Racialicious on Richard Thompson Ford’s “A Primer on Racism”
Compiled by Thea Lim, with Andrea Plaid and Wendi Muse
My day job takes me into some pretty non-anti-oppressive environments. Generally I try to steer clear of conversations that deal with any parameter of power in depth (race, class, gender, sexuality, ability…) because in my environment, I find these conversations excruciating. It’s not that folks necessarily say blatantly hateful things. It’s rather that we can’t even agree on the basis for conversation. Or to put it more bluntly, my interlocutors have no concept of – or respect for – certain Racism 101 concepts.
I think what is particularly frustrating is the way that critical race theory – if I can use that term to describe the basic tenets that we and many of our buddy blogs operate off of – is treated as if it’s a loose collection of unverified opinions. It is not recognised as an actual body of thought that people of colour and allies have been writing and thinking about since Sojourner Truth gave her Ain’t I A Woman speech in 18freakin51.
If a medieval scholar engaged me in a discussion on representations of the clergy in the Lancelot-Grail cycle, I wouldn’t talk over them and contest every single point they made just because I had seen Disney’s The Sword in the Stone. Yet white folks who have absolutely no concept of the fact that there is a whole body of books, blogs, speakers, academic departments and workshops devoted to a common understanding of systemic racism, feel free to talk over my observations, as if the things I am saying are just random observations I’ve made.
So I welcome Richard Thompson Ford’s assertion that we need some kind of commonly held notion of what racism is, in his Slate article, “A primer on the word racism”.
Ford breaks down five different commonly cited examples of racism – institutional, cultural, unconscious, environmental and reverse – providing definitions for them and then evaluating whether or not they really are racism.
But. It’s clear that racism gets in the way of us defining racism. I don’t think Rush Limbaugh would be down with Racialicious’ definition of racism. But is Racialicious’ down with Ford’s definition of racism? Our correspondents weigh in.
Thea Lim
My first issue with Ford’s article is that it is confusing. It would be easier to understand if Ford started out with a clear definition of what racism entails. Because it took me a few minutes to glean from this article that Ford thinks anyone can be racist – a claim that I flat-out reject.
Ford seems to conflate racial prejudice with racism: roughly, if you treat someone according to their race, you are being racist. Meanwhile, I think that it is only racial prejudice + power that = racism. So if I yell “cracker” at a white man walking down the street (which btw I wouldn’t do and also don’t condone), my action has far less impact than if a white man yelled “chink” at me while I was walking down the street. The first scenario is an example of racial prejudice and being a jerk. The second scenario is racism and a hate crime. This is sort of 101 stuff, but there you have it.
Because Ford and I diverge on this basic tenet, I have multiple problems with certain conclusions that wobble out of his analysis.
In places in his article, it feels like Ford is trying to find short-cuts that gloss over analysis and appeal to “common sense” to get us to agree with him. The first short-cut Ford uses is “Bill Cosby.” In a discussion of cultural racism, Ford says that wariness of another’s culture is not racism because:
Bill Cosby lambasted poor blacks for contributing to their own misfortunes by using slang, dressing badly, and giving their children “names like Shaniqua, Taliqua, and Mohammed and all that crap.” Cultural misunderstanding and hostility is a serious problem in today’s increasingly cosmopolitan society. But when Cliff Huxtable can be called a racist, it’s probably time to rethink our terms.
So Ford is saying that
a) Cultural racism is not racism because Bill Cosby is a cultural racist
b) Bill Cosby can’t be racist.
In trying to rush us through this part of his analysis by assuming we like Bill Cosby – or accept him as some sort of standard for “not racism” – Ford doesn’t address the fact that saying “Mohammed and all that crap” is racist, xenophobic and Islamophobic. I am surprised that anti-racist scholar like Ford can think Cosby’s comments are ok — and not even bother to explain why they are ok.
Another short-cut “Selma, Alabama.” If Bill Cosby is the personification of “not racism,” Selma, Alabama is the personification of racism.
Ford says that unconscious racism – when your mind immediately equates a person of colour with bad traits – is not racism. Discussing a test that looked for immediate reactions to photos of light-skinned & dark-skinned faces, and concluded that 90% of white test participants found it easier to associate black faces with bad qualities than good ones, Ford quotes:
“We’ve come a long way from Selma, Alabama, if we have to calibrate prejudice in milliseconds”
Selma, Alabama – or beating and arresting black folks for sitting in the wrong section of the restaurant or cinema – is short hand for “total racism.” As long as we are not physically beating POC, it doesn’t matter if our immediate reaction to dark skin is suspicion.
