Iâm doing a project on racism for school and I got bored during these hours and accidentally fell down the rabbit hole of triggered tumblr peeps. Do you believe that PoC can be prejudiced against white people? Can they be racist? Sorry if this seems weird I find social issues like this fascinating sorry
Prejudice, yes. Racist, no. Reverse racism does not exist.
White people in the U.S. (I say the U.S. because it is a place where they are the majority and the majority rules here) are in the position of power to where they can indeed oppress POCs. Racism and oppression goes hand in hand. Since POCs are the minority, and nor in that position of power (especially black and Native Americans, seeing as Native Americans were here first and the white men came and straight stole their land from them, and my ancestors were brought over here to be slaves to the white man), we can definitely voice our hatred and prejudice and disdain, but we simply cannot be racist.
These articles explain the message I would like to convey better than I can.
The Harvard Crimson
The Chronicle
Huffington Post
Huffington Post: Dear White People
Hope these help!!
That definition of âracism = prejudice + powerâ was made by a White woman with very little knowledge of actual POC issues⌠and that too in the SEVENTIES. FORTY YEARS AGO
Also:Â Â
 The definition has been criticized by some academics for relying on the assumption that power is a zero-sum game, and for not accounting for the lack of uniformity in prejudicial attitudes. Critics have also noted that this definition is belied by the fact that except in absolutist regimes, minorities, however disadvantaged they may be, are not powerless, because power is organized into multiple levels.
It is extremely simplistic to say that White people have ALL the power, and POC have none, especially considering that the wealthiest ethnic groups in America are Indians and Jewish people. BOTH out-earning White people by extremely vast margins. Â
Does this mean that White people cannot commit racism against Indians and Jewish people? Because obviously, those ethnic groups have more wealth than they do.Â
Does this mean that when Indians tell their children not to talk to White people because theyâll get âcorrupted by Western cultureâ, or call their children âAmericanâ as insults, by logic of this definition, are perpetuating racism against White people? Because itâs very clear that Indians as an ethnic group have more power over White people.Â
And herein lies the problem with the term âPOCâ in general, because you are taking hundreds, possibly thousands of cultures and ethnic groups, and treating them as a collective disingenuously against a nebulous âwhite people.â When in actuality, oppression is an extremely nuanced issue that cannot be put in binary âus vs themâ terms. There are other factors like class and wealth which can in fact NEGATE the oppression that one would normally face for gender and/or ethnicity, and I never see most of these political activists take those into account.Â
A Black personâs experience and a Chinese personâs experience in America is going to be totally different. Hispanics have different issues, Native Americans have different issues. Lumping them into one not only creates a false picture but also is perpetuating a different type of racism - lumping all non-European cultures as inherently the same.Â
And even many of the people who claim to fight for racism are very happy to perpetuate it themselves using THIS VERY DEFINITION as an excuse.Â
See how people reacted when a Chinese immigrant spoke on her experience with a Black person telling her to âgo back to her country.â Did these White people, in an attempt to protect the bad actions of a person just because he was Black, not perpetuate racism against a Chinese person by doing so? And does this mean the actions of this Black person were suddenly okay?Â
You also mention slavery, while also failing to realise that African countries were also perpetuating this trade, and that majority of slaves were actually transported within Africa and to Carrribean countries, and only a small percentage actually came to America. There were also Black people who owned slaves as well, and while some did so to protect family members, there was ALSO a subset who did not.Â
There is also the Barbary slave trade where African slave traders sold White people to be slaves. And donât forget about the Slavs (whose name LITERALLY MEANS SLAVE), and the Irish, who were ALSO subjected to oppression.Â
And when you look beyond America - the most common type of racism in existence is not White vs POC, but POC vs POC. Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans. The Hutus and Tutsis. India in general (which there actually is no such thing, India is 29 countries patched together and everyone with the exception being the government sees it as such), the Ainu vs Japanese, Han Chinese vs other Chinese, racism between ethnic groups in Southeast Asia, the list goes on. White vs POC racism is merely a drop in the vast ocean of racism existing in the world.Â
So can a White person experience racism? Can Black people be racist? When you look at the actual oppression that is going on everywhere and donât limit yourself to America, and when you donât see racism as a binary term, the answer to both these questions is a resounding YES.Â
â And donât forget about the Slavs (whose name LITERALLY MEANS SLAVE) âŚâ
Itâs the other way around. So many Slavs were taken as slaves that the word slave comes from Slav.
And you are giving too much credit to the entire issue. It was always apologia.
Itâs true that âReverse Racismâ does not exist, but only because the very term reverse racism is meaningless: If you believe one race is superior to another or hate a group of people because of their race, you are a racist. Itâs no more complicated than that.
The âpower + privilegeâ blather was never an accepted definition anywhere, and rightly so, since it is just a nonsensical set of mental gymnastics created for no other reason than to enable racists to excuse their own racism.
The idea that in 2018 no non-white judge, teacher, doctor, politician, policewoman or loans officer has any power over the white folk they, by definition, are given power over, should be self-evidently ludicrous to anyone with half a brain. America just spent 8 years with a black man as the single most powerful person in it, the one person in the country legally allowed to declare nuclear war. Thatâs a hell of a lot more institutional power than some homeless white dude.
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Racism is probably best understood as a kind of tribalism, that we evolved to better survive a very long time ago: If an outsider looked different, they very likely could be part of a warring tribe planning to wipe out you and everyone you knew, so being alert to those differences, and banding together with those who looked like you, would give you a greater chance of survival, and weâre all mostly the decendants of those that survived. So it seems to be a very old and inherent part of human nature, but one that in the modern world, crammed in tightly as we are alongside people of so many colours and creeds, does much more harm than good, and due to mass communications is usually projected at a distance onto millions of people we have no firsthand experience of but still have an ability to hurt. And anyone making their race the central definition of their identity today is probably just a bit of an asshole.
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A much more productive way of thinking that would better replace all of the endless post-marxist identity politics doubletalk would be to simply strip it back to daily teaching everybody âdo unto others as you would have them do unto youâ.
If everyone truly took that seriously, it would solve just about all of this at no cost whatsoever, although it would of course put a lot of university professors out of work.
