I’m a person of color and a new opinion among white liberals I’ve heard over the past year or so is that POC’s cannot be racist. Prejudice yes, racist no. This supposedly has to do with who is in power (white people) and who is oppressed (POC’s). I need some clarification on this issue:
Are white liberals saying that people in the country of Mexico cannot be racist? I mean, the government is run by Mexicans which makes them the people in power. If a Mexican is a racist in their own country and then crosses the border to the U.S…. does that mean they are no longer a racist?
To me, this opinion reeks of that traditional liberal mentality of “minorities can’t take care of, or think for themselves, so we have to do it for them,” but hey, I’m willing to listen to an explanation.
Anybody wanna take a run at this?
The idea that a POC cannot be racist is dumb. There’s no such thing as “reverse racism”- just racism. Where does this dumb idea come from? I think your point that some white folks think POC can’t think for themselves and must be insulated is well taken. Also- this idea just flies in the face of history. There are historic tensions between some Asian communities and some African American communities in Los Angeles- remember the riots? Are we to think that there are no members of those communities who are bigoted against the other side?
The other idea is perhaps that some white college kids think of POC as “noble savages.” Different from whites because so downtrodden that they can’t exhibit the all too common trait of bigotry against people who are different.
“this opinion reeks of that traditional liberal mentality of “minorities can’t take care of, or think for themselves, so we have to do it for them.”
I’ve been saying this for years, and usually saying it means you’re “racist.” I’ve got a white friend, super liberal, who literally flew to another state after a well publicized police shooting, “volunteered” and made signs and shirts and went door to door and handed them to black families. She came back to Portland feeling proud of herself and I told her that was probably the most fucked up thing she could have ever done. People don’t see it that way though for some reason.
I remember in the wake of the hurricane in Louisiana the anti-city and anti-police protests that took place in New Orleans were predominately white. Most of them flocked in, or flew in from out of state, to protest, while the black community rallied together to rebuild their community or raise funds to help people rebuild or move. White people protesting national guard treatment of black people, while black people are putting in work trying to gain a footing. It’s entitlement at its finest and it shows.
Racism is a system of not just belief (white skin makes humans superior to those who don’t have white skin), but also specific and deliberate legislative, social, and economic policies put in place and enforced to ensure whites are set up to to receive and benefit in every way above everyone else.
America, from its very inception has been a white supremacist society and has put in place a system where white people benefited from taking America from hundreds of thousands of Native Americans (murdering them and then later ghettoizing them on reservations); then the enslavement and free labor of blacks stolen from Africa and then stolen from free north America, on which white wealth and the wealth of the country was built in its entirety; then Jim Crow which ensured non-whites were kept in their place as second class “citizens” (not real humans), and since then, after the Civil Rights Movement, for decades (and still) a deliberate system of discrimination that has limited where non-whites can live, access education, access health care, work, access financial assistance such as loans (for homes, cars, education, etc). This very deliberate system has ensured the largest wealth gap in the history of the world as well as enormous gaps in opportunities for employment and education, health and well being (including life expectancy, maternal and infant mortality rates to only name two), and has created a country where the poor people of color live in polluted, run down, dangerous places where access to services (public transportation to name one) are nearly non-existent. Non-whites do the most dangerous and low paid work in this country (and then are vilified for it > we’ve been watching crops rot in the fields since immigrants are being targeted and unemployed white people are not lining up for those jobs and even those that have tried, like when Georgia passed their anti-immigration legislation, quit in a day or less). Illegal immigrants are used by huge American corporations to work in conditions and for pay white Americans would never do and never accept. It’s no different than outsourcing to other countries where people are literally paid pennies to do work white Americans want living wages and benefits for doing. Are there poor, white people in America? Yep. They voted for Trump because they thought their white skin made them more important and valuable to the country than everyone else. Trump made a white supremacist promise to get rid of all of the others and make sure white people got what they deserved. He used poor white people and their believe in white supremacy to pull the biggest bait and switch ever. He doesn’t give a shit about poor white people and they will suffer greatly under his administration. I could give a shit about them. They deserve everything they get. Every single non-white person in this country, especially the most vulnerable, will suffer immensely. Donald Trump calls Haiti a shit hole and yet more than 50% of his employees at Mar-A-Lago are immigrants, most of them from Haiti. Why doesn’t he hire white Americans do work there? EXPLOITATION. PERIOD.
Educating oneself regarding racism is quite simple. If you can write this IA, if you can read, then you can research racism in this country and others and learn that there is a different between hating people who aren’t like you vs. systems set in place to support people of one color while exploiting everyone else. And racism is not a silo. Racism, sexism, and classism all exist in a trifecta that intersect and work together to keep in place a system meant to ensure a caste system of race (a white construct) and class (the wealthy own almost everything, including our government).
Libraries are free and they are full of books that can and will, in much greater detail than anyone can go to into a response here on this blog, answer your question. Read Ta-Nehisi Coates’ We Were Eight Years in Power (and read every book he references in that book). Read about Detroit and how it was allowed to disintegrate and be destroyed – a huge city in America! – allowed to rot and die because it was predominantly black. Read Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City. Read Killing Rage: Ending Racism by bell hooks. Read The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Color Blindness. Read Slavery By Another Name: The Re-enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II. Read The Possessive Interest in Whiteness: How White People Benefit from Identity Politics. Read Understanding and Dismantling Racism. Read America’s Original Sin: Racism, White Privilege, and the Bridge to a New America. Read White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide.