Those are not the only places in the article where it feels like Ford’s thought is not as careful or thorough as it should be. In both his discussions of institutional racism and environmental racism, Ford concedes that these are two forms of genuine racism, but states that these kinds of racism are mischaracterised because in calling them “racism” the implication is that the acts are the result of deliberate bigotry (emphasis mine):
Many businesses, schools, clubs, and other organizations are racially homogenous or segregated, even though no one deliberately excludes racial minorities or tries to prevent them from succeeding. For instance, although roughly half of all college football players are black, only about 5 percent of head coaches are…And even if no one involved is a bigot, many scholars and activists would insist that this is a form of institutional racism. The term institutional racism suggests moral fault and culpability when often the racial inequity is unintentional. But, intended or not, practices that create “built-in headwinds” for minority groups are a serious injustice.
The term environmental racism refers to a serious problem, but like institutional racism, it muddies the issue by implying that bad people acting with racial animus are behind it, when poverty, bad urban design, and segregated residential patterns put in place many years ago are really to blame.
I found both these paragraphs confusing because Ford doesn’t unpack what he means by “racism.” After reading this article more than once, it became clear to me that Ford is assuming the reader thinks that racism is a) something that everyone is capable of (a belief I dealt with above) b) something that only baaad people do. And at points he seems to be implying – I think – that calling something racism when it doesn’t involve deliberate hatred, is confusing.
And that confuses me. Again it is a bit weird that an anti-racist scholar like Ford holds the rather elementary opinion that it is only baaad people with baaad intentions who get pleasure out of seeing others in pain are racists. As our friend Jay Smooth pointed out many eons ago – and as we state almost weekly – it really doesn’t matter what your intention is. To me there is absolutely nothing “muddying” or mischaracterising about saying that academic centers of power with no POC representation or “bad urban design” are racist. The intentions or motivations behind those barriers are irrelevant to me. By the fact that they form barriers to quality of life for POCs, they are racist entities.
This is nearly enough out of me, but I’d like to end by saying that I’d be much more open to this article if Ford presented these terms for consideration, saying that this is a starting point for a definition of racism, instead of saying “this is what racism is.” I would like this article a lot more if it was titled “An Open Invitation to Consider how we define Racism, Starting with My Opinion” rather than “A Primer on Racism.”
The attempt to define racism needs to be a dialogue, and it needs to take special heed of how the most marginalised folks in our society (in other words, not Stanford law professors, not Slate writers, and yes, not even Racialicious deputy editors) themselves define racism. Because I think as those who bear the brunt of racism are probably best qualified to tell us what it really is.
Andrea Plaid
Remember when I said I think the new way to discuss racism in the press is the “Trojan Horse” approach, in which white media hides their racially status-quo yet we’re-too-educated-to-be-racist ideas by offering PoCs writers the perfect publishing duty to, well, write those very same ideas. Thompson Ford’s article is the latest Trojan horse, where his primer really serves as a comfort for Slate’s mostly white audience by giving a Black person’s imprimatur on what’s “real” racism and what’s not. Because, as we all know, one Black person represents the whole race because we all think alike. (/sarcasm)
Thompson Ford offers comfort by either dismissing or euphemizing the “racisms” he discusses. Institutional racism equals a “serious injustice”; cultural racism is boils down to “serious problem”; unconscious racism is untestable and, therefore, questionable; environmental racism, “like institutional racism,” just muddies up the “true” class analysis; and reverse racism is truly practiced by Louis Farrakhan. (I’m surprised Thompson didn’t drop Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s name.) As with too many discussions about race and racism, his piece falls into the Black-White binary where, except Glenn Beck and Sen, Joe Wilson, whites are invisible and Black are in high relief as the vicitims or the perpetrators. Also, Thompson Ford also reuses the word “racism” until it becomes meaningless.
But what Thompson Ford did brings up a point Carmen brought up a good point in a tweet or her blog: we need another word besides “racism” to describe the hatred and/or fear of certain people based on a person’s phenotype and all the attributes attendant to it. I’m still thinking about it; Thompson’s post makes that re-thinking more urgent.
