Who Can Be Racist?

[Kamaji]

Who Can Be Racist?

If you can't win the argument, just change the dictionary.

By John Hirschauer
February 2, 2022

One of my college professors told me that black people can’t be racist. I try to be open-minded—I heard her out. The basic idea was that anyone could be “prejudiced,” but only people with “institutional power” could be racist. Since black people had no institutional power—an article of faith on campus—they couldn’t be racist. White people, by extension, could not be the victims of racism.

I was taken aback, particularly because there was only one racial group that the people with “institutional power” on our campus felt comfortable denigrating, and it wasn’t black people. But ultimately, I thought, it was trivial. If the world was anything like boomer Republicans in my life had told me it would be, my classmates would forget most of this stuff and end up voting Republican after they cut their first check to Uncle Sam.

Never trust a Republican over 50.

On Saturday, several Twitter users noticed that the Anti-Defamation League had changed its once-colorblind definition of racism to mirror the color-conscious one given by my professor. Until August 2020, the ADL had defined racism as “the belief that a particular race is superior or inferior to another.”

After George Floyd’s death and the “racial reckoning” that ensued, however, the ADL changed its definition to the “marginalization and/or oppression of people of color based on a socially constructed racial hierarchy that privileges white people.”

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Source:  https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/who-can-be-racist/

[Kamaji]

I first heard that specious argument back in 1998.  It's been around for a long time, and it's just as wrong now as it was then.

Racism is, at bottom, the coupling of judgments about a person's moral agency to that person's skin color or ethnicity - in other words, judging another person as good or bad based on their skin tone.

What a racist does about his/her racism - i.e., whether he/she lets it color his/her actions in the world - is analytically distinct from whether the racist is a racist in the first place.

It is also wrong to conflate racism with prejudice.  All racists are prejudiced, but not all prejudices are racist (i.e., race-based).

Thus, a black who delights in being cruel to old white men is both racist and, more generally, prejudiced - against old people.  The fact that this person is black does not take away one iota from the fact that she is racist.  And being prejudiced does not gainsay her racism, either.