Racism in the Semantic Field: Attractors, Curvature, Moral Asymmetry

Racism is commonly analyzed as prejudice, ideology, or institutional discrimination. This article develops a complementary account by interpreting racism as a deformation of the collective semantic field, in which persons cease to be encountered primarily as individuals and are instead perceived and judged through generalized group categories. Racialized judgments function as semantic attractors: they reduce social complexity, organize attention, and convert the actions of individuals into generalized claims about groups. Against this tendency, normative learning reshapes the semantic landscape: destructive paths become more difficult to enter, while attractors of factual clarity, victim protection, and individual responsibility become more stable. Building on an earlier model of normative landscape plasticity, the article argues that moral fields are reshaped by historical experience. Collective memory deepens constructive attractors and raises ridges against paths associated with exclusion, humiliation, and violence. These protections are indispensable, but they may become selectively organized. A moral field becomes asymmetric when structurally similar forms of group-based hostility are recognized, explained, or condemned differently according to the identity of the target. Within this framework, anti-White racism is treated not as historically equivalent to colonialism, segregation, antisemitism, or institutional racial domination, but as a diagnostic test of whether antiracist norms have become genuinely universal. The analysis extends to institutional blindness, the British grooming-gang scandals, mechanisms of feedback and self-correction, and the reproduction of moral asymmetry by artificial intelligence. The article concludes that the answer to selective recognition is neither relativization nor reversed racial politics, but the universalization of principles that protect individuals against racial contempt, collective guilt, and identity-based moral exclusion.