Wendi Muse
“That’s Racist!” is the well-known tagline from the blog Angry Asian Man. It also happens to be the rallying cry behind many a social movement, particularly in the United States, where race often trumps many other facets of our identities in debates on equal rights because, well, it’s so easy to identify. Or is it? Richard Thompson Ford attempts to unpack racism’s multiple forms (i.e. institutional, environmental, cultural, etc) for the reader who may not be so well-versed in racism’s many nuances. While Ford’s attempt is noble and, in my opinion, a great start for clarifying what racism means in a modern, American context, he makes one classic mistake. Instead of explaining racism’s effect on multiple communities, Ford boils down the great racism debate to black and white.
Given, Americans of African descent have often been the most vocal players in discussion around race and racism in the U.S., particularly because of their demographic visibility and the nation’s legacy of slavery, which made even the whitest of the white, from statesmen and slave owners to every day citizens, confront the issue of race, even if the debates around it were framed differently from those of today. Contemporary discussions of race also tend to resort to the bicameral black and white system, but with time, people of color from multiple backgrounds have played significant roles in the struggle for recognition, civil rights, and equality. So why now, as Ford discusses the multiple layers of racism and its evidence in the media and political realm, would he choose to ignore the complexities of the race debate when it comes to its own diversity?
All the more puzzling is how Ford could write an entire article on racism without pointing out that in each and every subcategory, one could replace the word “racism” with the word “classism”: and find oneself in a similar conundrum. Most of the issues covered in the article are tied inherently to class, and while Ford does make mention of the money issue, he focuses the entirety of his energies on the definitions of racism, distracting his audience once more from a topic that they should be thinking about in more depth.
I agree with Ford in his assertion that sometimes talking about race by way of racism can be a roundabout way of getting at a greater issue or even a point of distraction because of its sensationalism, but I wonder if he, too, has given much thought to the glaring absences in his piece and how their presence could help foster a more sane, concise, and developed discussion about race in the United States.
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Image via The Awl
Carmen Van Kerckhove is co-founder and president of 
atlasien wrote:
That article is really not very good at all.
It’s overwhelmingly centered on how white people feel and think. How can you list varieties of racism without listing internalized racism? That’s a big gaping hole right there. Internalized racism is a crucial component of how racism reproduces itself and has proved so difficult to overcome.
Without an understanding of internalized racism, white people who are invested in racism denying will never understand how it all works.
The discussion of “cultural racism” was scattered and confusing.
@Thea Lim: I totally agree with you except for one thing. I think the Racism = Prejudice + Power equation should still include white people as potential victims. It’s entirely possible that due to economic or other circumstances, people of color do have power over white people. For example, let’s use your example but say it’s a group of able-bodied Asian men yelling “cracker” at a disabled white woman. They have power over her, not because of their race but because of other factors… but it’s still power, and a racial slur aggravates the oppression. Or, let’s say it’s a white person working in a POC-owned company who is fired because of their race.
These things happen. They happen very rarely, and when they do, they are sometimes seized on by conservatives, endlessly trumpeted, improperly centered and blown up to be much more widespread than they really are. But I don’t think it’s possible to imply that white people are never victims of racism. Just because something is very very rare does not mean that it doesn’t exist at all.
Also, I agree that using Selma as the archetype of racist evil is just confusing and wrong. Its symbolism seems much more complicated. A lot of people were injured, but they were actively standing up for what they believed in, and it must have marked a really high point in their lives because of that. Selma isn’t the worst that racism has ever been in this country… it’s just the most visible racism has ever been in this country.
@Andrea Plaid: I read some entries on an interesting blog — http://amjca.blogspot.com/ — that argues for chucking any use of the word racism in a non-institutional sense (I think) and replacing it with “color arousal”, and treating extremes of “color arousal” as a mental illness on the part of the “color-aroused” person. It’s kind of tough to make such a big leap like that, but I like the overall concept, and the idea that personal racism is something that can be treated.
@Wendi Muse: Yep.
Posted 29 Oct 2009 at 10:44 am ¶
dersk wrote:
Agreed that defining the term ‘racist’ is a necessary first step – and I’m kind of surprised that that racism 101 page offers no definition of it.
