Post by HMARK Center on Sept 1, 2014 17:32:46 GMT -5
The problem with "racism" and "institutional racism" is that the adjective in the latter tends to get left off, and creates more confusion/hurt because of it. They are not one in the same.
Do whites benefit from institutional racism that has been in place since, well, probably the Renaissance? Yeah, on the whole I'd say yes. But that gets murky when it gets stretched to claims like "blacks can't be racist" when anyone individually can be racist, or that anyone who has worked hard in their life doesn't deserve what they've earned because they live in a society that has institutional racism.
(on an aside, this isn't necessarily a specific response to you, just a general opinion of mine)
It's a fascinating thing, too, in that it's something that can be misused by anybody.
Like you said, yeah: anybody can have racist beliefs, judgments, or practices, no matter their ethnicity/background. To say that isn't true is to commit the sin of taking what might be a traditionally oppressed group and making everybody in it out to be saints...a practice which is just as dehumanizing (albeit in a VERY different way), as acting like they're all bad.
But then there's the other way of abusing it, like somebody from a dominant group saying "Well, he's called white people 'crackers' before", so anything said back to him is fair"...which ignores the whole "you're not really insulting white people when you call them a name" thing we've talked about.
It just shows how pointless it is to ever talk in platitudes about issues like race; it's so intensely complex, rife with a twisted, broad history, and can be looked at from so many different angles/experiences/etc.