![\"\"](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/305\/2021\/12\/wallpaper-5252806_1280.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nStill more in our series on the assumptions behind our national polarization. . . .<\/p>\n
We Americans do have some consensus, despite our polarization.\u00a0 Most Americans agree that \u201cracism is bad.\u201d\u00a0 This is why the charges of racism that we blogged about yesterday have their force.\u00a0 Progressives say that conservatives are racist, but conservatives deny that they are.\u00a0 Yes, we continue to have racial problems and we differ on their nature and what to do about them, but very few Americans embrace racism as something good.\u00a0 But complicating the efforts to resolve our racial problems is that Americans have different definitions of what racism is.<\/p>\n
Some say that racism is prejudice against other human beings because of their race.\u00a0 Under that assumption, the goal of anti-racism is a \u201ccolor-blind\u201d society, one in which the color of a person\u2019s skin simply does not matter.\u00a0 This was the view put forward in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, as in Martin Luther King<\/a>\u2018s \u201cdream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.\u201d<\/p>\n But some progressives have started to define racism as \u201cprejudice plus power.\u201d\u00a0 According to this understanding, only the race in power\u2013that is, whites\u2013can be guilty of racism.\u00a0 Members of oppressed races might be prejudiced, but that\u2019s not so bad.\u00a0 Thus, black people cannot be racist.<\/p>\n Will Shetterly\u00a0 in an article on the subject<\/a>, gives this account of how the term acquired this new meaning:<\/p>\n In 1970, Pat Bidol redefined racism when she wrote in\u00a0Developing New Perspectives on Race<\/em>\u00a0that \u201cracism = prejudice + power\u201d. Judith H. Katz popularized the equation in\u00a0White Awareness: Handbook for Anti-Racism Training<\/em>. The theory is that everyone is prejudiced, but only white people can be racist because racism requires prejudice plus power, and people of color do not have power in a racist society.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n This explains how the major progressive efforts to be \u201canti-racist\u201d end up judging people by the color of their skin instead of by the content of their character.<\/p>\n Critical Race Theory argues that racism is not just an individual vice, but that it is systemic, built into the very fabric of our current social order.\u00a0 If that is true, white people as a whole are the villain.\u00a0 In these debates, race, which has been shown to be more of a social construction than a biological category, has re-emerged as definitive, essentialist identities.<\/p>\n Traits such as showing up on time, getting the right answers, objectivity, etc., are defined for math teachers<\/a> as \u201csigns of white supremacy.\u201d\u00a0 The implication that black people cannot show up on time, get the right answers, or are always subjective would, by the standards of the Civil Rights movement, be seen as racist, as condescending racial stereotyping.\u00a0 But now these qualities, usually thought of as necessary for success for anyone, are ascribed to white people alone, in another example of racial stereotyping.<\/p>\n The \u201canti-racist\u201d movement is saying some harsh things against white people.\u00a0 But, by the new definition, that\u2019s not racist.\u00a0 Some \u201canti-racist\u201d Progressives are saying cruel things about Jews.\u00a0 But anti-semitism is not racist when it comes from minority groups\u2013including oppressed Muslims\u2013since Jews are white people and allegedly hold the power.\u00a0 And any hostility on the part of black people to Asians is not racism either, since Asian immigrants are allegedly \u201cprivileged\u201d in America, like white people.<\/p>\n Making \u201cpower\u201d the crucial factor is, of course, a legacy of postmodernism, and it is no wonder that this new understanding of racism was developed by white academics, such as Pat Bidol.\u00a0 Shetterly shows the problems with this view:<\/p>\n The problem with the theory is people like Condoleeza Rice, Oprah Winfrey, and Kimberl\u00e9 Crenshaw have far more power than most people of any hue in the USA. Ron Kozar noted that by the anti-racist definition, \u201cAmerican Nazis aren\u2019t racists, since they have no power.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n He quotes a critique from social scientists Marie Macey and Eileen Moxon, which says in part,<\/p>\n If a Pakistani Muslim male refuses to have an African-Caribbean or Indian Hindu female social worker for reasons which, if articulated by a white Christian would be condemned as racist, one has to ask what the point is of denying that this refusal stems from racist (or sexist or sectarian) motivations? Similarly, if one compares the structural position of a white, working class, homeless male with that of a black barrister, would the statement that \u2018only whites have power\u2019 make sense or be acceptable to either of them?<\/p>\n \u2026the approaches [of anti-racism theory] are theoretical and thus closed to the canons of scientific evaluation and because the discourse itself prohibits the open, rigorous and critical interrogation which is essential to theoretical, professional and personal development.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n If racism is to have such a narrowed meaning, maybe we need another term for hating people because of their race.\u00a0 And maybe we could build a consensus that hating people because of their race is wrong, no matter who is doing it.<\/p>\n \n<\/p> Image by\u00a0Samir Basante Valencia<\/a>\u00a0from\u00a0Pixabay<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The classic definition of racism is prejudice against human beings because of their race. Progressives are advancing another definition, that “racism = prejudice + power.” By that thinking, only members of the race in power–that is, white people–can be racist. And blacks who hate whites, Asians, or Jews cannot be racist.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1281,"featured_media":58268,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,12,25,35,36,42],"tags":[11174,4429,1769,11390,3870,1836],"class_list":["post-58260","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-america","category-culture","category-language","category-philosophy-2","category-politics","category-social-science","tag-americas-polarization","tag-post-marxism","tag-postmodernism","tag-power-reductionism","tag-race","tag-racism"],"yoast_head":"\n\n
\n
\n