Somebody in the comment thread of this video accused the woman in the video of “blatant racism” specifically targeting White Males and said in his defense that “the most accurate definition of racism is prejudice based solely on race, whether favourable or unfavourable.” I have responded to this type of comment many times, because it seems to be in every thread from someone who cannot understand anything but the dominant view of racism as an individual act, but this time I thought of something else to say. It’s not that it is anything new, but perhaps more succinct than any response I have said before,so I figured I’d share it here as well… Here is what I said: I understand your take on racism, but the problem is youre getting hung up on thinking of it at the level of the individual. The suffix ism denotes a system. Capitalism and Catholicism are systems that people participate in. Racism is a system that people participate in. It requires power to have any meaning. Any system without power ceases to be a system. What people do internally as individuals may help to bolster that system, but it does not implement it. It takes actions and consequences to create a system of racism. Prejudice based on race merely means to prejudge people based on the color of their skin, or however one interprets the fallacial fantasy of race. If it stayed as an internal judging and no actions were taken, there would be no system, no racism. Albert Memmi defines racism as the generalized and final assigning of values to real or imaginary differences, to the accusers benefit and at his victims expense.” Perhaps you can find that a credible definition considering the reframing of racism I just presented. But, I suppose you could make the argument that the situation could be reversed and a white person could be harmed by a black person in the same way, but that would be a highly localized phenomenon with insufficient power to replicate on a broader scale. It would be like me arguing against the systemic killing of cows in the United States and you saying that cows kill people, too.
Posted on: Tue, 16 Dec 2014 21:28:53 +0000
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