abhortion:

racism-education:

jehovahs: it’s not ‘reverse racism’ when you’re being racist to whites it’s racism No, it isnt. There is an inherent logical fallacy in your argument that will never make it true. However, white people can be discrimated against. Discrimination is different from racism. Let’s start from the beginning. Your first step is to accept that “a hatred or intolerance of another race” is not the definition of racism. The dictionary is wrong. Get over it. Racism is when intolerance in government laws, attitudes and ideals of a society are ingrained in a culture to the point where patterns of discrimination towards a certain race are institutionalized asnormal. If you keep this in mind, you’ll understand that reverse racism doesn’t- and can’t- exist. There is another saying “Racism (or sexism) = prejudice + power. POC (people of color) can be prejudiced against white people. But they can neverhave power, i.e. a whole system of structured support that backs them. White people often don’t understand how much power they have. Just ONE white person has more power to do actual harm to a black person than one hundred black people do to that white person. A white person can KILL a black person without any consequences, while if the situation was reversed you can bet the killer wouldn’t see the outside of a prison cell for a long, long time. When white people complain about reverse racism, they are not complaining about losing their RIGHTS. What they are complaining about is losing their PRIVILEGE. White people can never call someone else racist against them because that ‘someone else’ does not have the power to OPPRESS them. The person has the power to be mean.To hurt feelings.But not to OPPRESS. THAT is the key difference. When a POC is mean to you, they are JUST being mean to you. Their entire society is not ACTIVELY discriminating against and oppressing you. Their society is not one where it is difficult for them to not be racist against you. But yours is. And you need to accept that.

There are plenty of things wrong with this post and I’m not really sure where to start.

1. You’ve refused to accept jehovahs’ definition of racism (which is implied), with no justification given, apart from “get over it”. Convincing.

2. After dismissing OP’s definition, you’ve then supplied your own definition of racism, with no explanation as to why your definition is more correct than OP’s. Essentially, what you’ve said is “your definition is wrong and mine is right” without saying why. What makes your definition more valid than theirs? What’s to stop me, or anyone else, from doing the exact same thing to you?

3. Even if we do use your definition of racism, the rest of your post doesn’t logically follow from it. In fact, it’s incredibly US-centric, and ignores and erases plenty of PoC countries and cultures around the world. “Racism = prejudice + power” is not the same thing as “POC (people of color) do not have power”. Believe it or not, there are actually countries where PoC are the majority, and countries where PoC have power and white people do not. To pretend or imply that these places to not exist, or are not important, is actually kind of, well, racist. The world is not America: stop making massive sweeping generalisations that may be accurate for your country, but certainly do not hold true elsewhere.

To use a personal example, about 4 years ago in my city, there was a lot of heightened security due to a big event that was occurring, which meant that there were extra security checks and ‘random’ searches everywhere. My white father and uncle, my ethnically Han Chinese mother, and I (I’m mixed, but white-passing) would often get stopped on our way to tourist destinations or restaurants. Every single time we got stopped, they would search through the contents of my mother’s bag, or ask her to go through a metal detector, or get patted down. Not once did my father, uncle, or I get asked to do so. It was fairly obvious that she was constantly being ‘randomly’ stopped and searched because she was Asian, and we were not because we looked white. I’m sure we can all agree that this is racial profiling and extremely racist.

The city was Beijing, and it was during the 2008 Olympics. In other words, it occurred in China, a country in which Chinese people (or more specifically, the Han Chinese) hold institutional power. Using your “racism = prejudice + power” definition, this means that people who are Han Chinese (and not white people!) cannot experience racism in China. And yet, the above incident was a clear example of an Asian person experiencing racism in an Asian-majority country where Asians had institutional power. This was not an isolated incident either, but one example of many, where Chinese people may face discrimination and yes, racism, in China, for being Chinese. Needless to say, non-Chinese people in China also do face racism for being non-Chinese, but that’s another discussion.

Unless you are about to argue that racial profiling is not racist, what my mother experienced was racism. What she did not experience, and what you have defined above, is institutional racism. That is the problem with the prejudice + power definition: whilst in places such as the US, the idea of ‘reverse racism’ may be laughable to some, it can be a serious problem in other countries. Your neat little definition actually erases the experience of many people in other counties, including PoC. It’s damaging, it’s incorrect, and is almost always used synonymously with “white people can’t experience racism”, which is not the same thing at all.

Stop equating your US- and Euro-centric experiences with the rest of the world