ was racist because it stemmed from these attitudes. This view is attractive, in large part, because it seems well equipped to account for our moral condemnation of racist people and conduct. J. C.’s jeremiad was wrong for the straightforward reason that it stemmed from objectionable attitudes.

On the political view, by contrast, racism is primarily a matter of systematic oppression of a racial group by the institutions that structure society. Racism stems from racially targeted injustices in the housing sector, education, the criminal justice system, and so on. On this view, J. C. and his ‘lesson’ are racist because they stem from attitudes that are inculcated by and implicated in a system of unjust social relations.

It's less straightforward to trace what's morally troubling about J. C. and his ‘lesson’ to unjust social structures. For one thing, some people take the view that a social structure, itself, is unjust just in case relevant characteristics can be traced back to the unjust actions and attitudes of individuals. To adapt a familiar slogan: banks don't discriminate, bankers do. The institution sees only green, it's the employees who see black and white. A second issue has to do with the apparent connection between immorality and blameworthiness. If we explain what's wrong with J. C.’s ‘lesson’ in terms of a morally corrupt social context that inculcated abhorrent beliefs, we seem to be in danger of severing the tie between J. C.’s conduct and his agency. We seem to threaten the appropriateness of blaming him for what he did. He comes to look like an innocent cog in a racist machine.

Difficulty accounting for the immorality of racism appears to be a weakness of the political view. But it has its advantages. Chief among these is its ability easily to account for the scope and depth of the problem. Racism touches our lives in myriad ways. It co-opts our attitudes, shaping our minds subtly and, oftentimes, unnoticed. It taints our relations with each other and with our institutions. It influences how people see themselves and their place in society. In contrast to the moral view, the political view puts its focus squarely on the large-scale explanations of these realities, namely, the institutions that structure society. In doing so, and this is a further reason in its favour, it more readily points the way to widespread change. It is, thus, the more pragmatic alternative.

I don't want to give the impression that leading philosophical analyses of racism are in complete disagreement. It would be a mistake to deny the reality of institutional racism or the continued existence of individual racists, like J. C. The interesting disagreement between proponents of the moral view and proponents of the political view isn't about the phenomena to be explained, but rather about where the explanatory buck stops.

There may be those who deny institutional racism altogether and claim that all instances of racism, properly so called, are a matter of individual attitudes. But this extreme version of the moral view is obviously problematic. To begin with, it often functions as an evasion: ‘That joke wasn't racist because I don't hate black people.’ The opacity of the human heart serves as a handy shield against moral condemnation. The very same considerations that speak in favour of the moral view can function as a barrier to effective change. ‘I don't know any fellow cops who are racist.’ It's as if racist social institutions sprang up out of the social weeds all on their own and are maintained by the rains of natural fortune.

A more sophisticated moral view begins with the individual and his racist beliefs and intentions, but it doesn't stop there. It recognizes the role racist attitudes have played in society's development. To borrow a metaphor from J. L. A. Garcia, institutional racism results when the hearts and minds of individual racists infect the fabric of society. A bank becomes racist when its executive's beliefs about the inferiority of black people and antipathy towards them lead him to enact racist policies. And once in place, racist policies and practices, in turn, infect the hearts and minds of the individuals they touch. Those who enact racist policies may themselves come to believe in the inferiority of the people they target. It's a vicious cycle.

The political view also comes in a crude version. There are those who claim that ‘real racists’ are largely a relic of the past; people just don't harbour racist attitudes anymore. J. C., on this view, is an oddity, a creature from another time and place. But life experience should be enough to show that this is too simplistic. Even if the vast majority of the time people adhere to socially acceptable ways of interacting with each other, there are contexts in which people feel more comfortable letting their true racist selves shine through. They tell racist jokes when not in mixed company, share their concern about a daughter's boyfriend in hushed tones. They tweet racist memes and encourage violence against black protesters at political rallies. Sometimes people are caught in the act; sometimes they're called out. But many times they aren't. And many times their conduct speaks for itself. They veil their discrimination with thin excuses: ‘Other candidates for the job were a better fit with what we're looking for.’ Denying the existence of ‘real racists’ today can seem like yet another privilege of those who aren't themselves the objects of discrimination.

