If you’ve spend any significant amount of time on tumblr you will have seen a new definition or the word racism, prejudice + power. You will also have seen this definition applied to sexism and to all manner of phobias. Granted, my personal experiences are not a source, but in dozens of encounters with that definition I’ve seen maybe 4 that weren’t using it as a justification for prejudice. Either way, it’s impossible to deny the blogs dedicated to social justice calling whites savages, calling for the death of all men or whites, justifying any and all misgivings done to men, things they would find completely unacceptable directed at women or POC. None of this is racism or sexism they will say when inevitably called out, because men hold power over women and whites over POC. Many of them seem to find any other definition unthinkable or think it the natural opinion of women or people of color. It is neither of these things. Experiments consistently show most people of color to use the dictionary definition of racism and women that of sexism. Almost all of academia similarly rejects the new definition. It has influence in sociology, but all of the related disciples (i.e. anthropology, social psychology) completely reject it, and it’s far from universally accepted in sociology either.

The most obvious reason for this rejection is that most axises of oppression have more than two settings. If one most have power over someone else to be racist, then a black person who hates Hispanics is not a racist. Similarly an intersex misogynist is not a sexist and a pan-sexual that frowns on gays in not homophobic. Moreover any internalized racism a POC might have against their own race or women their own sex is not racism or sexism.

The counterargument usually made to this is that while insults or generalizations made against women or POC, even when made by them, uphold the oppression of women and POC, similar things said of men or whites do not uphold any oppression of men or whites. This counterargument had some value in a colonial pre-information world (though even then it had complications), but in the modern world it is totally worthless. As far as race goes all one has to do is Google “whites in Japan” or “whites in Saudi Arabia” to know why. There are exceptions, most notably South Africa, but in most of Asia and Africa whites are a disenfranchised minority. The most extreme case of this, at least in this decade, is how the whites of Zimbabwe, almost all of whom were born there an once constituted 4% of the population, were recently striped of the right to own land, including houses or farms. This law came after most of the whites were already driven out by racist violence. The justice system does not protect them.



As previous links imply the Arab world has a history of anti-white racism predating European conquests in the Americas or the Atlantic slave trade by hundreds of years. Since at least the seventh century both whites and blacks were taken as slaves by Arab slavers with race as the justification. The women were made into prostitutes, the men castrated and conscripted or forced to mine salt. The Ottoman and Moroccan Empires also held conquests in Europe, Spain and the Balkans respectively, and extracting slaves of its conquests. North Africans slavers continued the practice as raiders long after the reconquista, and the Ottoman government went on to attempt to exterminate whites and Christians in an events called the Armenian Genocide and Greek Genocide. These events are not recognized by many countries. Whites made up 13 percent of the population of Algeria one the day of it’s independence from France, again almost all of them born there; almost all of them were driven out by racist violence.

SJW’s will say in response to this that their arguments are only meant to apply to Western countries, usually only America. Even ignoring the Eurocentrism of this, it doesn’t fly in the information age. People all around the world consume our media today. They read our books, watch our movies, and most relevantly, browse our internet.

As far as sexism goes, although there is no country on Earth that is matriarchal there is serious repression of men within patriarchy. It is upheld by insults and generalizations of men just the same way similar things uphold the repression of women. Men are vastly more likely than women to die at their own hand, or at another’s hand, than women. Almost all of the unsheltered homeless are men, and most relevantly, men are subject greater rates of arrest, greater rates of conviction, greater rates of police brutality, and longer sentences for the same crime when compared to women.

I say this is most relevant for two reasons. First of all it is directly upheld by the perception of men as violent or sexually deviant, a theme to often seen in the assertions of internet social justice, and secondly because it highlights this site’s failure in its understanding of intersectionality. As opposed to its indented meaning of how different axises can repress people together I’ve almost explicitly seen it assert all forms of repression are at work when only one if any are, or just to say white male cishets are the worst of humanity. On a few rare cases I’ve seen it correctly applied to Asian women Asians are seen as hyper-feminine by the white power structure, so it is logical that Asian women would receive that worst of cat calling and objectification, as it has been said here they do. I’ve never seen an SJW apply to same logic to black men. Blacks are seen as hyper-masculine in the white power structure, so it is logical that black men would receive the worst of the unfairness of this country’s legal system. They do. There is a reason that black men and not black women that are the stock victims of police brutality and egregious convictions. I’ve heard the plight of “black men” discussed many a time in the main stream, but here, despite all the talk of accommodating women of color, the talk of legal unfairness is only of “black people.” To say otherwise they’d have to acknowledge the institutional repression of men, misandry, which is clearly impossible. Gag me. It’s particularly jarring given that the “men” part of the plight of “black men” is quantifiably the greater part. The disparity in sentencing between men and women is greater than that between whites and blacks, as are those of arrest, conviction, and police violence. If you are generalizing men are violent or sexually depraved you are upholding the demonization of black men, even more than if you said the same thing about black people.

And really, even If I took the new definition for granted it still wouldn’t justify half the things it’s used to defend. Why would anyone justify prejudice or discrimination? If you must have consequences for the disenfranchised in the west they should be obvious. Remember those polls I mentioned about women and the dictionary definition of sexism? Google any poll about women and feminism and you won’t like the results. The stereotype that all feminists are misandrists is backward an repressive, but what what act of sexism could possibly uphold it better than an actual misandristic “feminist?" There are people who would paint all of social justice, not just feminism, as hateful and bigoted. What better ammunition could you possibly give them?