> Racism isn't about personal prejudice, although it's certainly a participation trophy for them. Racism is not about who is burning crosses, or about who is born into privilege. Racism is a system, a set of rules, rites, privileges and laws that puts 100% of POC at a disadvantage, and 100% of white people at an advantage, regardless of the rest of their social status.
Nope. Alot of people keep attempting to change a definition that is older than any of us alive, and nope. You have to make up a new word. I don't mind "Institutional racism" or "systemic racism" so much, because they're more descriptive expressions, and lead to useful discussion, but to infantilize whole groups of people by making them incapable of a part of the human experience (to be personally racist towards people whose skin is a different color than theirs) is simply absurd.
You can identify the problem without making your language a personal attack on every individual. And attempting to accuse every individual, DOESN'T solve the problem does it? It doesn't unmake the laws. It doesn't unbuild the institutions. It doesn't drive people to talk about how laws unfairly target blacks, like the "war on drugs". But it most certainly makes enemies. It's a useless and impractical approach.
There is NO statement you can make that is true of all humans, nor even any particular "group" of humans, for whatever that means, because NO "group" of humans is remotely meaningfully homogeneous. Except for very broad strokes like "humans must breathe to live", no universal statements are true.
> Nope. Alot of people keep attempting to change a definition that is older than any of us alive, and nope. You have to make up a new word. I don't mind "Institutional racism" or "systemic racism" so much, because they're more descriptive expressions, and lead to useful discussion, but to infantilize whole groups of people by making them incapable of a part of the human experience (to be personally racist towards people whose skin is a different color than theirs) is simply absurd.
It's not a change of definition. It has always been systemic. Slavery abolitionists and civil rights activists were not fighting to get white people to stop calling black people the n-word, they were fighting to end institutions that treated black people as subhuman. Black Lives Matter isn't trying to end people's personal prejudices, it's trying to end an endless stream of black lives being taken.
Racism is, and always has been, about power and control. It certainly intersects with, and is bolstered by, individual feelings of racial prejudice. We can certainly call those individuals racists. But they are invariably helping to reinforce a system, not atomically expressing personal hate in a vacuum.
> You can identify the problem without making your language a personal attack on every individual. And attempting to accuse every individual, DOESN'T solve the problem does it? It doesn't unmake the laws. It doesn't unbuild the institutions. It doesn't drive people to talk about how laws unfairly target blacks, like the "war on drugs". But it most certainly makes enemies. It's a useless and impractical approach.
> There is NO statement you can make that is true of all humans, nor even any particular "group" of humans, for whatever that means, because NO "group" of humans is remotely meaningfully homogeneous. Except for very broad strokes like "humans must breathe to live", no universal statements are true.
I'm not sure what you're talking about, but it sounds like you were predisposed to treat me as an enemy already. I didn't personally attack any individual. Describing a system, and who is disadvantaged or advantaged by it, is not a statement about any of the people affected by it.
Nope. Alot of people keep attempting to change a definition that is older than any of us alive, and nope. You have to make up a new word. I don't mind "Institutional racism" or "systemic racism" so much, because they're more descriptive expressions, and lead to useful discussion, but to infantilize whole groups of people by making them incapable of a part of the human experience (to be personally racist towards people whose skin is a different color than theirs) is simply absurd.
You can identify the problem without making your language a personal attack on every individual. And attempting to accuse every individual, DOESN'T solve the problem does it? It doesn't unmake the laws. It doesn't unbuild the institutions. It doesn't drive people to talk about how laws unfairly target blacks, like the "war on drugs". But it most certainly makes enemies. It's a useless and impractical approach.
There is NO statement you can make that is true of all humans, nor even any particular "group" of humans, for whatever that means, because NO "group" of humans is remotely meaningfully homogeneous. Except for very broad strokes like "humans must breathe to live", no universal statements are true.