What is Racism?
I recently ran across a catfight on one of the Web sites I read regularly. The owner of the site had picked up a post from another site that claimed the Republican party was full of racists. He criticized this on the basis of the number of historical racists still prominent in the Democratic Party, and by denying that someone like David Duke, however he describes himself, can be truly called a "Republican."
The original poster came in to defend himself and only ended up deepening the sense of insult, and a lot of mud was thrown without any reconciliation. Not that reconciliation is always desirable or possible. But it seemed to me, watching the train wreck, that, though the topic was a single word, "racism," it was a classic case of two sides talking past one another.
If you look up racism in a range of sources, you find two different groups of definitions. One -- the older and majority view -- can be boiled down to, "treating an individual or group of individuals differently because of their race." Sometimes this is expressed explicitly as "the belief that one race is inherently/genetically superior to another" [Japanese Canadian History].
In other places, however, racism is defined negatively, as "belief that one 'racial group' is inferior to another." [British Library]
This practical difference might seem to mean little; whether you treat racism as "white = good" or "black = bad." In fact, many caucasian racist constructions posit a spectrum of racial types, with Asians and Amerinds falling somewhere between Europeans and Africans.
However, the second and purely negative definition tends to include a caveat: racism, in this definition, "involves use of power plus privilege" [ACCTA] One source claims that racism is "often defined as a combination of power, prejudice and discrimination" [British Library].
These seemingly semantic difference spin out in ripples, until before long you're no longer talking about the same thing. The simple "treats others differently" definition, for instance, does not necessarily imply a negative treatment. One site defining the term (religioustolerance.org) goes so far as to say "The most common form of racism in North America is in the form discrimination against African-Americans. However, it occasionally is manifested as preferential treatment for blacks."
The stricter, purely negative definition, however, would exclude race pride, and even the anti-other beliefs of a given race group from the term "racism" if that group did not also have "power" or "privilege."
This is the definition that leads to the conclusion that, in America at least, only whites can be racists. It seems to me to execute some fairly sinuous logical twists for the sake of coming up with a crime that only white folks can be guilty of. Let's see: even if one white resident on a city block is harassed, abused, denied service, and physically attacked by all his black neighbors, he still would be the "racist" in the situation because he had been born with the "privilege" of whiteness?
If we're goint to have trans-political discussions of "racism," it would be wise to determine first which of the two the debaters have in mind.
The original poster came in to defend himself and only ended up deepening the sense of insult, and a lot of mud was thrown without any reconciliation. Not that reconciliation is always desirable or possible. But it seemed to me, watching the train wreck, that, though the topic was a single word, "racism," it was a classic case of two sides talking past one another.
If you look up racism in a range of sources, you find two different groups of definitions. One -- the older and majority view -- can be boiled down to, "treating an individual or group of individuals differently because of their race." Sometimes this is expressed explicitly as "the belief that one race is inherently/genetically superior to another" [Japanese Canadian History].
In other places, however, racism is defined negatively, as "belief that one 'racial group' is inferior to another." [British Library]
This practical difference might seem to mean little; whether you treat racism as "white = good" or "black = bad." In fact, many caucasian racist constructions posit a spectrum of racial types, with Asians and Amerinds falling somewhere between Europeans and Africans.
However, the second and purely negative definition tends to include a caveat: racism, in this definition, "involves use of power plus privilege" [ACCTA] One source claims that racism is "often defined as a combination of power, prejudice and discrimination" [British Library].
These seemingly semantic difference spin out in ripples, until before long you're no longer talking about the same thing. The simple "treats others differently" definition, for instance, does not necessarily imply a negative treatment. One site defining the term (religioustolerance.org) goes so far as to say "The most common form of racism in North America is in the form discrimination against African-Americans. However, it occasionally is manifested as preferential treatment for blacks."
The stricter, purely negative definition, however, would exclude race pride, and even the anti-other beliefs of a given race group from the term "racism" if that group did not also have "power" or "privilege."
This is the definition that leads to the conclusion that, in America at least, only whites can be racists. It seems to me to execute some fairly sinuous logical twists for the sake of coming up with a crime that only white folks can be guilty of. Let's see: even if one white resident on a city block is harassed, abused, denied service, and physically attacked by all his black neighbors, he still would be the "racist" in the situation because he had been born with the "privilege" of whiteness?
If we're goint to have trans-political discussions of "racism," it would be wise to determine first which of the two the debaters have in mind.