A sophisticated political view recognizes the presence of ‘real racists’ but still insists that the explanation of racism lies, ultimately, at the doorsteps of our institutions. Through our participation in a racist society, structured by racist institutions, people (all of us) come to have certain racist beliefs and intentions. But this is mostly a matter of our being unwittingly corrupted by the overarching racist social structures. Sure, some people take to racism with gusto. But even this is explicable in terms of their upbringing and environment; it implicates the institution of family and highlights the failures of the educational, economic and legal systems.

The sophisticated moral view and the sophisticated political view differ, mainly, with regard to explanatory priority and practical emphasis. On the moral view, institutional racism is real, but the buck stops with individuals. Ultimately, even systemic change requires that we change hearts and minds – banks don't discriminate, unless individual bankers do. The political view claims the reverse. It's because of the racist structure of social institutions that people have racist beliefs and intentions in the first place, and eradicating (or mitigating) racism is a matter of restructuring the scaffolding on which society is built. Only by changing racist policies and practices will we change the hearts and minds of individual racists.

Both views have something going for them. But they can't both be right. As with the chicken and egg, we seem to face a choice about which is primary: attitudes or institutions?

It is better, I think, to reject the question. Neither attitudes nor institutions are primary in the ways the moral or political views suppose. We need to approach thinking about racism in a different way. This comes out more clearly when we consider some of the claims made by a leading contemporary voice on race.

* * *

In his memoir, Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates claims that ‘race is the child of racism, not the father’. There is truth in these words. But neither the moral nor the political view is up to the task of untangling this sordid family tree. The moral view analyses racism in terms of attitudes that already appeal to race – for example, beliefs about black people. The political view analyses racism in terms of institutional oppression of a particular group of people on the basis of their racial designation. In both cases, we don't have racism until we have race. They get it backwards.

The truth in Coates's claim is that race is a concept invented for the purpose of justifying domination of certain human beings by others. The oppression was already there; it became racialized when the bodies of its victims were cited as justification.

Consider American slavery. As Barbara J. Fields details in ‘Slavery, Race and Ideology in the United States of America’ (New Left Review 1.181 (1990), 95–118), the driving forces behind the eventual enslavement of Africans in America were economic. Africans were not the first people exploited for labour in the American colonies, but they quickly became the most profitable. The origins of the institution had nothing to do with race, and everything to do with the history of people, markets and trade. It also had something to do with ideas. America was founded on the notion of liberty and equality for all. This grew out of long political struggles in Europe, in which African people did not take part. But when it came time to square the reality of everyday life with the aspirations of revolutionary rhetoric, something had to give. Those in power in the colonies needed a justification for treating one group of people in a manner that their professed principles deemed immoral. Their response was to dehumanize people of African descent. They created a new race – ’black’ people – and with it a moral and political hierarchy. Thus was white supremacy born.

This is not to say that white supremacy has its exclusive origin in America. There were other European colonial adventures, and European thinkers classified people differently (and, at times, hierarchically) depending on their continental and cultural origins. Nor is it to insist that there was no notion of English superiority over Africans prior to the development of the institution of African slavery in the American colonies. And it isn't to forget the impact of white supremacy on people native to the Americas, among others. But it is to claim that white supremacy was, generally, cooked up according to much the same recipe: begin with the human drive to dominate, add in a social hierarchy, include a pinch of idealistic vision, a whiff of hypocrisy, and the need for justification will rest on readily apparent differences in what people look like.

Importantly, the racialization of oppression – the birth of racism – derives neither primarily from individuals’ attitudes nor from social institutions. It comes from both at once. The system of oppressing people for labour (including Africans) in America predated the racialized justifications of it that are now so familiar; the same is true of antipathy towards the oppressed (whatever their skin tone or continental origin) who were believed inferior. Early American colonists worked English indentured servants to death and traded them like chattels. Even free English colonists who didn't own slaves or servants looked down upon them because they lacked independence. It was from this soil that racism bloomed in America.

Key to an adequate understanding of racism is an adequate understanding of how existing practices are reinterpreted, how they are given new meaning in the service of justifying the exploits of those in power. Here we can learn from the genealogical approach of Friedrich Nietzsche. Consider, for instance, what he says about punishment in On the Genealogy of Morality. He counsels us to keep in mind the distinction between the practice of punishment – the procedures by which it is carried out – and its meaning – the purpose these procedures are supposed to serve. Attempts to justify the institution of criminal punishment by appeal to a single purpose, such as retribution or deterrence, ignore the fact that the institution is born of ancient procedures that have been repeatedly reinterpreted. The poor thief had no way of compensating for what he stole, except by providing the rich and powerful with the pleasure of making him suffer. Eventually, it came to be said that he deserved to suffer; his pain was justified as a means to restoring moral order. Then it was said that the spectacle of his suffering would serve as a lesson to others, making it unthinkable for them to commit the same offence.

