If you're Jewish and you vote for Biden you hate your religion and hate Israel

[Dill]

(03-19-2024, 08:23 PM)CJD Wrote: I'm not saying systemic racism doesn't exist. It very much does. I'm just saying the people who took the definition of "racism + power = oppression/systemic racism" and changed it to "prejudice + power = racism" did nothing to help the cause and only created a knee jerk defensive reaction in white people by telling them that "you can't be racist to a white person, only prejudice" when everyone knows the colloquial definition of racism is, "that person did something or said something to me based on my race and their hatred of me for that reason. "

The Kerner Commission set off knee jerk defensive reactions for sure as it placed the responsibility for rioting not on blacks but on whites, in the collective
structure of city governments.  Many whites thought that unfair. You blame rioters for riots, not "power structures." Especially when you are part of the power structure.

Since then, civil rights activists have tended to view racism as institutional and subject to policy correctives, and their opponents have characterized it as something individuals choose to practice or not, and so not subject to policy, just something "both sides" do.

The colloquial definition you mention wasn't very useful in analyzing power relations, and the persistence of inequality in housing, education, and incarceration.
Hence the distinction between "prejudice" and "racism," which located the latter not in individuals but in institutions.

But I can understand why the distinction could disconcert some. I don't think it very well understood. Fox and friends have helped in this regard by flipping CRT tenets, like "race is a social construct," into their opposite--whites are racist just by being white. 

It's easy to imagine black and white HS kids arguing about race and white kids getting angry because the black kids could say all manner of disparaging things about whites, then claim they cannot be racist because only whites can.  I had a conversation like that with a young American/Nigerian woman who told me that blacks could not be racist because of the power differential in transactions, which she seemed to think was always operative when a black and a white interacted, but not when blacks and blacks interacted. I asked her how the "racism" designation would work if I were in a market in Lagos and a Nigerian merchant cheated me and the police refused to address the matter.  I.e., would I be the "racist" as a white person facing black power structure. She couldn't answer me directly. Or perhaps she did not yet have the facility to jump it to the global level, Nigeria being an ex-colony. 

But yeah. Lot of people out there who don't know what they're talking about on "both sides." And others seeking to ramp up the misunderstanding with disinformation.