It was a fairly poorly structured article – I think he may have been trying to put Selma forward as an example of active vs. passive, or thought vs. action?
@atlasien / @Thea – shouldn’t it be about perceived power – but then how do you measure it? I can easily imagine situations in which both people feel like they’ve got less power – what about, say, someone of Thai origins insulting a Hmong?
Your example, Thea, actually reinforces my personal opposition to hate crime legislation (basically, I don’t think it’ll help to reduce racially motivated – bias motivated? – crime, and it’s way too difficult to determine when bias is actually a factor in many cases).
Posted 29 Oct 2009 at 11:08 am ¶
Kari wrote:
I tend to use the word “bigoted” when referring to a person’s individual perceptions of others based on appearance, etc and try to reserve “racism” when discussing institutional/structural inequality.
Is Slate’s approach to explaining racism maybe similar to the movie Crash- in that it provides a way for white people to lay the issue out in front of us, and say “that’s not me- I don’t do that- I’m not racist.” It is not conducive to self-reflection.
Posted 29 Oct 2009 at 11:16 am ¶
refresh_daemon wrote:
I got annoyed with the Slate article in the second paragraph as the writer asserts that we’re overusing the word “racism”. As far as I can tell, we’re not using it enough and everyone’s busy denying it when it’s used to begin with.
I think I differ from consensus here in that I consider “racism” the systematic application of racial prejudice (note: not “systemic”). One’s racism is a state that they are in. Racial prejudice is the means by which that state is exerted. So, a racist exerts their racism by means of racial prejudice.
I also like to keep power separate when speaking of racism because, while it’s incredibly important to the discussion, it can vary and in some rare cases can shift from one side to the other. Thus making one person’s comments no longer racist, if you use the compound racial prejudice+power definition–but I prefer to think that all racist behavior is always racist behavior. However, I do think power is a necessary component of systemic racism.
Also, I consider the use of racial slurs less an act of racism and more an act of bigotry. Bigotry being the valuing of ones associated group more than all other groups (ex. white supremacy). As such, there is no prejudice necessarily involved in a slur, it’s a negatively weighted word used to describe a person of a certain background, but in its purest form I see them more used to devalue the other person because of their race than to ascribe to them any characteristics because of their race.
I do think that racism and bigotry almost always conflate themselves together, but I think it’s very useful to keep them separate in theory, because the more specific we can be, the more specifically we can attack the actual mechanics of both racism and bigotry without having assault it all at once.
I’ll be back with more thoughts later. I have to get back to work!
Posted 29 Oct 2009 at 12:22 pm ¶
Monica wrote:
I guess I am a neophyte to the study of racism, and this is the first time I’ve seen the distinction made between racism and individual racial prejudice. Incredibly helpful and illuminating. I love this website!
Regarding “classism,” I was reading something recently about “U” and “non-U” English usage in the UK and it makes me think that in the end, we don’t have a “class” problem in this country as much as we have a “money” problem. At extremes of poor grammar, think accents, or missing teeth, perhaps the class of Americans’ origins will hold them back and be determinative, but for by far the most part, it’s actually just money. Not that this is better, but it’s different. If you can get people into good schools, have good health care, enrichment, whatever all the advantages are that money conveys, they will not be held back by some ineffable “class” quality except perhaps from esoteric, effete organizatiosn of waning relevance. BY CONTRAST, race is a quality that you can’t buy your way out of. So I think the issues on class are more cut-and-dried, less nebulous, more easily solved and less insidious than those on race.
Thanks for the amazing dialogue you facilitate here. This is a truly top-notch blog.
Posted 29 Oct 2009 at 1:40 pm ¶
7thangel wrote:
are you all familiar with his books?
because just from the titles and blurbs, i get the white apologist vibe.
“trojan horse aproach” indeed.
Posted 29 Oct 2009 at 1:43 pm ¶
Elton wrote:
Ford’s article is poorly written and researched. Only someone with white privilege could mumble and speculate his way through a topic that has been done a million times, and a million times better, by anti-racist bloggers and get it published on Slate.
Here is the fundamental difficulty: How can a white person know what racism is?
Of course, there are white anti-racists like Tim Wise, but I’m sure they have done a lot more than just sit around in a little room and weave together anecdotes about Bill Cosby as “evidence” for their muddled “points.”