According to Nietzsche, there's no one true purpose that justifies criminal punishment. Rather, this institution is, at any given time, a tangled rope formed of various strands, knotted together in various times and places to serve the various aims of the powerful actors on the stage of human history. The same goes for all historical features of our world. At different times, different groups have held power. And each one has left its mark. Human society is a vestige of human history – an intricately woven one at that. The task of the genealogist is to unravel our shared notions and reveal what has gone into weaving them. The only constants are the drive to dominate and the dominion of the dominant. We take certain truths to be self-evident. But just as the winner writes history, the powerful confer justifications.

And so it is with race-based attitudes and practices in America. Those in power responded to the need to justify a peculiar institution by inventing a distinction between people. Dark skin, broad noses and tightly curled hair were the marks of those who were ‘black’ – that is, not ‘white’. Once made, this distinction was available as a means of justifying the practices and attitudes already in place. The belief that certain people were inferior had its origins in the observation that they were unfree. But it came to be the belief that this was so because of their race, and this belief justified their subjugation at the hands of those who were superior – now, because they were ‘white’. To be clear, the subjugation came first, with the justification arriving late on the scene. But it was the latter that came to dominate the narrative.

These reflections support a view of racism that is distinct from the moral and political views in two ways. First, it is essentially historical. It denies the analytical approach that seeks to identify necessary and sufficient conditions for application of a given concept. Racism, on this genealogical view, is properly understood in terms of the historical interweaving of individual attitudes, social institutions and human conceptual ingenuity. Racist attitudes and racist social structures developed in tandem from earlier attitudes and structures marked by the drive to dominate and the dominion of the dominant. Pre-racial oppressive attitudes and institutions evolved into racialized ones once they could take aim at victims conceptualized in terms of race. The roles of oppressor and oppressed were thus reinterpreted in racial terms. ‘White’ people – which is to say, those in power – justified their oppression of ‘black’ people on racial grounds. And these grounds were invented to do just that.

Second, on the genealogical view the buck stops neither with individual attitudes nor with basic social institutions. Rather, both have an irreducible role to play. The existence of pre-racial oppressive social institutions, in part, explains the development of the relevant attitudes. Beliefs about the inferiority of certain races and antipathy towards members of those races were cultivated in order to justify certain institutional practices – for example, African slavery in the American colonies. And those institutions, now justified in racial terms, served also to inculcate and buttress racist attitudes. At the same time, pre-racialized beliefs about the inferiority of the oppressed and antipathy towards them played a role in the development and maintenance of the relevant social structures. Even before race justified slavery, inferiority and antipathy on other grounds did. And the racialized versions of these attitudes explain the maintenance and further development of the racist institutions they were supposed to justify. African slavery evolved into Jim Crow and, eventually, the ‘colour blind’ racial injustices that characterize contemporary America, an evolution propelled forward, at least in part, by the racist attitudes of individuals.

* * *

The genealogical view has a practical upshot connected to another aspect of Coates's thought. At various places, he compares racism to a natural force, like a typhoon. This has struck some as misguided. It's too much gloom and doom. He should profess a more hopeful vision, they say, or at least pay due recognition to the fact that racism, originated and maintained through human effort, is under our control. We can change our racist ways, but we can't stop the rain.

I think Coates is right not to soften his rhetoric on this point. The genealogical view helps us to see why. If racism is tied to a natural human tendency to dominate, then even if we rid ourselves of it, we might wonder what form of domination will take its place. And given the way racism has become so tightly woven into the moral and political fabric of society, it can seem to take on a life of its own. This is closely connected to one of the apparent virtues of the political view – its pragmatic advantage. But we can see that the genealogical view has an edge even here. It has something to say, a cautionary message, about the aspiration for and possibility of a ‘post-racial’ society.

