re: The Riots Are Coming.

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We’re all prejudiced, because we grow up in a racist culture and we inherit those prejudices. But racism is a system of institutional, systemic oppression, and in order to be racist, you need both the prejudice + the power to affect people. By that definition, which a lot of progressives share, PoC (people of color) can’t be racist, because they don’t have any reinforcement from that institutionalized power. We may hold individual racist ideas and thoughts, but we only have the power to do damage with our actions in the rare, brief contexts where our other privileges temporarily override color privilege. A relative of mine may say racist things about black or white people in her own home, but when she engages with the wider world, as she must do daily, she’s just another brown girl, and is therefore at risk.

So while a black person may be prejudiced against whites even to the point of hurting and killing them, he is not racist: he lacks the power of the courts, the police, the banks, the newspapers and so on to affect society as a whole. Going by this meaning of the word the only racist people in America are white.

racism = prejudice + power

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