Not only is this not a primer on racism, it has the potential to do harm to anti-racism, it reeks of racism and privilege itself, in that it is a white person decreeing his poorly worded opinions as truth.
It is imperative that Racialicious and other anti-racist blogs be ready to continue to hammer down this article, because I have a feeling it will continue to get brought out as a weapon against us.
Mod Note: Richard Thompson Ford is not white: http://www.law.stanford.edu/directory/profile/20/Richard%20Thompson%20Ford/. See Andrea’s critique for why this doesn’t make this article any less problematic – but potentially more so.
Posted 29 Oct 2009 at 1:48 pm ¶
Thea Lim wrote:
@atlasien
Definitely white people can have less privilege than people of colour – but not less racial privilege.
So a straight black person can persecute a queer white person – but while race is involved there, that power dynamic is not about race but about sexuality.
(Note that I am speaking within a Western context – these things don’t translate to other countries)
Without more info about your imagined scenario (do the men harass the woman further? Do they harass her because they feel they can get away with it in a way that they feel they couldn’t harass an able-bodied white woman?), I can’t agree that that is an example of racism. In they harass her because she has a disability (therefore seems more easy prey to them) then that is ableism. But I don’t think it’s racism.
The fact is that acts of racism are always referencing some not so distant past as a means to put POCs “in their place.” When a white person drops an n-bomb on a black person, they are reminding black people that they used to be slaves. While the word “cracker” is meant to remind white people they used to be slaveowners, it just does not have the same effect because it doesn’t have the same historical power.
Posted 29 Oct 2009 at 4:06 pm ¶
atlasien wrote:
@Thea Lim: I agree “cracker” doesn’t have that much power… and there is no word for white people that approaches the power of other racial slurs (As a side note “cracker” etymologically has nothing to do with racial oppression, it dates from Shakespeare’s time and meant someone that was boastful and extravagant).
But that doesn’t mean that white people can’t be victims of racism. In the example I gave, I don’t think you can separate out what is ableism, sexism, racism… to do that, you would have to have an almost omniscient level of insight into the human mind. When we’re examining these kind of aggressive personal situations (personal, NOT institutional) we just don’t have that level of detail to know exactly why something started or in which particular area the hate started.
I’m especially thinking of bullying incidents that happen among children. If a white child gets bullied in part because of their race, the white child might be too young to wield their white privilege or even understand that they are white. The same goes with people who are white and mentally handicapped… I’m not bringing them up to be obstreperous, it’s just I witnessed a lot of them getting harassed when I was younger and it was really depressing.
If white-on-POC racism is like hitting someone with baseball bat, POC-on-white racism is like hitting someone with a small stick… no, it doesn’t have institutional force behind it, but it can still hurt, especially if the victim is particularly vulnerable because of other factors.
And then there are also the white victims of white-on-white racism, such as the white civil rights activists in the 50s and 60s.
Again, I think that when whites are victims of racism, the occasion is often improperly centered, and made to seem like it’s a lot less rare than it really is… but it still happens.
Posted 29 Oct 2009 at 6:01 pm ¶
Thea Lim wrote:
@atlasien
I was told that the word “cracker” came from “the cracking of the (master’s) whip.” Etymology is so interesting.
I don’t think that white people CANNOT experience pain to do with a racial incident, it’s more that I think it is not racism they’ve experienced. It’s prejudice. As a mixed race person who is read as white depending on where I am (for e.g., if I am in Asia) I have experienced definite prejudice that was about being white. It was hurtful and distressing, but it wasn’t racism.
One of the things that informs my understanding of racism is that, if the system of power in your culture states that you are top dog based on race, it doesn’t matter if from time to time POCs are nasty to you. I’ve heard white folks say they know what racism is because they were the only white people in their neighbourhood and experienced persecution because of that. But if that happened in the US, that’s not racism. It’s prejudice. I think it’s important to make the distinction.
I also think it’s important to distinguish between different ism’s, because they all work in very different ways. Sometimes they work simulataneously, but never in the same way. So ableism has different M.O. than racism. I still think that if able-bodied POCs harass a white person with a disability, it’s not racism. The POCs in the situation have power because of ability, not because of race.