One attraction of the political view is its focus on the large-scale, enmeshed and deeply suffocating aspects of our racist society. Racist individuals do damage, but racist basic social institutions wreak havoc. No one escapes unscathed. Our basic institutions don't just govern our social interactions and police our conduct, they shape our hearts and minds. Even those who can be reasonably secure that they – because ‘white’ – won't succumb to racism's dragnet, are caged by it all the same. As James Baldwin pointed out over a half-century ago in The Fire Next Time, the lie of race has imprisoned the minds of ‘white’ people, blinded us from reality. Even those who know better can find it difficult, at the very least jarring, to shake the chains.

So there is wisdom in the call to combat racism by targeting the institutions that embody it. But it would be folly to think this means that combating racism doesn't also require targeting the hearts and minds of individuals. Who constructed the institutions in the first place? And who keeps them going? Fair treatment of mortgage applications will not come about if fair-minded people aren't reviewing them. This is the truth in the infection metaphor invoked by proponents of the moral view. Racist institutions are infected by the racist attitudes of the people who found and maintain them. The genealogical view holds that pre-racial institutions evolved into racist ones; this didn't happen all on its own. It took human intervention, motivated by human beliefs and antipathy.

Just as pre-racial institutions came to be racialized when flesh-and-blood ‘white’ folk began justifying them by appeal to race, post-racial institutions will not come about without flesh-and-blood human beings (‘white’ folk, in the main) acting on the knowledge that it's all a farce. Our illness won't subside without human intervention. And human intervention stems from human attitudes. The pragmatic programme championed by the political view cannot be accomplished without changing hearts and minds.

But we're stubborn. Our resistance to change is one reason why racism is aptly compared to a typhoon. Another reason is that, once the institutional ball gets rolling, it can continue all on its own. Individual actors working within racist institutions may have the best of intentions, all the while meeting the greatest of resistance. Combating racism requires combating racist attitudes, as well as the social structures they've infected.

The genealogical view underscores a further reason for thinking it makes sense to think racism is like a natural disaster. The view holds that the weed of racism sprang from the soil of the human drive to dominate and the dominion of the dominant. These appear, for all we know, to be natural features of our world and ourselves. People have always clamoured to be on top, and we have constructed societies that express this and stories that justify it. This suggests that racism shares something with other forms of oppression – sexism, anti-Semitism, xenophobia, homophobia, to name a few. They all have their origins in the tangled relationship between a deep feature of human character and the basic institutions and narratives that structure our societies. It may also suggest a dark truth about humanity: we can't help ourselves. Even if racism won't always be with us, it may seem that oppression in some form or other will.

Perhaps. I'm honestly not sure. But one final aspect of Coates's thought deserves mention here. The final pages of Between the World and Me spell out the charge that the roots and shoots of white supremacy are implicated in the latest existential threat to the human race. Climate change is real and yet many don't want to admit it. We're destroying the planet faster than we can wrap our heads around, and by the very same means we've employed to plunder the bodies of those we call ‘black’: the Industrial Revolution – fuelled by slave-picked cotton – suburban sprawl and increased reliance on automobiles – prompted by redlining. We've placed a ‘noose around the neck of the earth’. And this time, there'll be ‘white’ blood on the leaves.

Even if we are able to rid our world of racism, it might be too little too late. Our original sins may have already caught up with us. The genealogical view can make sense of this. Racism is a member of a family of human evils. The attitudes and practices that went into it are implicated in all manner of other ills. It's a real and pressing question whether we can escape the clutches of one, let alone all of them. And the storm may already be bearing down.

This isn't an argument for apathy. ‘Perhaps the struggle is all we have’, as Coates puts it. Human history may not be a long and winding road to justice, but there are better and worse ways to walk the path no matter where it leads. There's value to be had in recognizing the struggle for what it is.

* * *

About six weeks into my summer stint with the tree service, J. C. just about killed me. The knot he'd tied for himself before climbing the forty-foot pine slipped, and he fell on top of the pile of branches I was stooped over beneath the tree. Our boss called the ambulance immediately, and I was sent home. The next day the guys informed me – apparently, they'd all gone to visit J. C. in the hospital – that he'd broken several vertebrae. They said he'd kept asking whether I was OK.

The last time I saw J. C. he was limply weed eating the boss's yard. It was my last day on the job before returning to college in the fall. Though we weren't supposed to talk about pay, I knew the climbers made a lot more than us ground guys. It wasn't clear if J. C. would ever climb again. The back cast he wore made him look like a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle. He had on a tank-top, and the two hooded women flanking the devil dispiritedly danced back and forth as he swung the weed eater from side to side. I wondered if he still had to shit at work.