The Nigger Tax
I couldn’t think of any picture that was cleverly appropriate to this post, so instead here is a picture of a plant thingy in the gardens of Farmleigh House, Phoenix Park, Dublin, Ireland.
No, the title of this blog post does not indicate disrespect for anyone. Except of course the people who levy that tax.
What tax? The Nigger Tax. Read it.
I don’t think I have ever (since elementary school anyway) seen anyone dissed so thoroughly on such lousy grounds. I’m not sure how I’d react if I witnessed that tax being levied on someone. Nor how I’d react if it were levied on me. In the latter case I suppose I would probably shrink up and leave, wimpy though that may seem. It is somehow less dignified to demand respect for oneself than for someone else, and anyway I hope the heat of the moment will not blind me to the fact that the tax collector is not worth a second of my time or a joule of my energy.
[Update: Since writing this, I have witnessed that tax levied on someone. My reaction consisted mostly in dislocating my jaw; the tax collectors were gone before I could think of anything more apt.]
We have a history of racial homogeneity in this country, curtailed in recent years by a sharp rise in immigration; it seems likely that such rapid demographic changes would cause a rise in racism. When I loved a young woman of dark-skinned ethnicity (well, dark compared to mine) in another country, I worried about the prospect of her living with me in Iceland; I feared how my countrymen might treat her. But she was treated just fine when she visited. And I have never seen anyone here (or elsewhere) indulge in Nigger Taxation. No doubt it is being done, but it is rare enough — or isolated enough — that I haven’t seen it. That’s a good thing.
But many of us are guilty of a smaller-scale version of the Nigger Tax, and perhaps of its inverse — the Whitey Subsidy, if you will. We treat the people we find attractive better than the people we don’t. If an unattractive woman asks me for a favor, I may well happily do it … but I will do it more happily if an attractive woman asks. And if the favor is so big that I am not sure I am willing … then I am more likely to do it for the beautiful one. There is no point denying this tendency, though I’m hardly proud of it.
We can split the causal relationship in two: I am more likely to do a favor for a friend or someone I like, than for a stranger or someone I don’t particularly like (even if I don’t particularly dislike them either). And an attractive woman (or charismatic man) is more likely to be considered a friend and liked, than an unattractive woman (or uncharismatic man) — other things being equal.
Is that a moral failing? I think that depends on the relative importance of attractiveness vs. other factors — what happens when other things are not equal. If my priorities are straight; if my bias for attractiveness is easily overridden by my appreciation of politeness or amicability or whatever other positive character traits may be apparent … then I’m probably OK, morally speaking.
But the effect is there, and we are often unaware of it. Attractive people are probably generally unaware of it too, when they benefit from it.
[Sidenote: Alexander McCall Smith wrote a book called "Morality for Beautiful Girls" and I don't want to read it because I am certain that it is not as good as its title. Just like the Tom Waits song "Warm Beer and Cold Women" is not as good as its title --- good though it is.]
Maybe I am guilty of mild forms of nigger-taxing when I am not paying attention. I want to try to be more attentive to that. You do the same, ok?
September 11th, 2005 at 5:11 am
I actually think there is a fundamental difference between the subsidy and the taxation. One is responding to incentives, while the other is a classification of people (with a public statement).
Let’s first analyze the stories told on the weblog you refer to, at first pass they all seem to convey the same message – but actually since we don’t know the facts leading up to each situation, they might be very different.
The story about the pizza place is obviously taxation, but the drug store not necessarily.
Let’s assume that the woman in the drug store had requested (and even promised) a day off around Christmas. Unfortunately at the last minute someone got sick and she was called to work. She is now angry being working on Christmas day and almost refuses to work. However due to her private incentives she chooses to serve her friends in the neighborhood when they drop by, because these are her friends and she doesn’t want to let take her grievances out on them – but the white guy in the story, whom she has no connection with and is very likely from another neighborhood, is the perfect candidate to show her boss how little she wanted to work.
This is also what is happening in the case of a beautiful woman, a single man (in the search of a girlfriend) will undoubtedly respond differently to any favors asked by a beautiful woman than a man who is happily married. This has to do with personal incentives and hope of reciprocity rather than “race subsidy”. You actually want to show this person that you are nicer to them than you are to the average person.
This all boils down to the twofold meaning of the word: “prejudice”. The first and neutral meaning is: “opinion formed beforehand, based on insufficient knowledge” and that is very difficult to change, we all do it and often we need to. If you were hiring a programmer and got one thousand applications you would have to use some kind of prejudice to determine who gets an interview. A person with a masters degree in computer science is more likely to get an interview than an uneducated person – even though it may lead to “false negatives”. On the flip side of “prejudice” is irrational dislike of somebody – and I agree with you, that is an awful act.
Sorry for the long reply…
September 11th, 2005 at 2:37 pm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beauty
(Happy about the short reply :-)
September 11th, 2005 at 4:27 pm
Hjalti: well, everything we do is responding to incentives, if you want to get into that; the racist pizza clerk wants to compensate for his spotty rag of an ego, so he treats the Nigger like shit to give himself the impression of superiority over someone. That’s not a conscious “if I do X maybe I’ll get Y” incentive, but it is an incentive nonetheless. So I don’t know if that’s a real distinction.
If there is a fundamental difference, I’d say it is that the “beauty subsidy” is based on positive feelings for the beautiful, along with unconscious indifference to the less beautiful … while the “Nigger Tax” is driven entirely by conscious hatred of the “Nigger.” In the former case, our response to the unusual is positive and not conscious, in the latter it is negative and conscious. That may be what vindicates the beauty subsidy as being less pernicious.
September 11th, 2005 at 4:52 pm
As for the possible excuse for the woman in the drug store … I want to apply the walk’n'quack argument there. It’s a duck; it’s a Nigger Tax. Whatever the reasons for her being mentally deficient enough to discrimate against someone based on race, she is still discriminating against someone based on race — quite overtly and aggressively. It seems unlikely that he is just paying for not being one of “her friends in the neighborhood” … call me prejudiced if you want, but I am somehow skeptical of the neighborly camaraderie at supermarket chains in the Bronx. :) So excluding familiarity, she may still be predisposed, for whatever reasons, to help her fellow Latinos but not the white guy. Is that any different from a grumpy white pizza clerk who will serve his fellow pasty white guys but not the … Nigger?
September 11th, 2005 at 4:22 pm
Nice short reply, bro! That led me to an interesting website, Beauty Check, reporting on an experiment in which many facial images are rated for attractiveness and then morphed together to create the prototypical attractive face and unattractive face for both males and females. A section of that site that is relevant to the above discussion: Social perception.
September 11th, 2005 at 6:28 pm
I think my mistake was to narrowly define “nigger tax” as a taxation based on race.
In the drug store we only know that she boycotted one person – we don´t know why, and perhaps it was not because of race, it may have been because of other attributes.
The pizza story provides two data points. Both the guy who would have received service (we know that he had no relationship with the restaurant) and the other one who was ignored and stated that this happened every time. The pizza story is therefore a more accurate depiction of race discrimination.
However, boycotting people based on appearance attributes is of course taxation. So I stand corrected having defined “nigger tax” as race discrimination when it is appearance discrimination.
September 11th, 2005 at 6:59 pm
… and even more general than that: David’s story mentions the effect of language as well. Maybe he would have been better received if he had spoken fluent Spanish. Appearance, language … anything that makes you instantly categorizable is a potential basis for discrimination.
I’m interested in a general view of this phenomenon, because I want to know the ways in which I may be nigger-taxing people (even if only slightly) without realizing it.