I sense we are not going to agree on this – which is ok
Posted 29 Oct 2009 at 6:14 pm ¶
atlasien wrote:
Yep, I’m just not a big fan of a hard-and-fast prejudice versus racism distinction. I agree it’s useful to separate, at times, but they also bleed into each other in practice.
I wrote a piece on the word cracker here:
http://www.rachelstavern.com/race-and-racism/what-cracker-is-this.html
It’s got an interesting and complicated history… it used to have everything to do with class, not race, and though it’s semi-racialized nowadays, it still has a lot of class associations.
Posted 29 Oct 2009 at 6:28 pm ¶
Winn wrote:
As 7thangel said, I immediately knew this article would be made of fail considering the author. This is the guy who gave us The Race Card: How Bluffing About Bias Makes Race Relations Worse and Racial Culture: A Critique. Both are examples of the worst in conciliatory white folk apologia and perpetuating the idea, exemplified by his section on Selma, that racism is or should be primarily defined as overt, not covert, acts and explicitly voiced attitudes, and that anyone, regardless of race, class, access to power or position in the social hierarchy, is as capable of being racist as anyone else. He’s also an advocates of the idea of “racism without racists”, which divests individuals of any personal culpability in benefitting from pirivilege or perpetuating discriminatory institutions and structures. Only people of color need to be introspective and examine their motives in Thompson’s analysis; whites are relatively blameless and tired of being accused of racism on the flimsiest of evidence; therefore, they are justified in tuning out the needs of those hypersensitive or even “hustling” people of color trying to make them feel “guilty”. And as long as we pay attention to all this whining about racism, we’re ignoring much bigger problems that disproportionately impact people of color, but which aren’t really the fault of anyone living today, right? Sheesh! This is just a little more academic and analytical version of the Te-Nehisi Coates argument we were recently discussing here. And although Thompson has some insightful and nuanced points to argue, his overall theme doesn’t diverge too much from David Horowitz’s Hating Whitey or some of Patrick Buchanan’s essays. Can you tell I’m not a big fan? If Thompson truly considers himself an anti-racist scholar, of which I am dubious, given the baggage that has come to be associated with the therm “anti-racist”, he certainly has a different definition of it than I or most who ground our activism in critical race theory do.
Posted 29 Oct 2009 at 6:28 pm ¶
refresh_daemon wrote:
So, I read over R. Thompson Ford’s piece again. I get part of his unstated and possibly unconscious point in that calling everything racist, which a lot of people tend to overreact to (it’s sort of been given a status approaching that of calling someone a Nazi), while accurate, might be less than helpful due to the current emotional connotation connected to the word.
Nevertheless, I think racist behavior still needs to be called out all the same if it creates injustice. For me, that any behavior that includes an aspect of racial prejudice–where it matters. I’m too pragmatic to think we can wipe racism off of humanity, but it might be possible to tear large chunks of it away from where it has any power to create injustice in our society.
I also see RTF’s point in how it might be helpful to tease apart and attack separately prejudice based on culture as well as prejudice based on race, because race does not imply culture. It is still unjust (and equally wrong) to prejudge someone by their affiliated culture and while it often does conflate with racism, due to our predominantly sensory nature, we do stand to benefit if we’re specific.
…
I think that it might be helpful to understand what the mainstream believes racism to mean, dissect it and find new ways around the word, while still accurately describing the injustice that is occurring. Even here we seem to be a little divergent on what racism means.
Posted 29 Oct 2009 at 8:18 pm ¶
ashlynn wrote:
This article is pretty awful because you think, “wow, this guy really doesn’t know what he’s talking about” because he’s white, but he not. It’s like the black white supremacist skit on Chappelle all over again!
The fact that Ford excludes unconscious racism is probably the worst part here. Racism doesn’t stop at hosing people down in the streets or jumping a kid on his way home after school. If that were the case, then hey, we really WOULD be in a post-racist society(hahahano)! The true danger of racism today is that its principles are ingrained in the mind, cultivating over time and being passed down like some sort of sick tradition. It’s largely a mental issue, which is why you see so many of the people most affected by racism dealing with mental and emotional issues, defined/identified/classified or not.
Posted 29 Oct 2009 at 9:41 pm ¶
Nate wrote:
Thea
What about racism in the non-western context – for example ‘developed’ asian countries? Power resides with the majority group in a lot of cases, an example is Singapore and the discriminatory treament of guestworkers – Are you saying that even when systemic prejudice is displayed by a POC state, or individually by the majority members of that state, it isn’t racism?