I could go on, but the list is endless.
I hate liberals, they have a good complex with morality. I’m white and another one of my white friends was like “you need to be nicer to poc because they’re systematically disadvantaged”. I was like “uhhh isn’t that patronizing? I’d rather judge someone by their character.” Then they called me rascist and stopped talking to me. Lol. Even though I have plenty of poc friends I guess I’m rascist because I don’t go out of my way to identify who is a poc. Ugh. So I could care less about liberals.
***God complex
Christina Rae, you are a badass.
And yet Cristina Rae didn’t bother to actually answer the IA’s question.
Sure, she referred the IA POC to the library where, you know, books are kept (arrogant much?), but she failed to address the question about whether Mexicans in Mexico can be racist and whether after coming to America if they are no longer racist.
as a hardcore #SJW… I was always told by PoC that only white people can be racist. There are articles ALL OVER the Left’s interwbes, HuffPo and BuzzFeed, Axios, Mic, The Root, etc and etc., article after article talking about how PoC can be prejudice, but not racist.
It’s not just white people saying this.
“Hardcore SJW” = Extremist
Just like if someone were to say, “I’m a hardcore right-winger,” they’d be an extremist.
Extremist: “A person who holds extreme or fanatical political or religious views, especially one who resorts to or advocates extreme action.”
Captain Obvious here, to hopefully help untangle this confused conversation. The difference between what Christina Rae is taking about and what IA is talking about can be boiled down to semantics. Christina Rae is taking about a certain kind of (systemic, intergenerational, culturally entrenched) racism, and IA is talking about individual, interpersonal racism. The idea that these are one and the same is laughable. IA is absolutely correct to point out the logical inconsistencies in conflating the two. The reason that white liberals like to conflate them is because of the well-intentioned idea that even if a white person isn’t racist in the interpersonal sense, they are fully participating in the systemic kind of racism, and the idea that acknowledging this has value. Which it does, but when it causes white college students to fly to the site of a police shooting to make signs and hand out t-shirts, someone had missed the point. This is bigger than signs and t-shirts, and reducing it to these small tokens is really only about that students efforts to make HERSELF feel better. Which is where the insult comes in, as downtown pointed out. Let’s just all agree that there should be two separate words for these concepts and move on with our lives.
*doomtown not downtown.
Also I’d like to point out that a person might not need to read Christina Rae’s list of books in order to understand that institutional racism exists. I’m not saying that these books are not worth reading. But it is possible to grasp the concept if you don’t have time for all this reading because you have to, idk, work for a living.
Ok, so maybe “move on with our lives” was not the best choice of words. This is a big deal. It is important. I’m glad for this opportunity for dialogue. As a white person, I feel that this type of interpersonal dialogue (albeit online in this case) is hugely important to have. MUCH more so than signs and t-shirts. Thank you IA for starting the conversation. I hope I didn’t come across as glib.
Is your friend a Reedie? In which case they may simply be Against Racism.
FH, if nonwhites find you to be part of the problem based on your individual behaviour towards them then its possible you are. I will not make that assumption because I’m not prejudiced. BTW I liked your post and agree with most of it I’m just using your last sentence as a segway to make a point. So let’s take a look at the definitions of these words we love to throw around:
Prejudice has nothing to do with skin color, its simply prejudging someone for any reason — religion, party affiliation, orientation, manner of dress, and of course can and often does refer to racial prejudice. An important distinction with this word is that while prejudice might stop someone from hiring you or having you over for dinner, it doesn’t mean they specifically wish you harm. But they definitely think less of you.
Xenophobia is a little more intense in that its essentially a fear of ANYTHING different, especially with regard to race, culture, religion or even simply geography. So if you’re comfortable having Asians over for dinner but not Africans, that’s prejudice as opposed to xenophobia. The xenophobe will universally shy away from anyone that strikes them as too different from themselves, but again not necessarily wishing them harm.
But racism has an extra layer of darkness. The typical racist isn’t just uncomfortable with other races, they want them dead or gone. They don’t just hate other races, they hate the IDEA of other races. This is how someone can be totally fine with the genocide of Native Americans and at the same time hate the idea of any other color living in our country today.
All around the world there are dozens of wars happening right now between populations of people that most Americans could never distinguish by race or color. Many are on the surface religious in nature, but deep down they boil down to the conquest of territory, with race or religion or culture as more of an excuse than a real motivation.
And yes anyone can be xenophobic or prejudiced. Many Koreans still hate the Chinese and Japanese for trying to take over their land in the 16th century. But again how many Americans can spot the difference between any of them? And do you really think there aren’t a certain number of Mexicans running around saying Gringo’s be like this and Gringo’s be like that? Duh.
The real difference is only a true racist wishes violence and death against an entire population based on the color of their skin. Even the Burmese “ethnic cleansing” of the Rohingyas is based on religion, not color.
Forrest I apologize if I insulted your sensibilities. I was just trying to illustrate how different words can be taken differently by different people. I was making a play on words and attempted to communicate to you that I was not disagreeing with your post. I regret my failure in that sense. What did you think about my other points?
Yea, looking back it was a poor choice for a segue which gave the wrong impression and ultimately detracted from the point I was making. Sorry.
mexico is a very racist country. lighter skin color mexicans, claiming typically european ancestry, discriminate brutally against darker complected mexicans who are of primarily native american origins. have a look at this report; http://www.inegi.org.mx/saladeprensa/bol… 9 [in spanish, translation available]