Posted 30 Oct 2009 at 5:56 am ¶
Slush wrote:
Such a great discussion. On the dialogue of Thea Lim and Atlasien – I think it has a lot to do (a lot, but not everything) with regional majority.
In the US overall, whites are a majority and dominant group, but that isn’t true in certain neighborhoods, or cities or political groups or social groups. So in certain contexts, I think even the sort of basic power dynamic that Thea is talking about can shift. And at that point it could shift from prejudice to racism, even according to Thea’s distinction.
I guess the counterargument is that whites can always most easily retreat from that situation to a space of power, because that is the default for them anyway.
Posted 30 Oct 2009 at 12:58 pm ¶
Thea wrote:
@Nate
Note my comment at #8 – Racialicious is a US based blog, so unless otherwise indicated you can assume that we are talking about the US. Racial landscapes are vastly different from country to country – we don’t try to speak for any context other than a Western one.
It’s funny you should mention Singapore – I grew up there. Yes definitely, racism is in the hands of whoever the system prefers, and obviously that will mean POCs in some countries. I would argue in Singapore that the power group is the Chinese, and the way (for eg) Filipin@, Indonesian and Sri Lankan workers are treated in Singapore is appalling. I think that is as much racism as it is xenophobia.
Posted 30 Oct 2009 at 1:10 pm ¶
GENQ10 wrote:
This is what drives me nuts about journalists: they are essentially amateurs. For opinion pieces on highly sensitive–and important– subjects like race, I wish newspapers and magazines would get more scholars and academics to weigh in more often. People in the field of cultural studies–including White studies, who are themselves from a variety of racial backgrounds (although I would prefer to see more people of color writing these articles in general). There’s just too much information out there to trust this stuff to your run of the mill opinion columnist.
Of course, I will admit to my own prejudice against opinion columnists. I think if newspapers did a good job, people could form their own opinions.
Posted 30 Oct 2009 at 2:58 pm ¶
Winn wrote:
@GENQ10,
Actually, Ford is neither a journalist nor an opinion columnist, but a law professor at Stanford. Therefore, he is ostensibly a “scholar and academic”, which is why his analysis is so disappointing in its simplicity, lack of nuance, and appeasement undertones.
Posted 30 Oct 2009 at 9:35 pm ¶
Charles J wrote:
I like to use Dr. Cathy Royal’s definition of isms, especially racism. It’s very simple and you cannot get bogged down with “misunderstanding” she states racism is the denial of services, goods and opportunities by Whites (as a group) over people of color.
Her definition is straight to the point.
Posted 01 Nov 2009 at 5:20 pm ¶
Daktari wrote:
“So if I yell “cracker” at a white man walking down the street (which btw I wouldn’t do and also don’t condone), my action has far less impact than if a white man yelled “chink” at me while I was walking down the street. The first scenario is an example of racial prejudice and being a jerk. The second scenario is racism and a hate crime.”
WTF? You do it and you’re rude? I do it, I’m a criminal?
Posted 01 Nov 2009 at 7:40 pm ¶
Mars wrote:
@Daktari
You didn’t quote the first part of that paragraph that analyzed the difference between those two words “cracker” and “chink” as stemming from their implications that the person saying the word has more power, or is better than, persons of the group being slurred. (They feel justified in saying the slur because of their prejudiced and when they verbalize this out loud, they usually know they can get away with using such a word).
When you say “you do it…I do it”, you have to realize that the two words/acts of saying them are not the same and do not carry the same weight. It is wrong to judge people by the color of their skin–which leads to generalizations about who they are without getting to know the person, simplifying them as a stereotype. However the use of the words “chink, nigger, spic”…etc, when used by people not of this disadvantaged minority group (especially white people who are able to get by due to power and privilege), serve as a reminder of that person’s inadequacy in a white dominated society.
If hurling racial epithets and insults constitutes verbal harassment, words like “chink”– that are motivated by a white person’s racist dismissal of an Asian as not good enough–should be taken more seriously. These words are indicators of the imbalance of power, the way that minorities are held back in American society, simply because of prejudices and stereotypes.
Posted 03 Nov 2009 at 12:56 pm ¶