Yeah, I've always felt like the "Racism = Prejudice + Power" formula is needlessly confusing and would be vastly improved by just adding the word Systemic before Racism.

Like it or not most people use the word racism to describe any kind of racial prejudice, I'm guessing that that's why the term "systemic racism" even exists in the first place, to distinguish the two. It's fine to use racism as a short hand for systemic racism in leftist or academic circles, but telling ordinary white people "it's actually impossible to be racist against you crackkkers :gigachad-hd:", although very funny, is not really the best way to educate them.

It is accurate for the US. Some people argue that in Europe, Eastern European people, who are generally considered white, are subject to systemic discrimination based on their ethnicity. I agree with that view, but it's arguable if that is racist or rather national-chauvinist. The American and European perspective on this are just very different.

What we have to keep in mind here is that racism was constructed differently from one society to the next, depending on how it best served the interests of the ruling class . In my home country Germany, racism is still heavily influenced by nazi race "science", which has led to the systematic murder of millions of Eastern European people during a brutal war of extermination. Racializing slavic peoples was front and center in that ideology, as it served to justify the invasion, pillaging and mass murder that was conducted during the Generalplan Ost. Structurally, this was like an attempted speedrun of the genocidal westward expansion of the settler project in America, and it was in fact directly inspired by the genocide of the Indigenous peoples of North America. These people were labeled as "subhuman", they were shot en masse, they were subject to systematic sexual assault, their villages were burnt to the ground, as PoWs they were purposefully worked to death or starved to death. 3 million PoWs from the USSR died in nazi captivity, no other ethnicity suffered similar losses as prisoners on any side of WW2. It could very well be described as the second worst thing the nazis did, and that's really saying something given the long, long list of their atrocities. This also has effects until this day, there is definitely at least racial prejudice against Eastern Europeans, which can be seen in Russophobic war propaganda right now, in the fetishization of Ukrainian women seeking refuge from the war, but also in a general cultural attitude that sees all men from the East as vodka-swilling criminals and all women from there as submissive sex toys. Such attitudes are very widespread culturally, so widespread that many of the Polish people i know try to pass as German, train to get rid of their accent, try their hardest to be a "model minority", keep the last name of their German ex-wive instead of their birth name to avoid discrimination etc.

I understand that my BIPoC comrades in America have a very different perspective on this subject, as they suffer daily from structural racism built upon the settler ideology, which is constructed along the British-Imperialist ideology of whiteness instead of nazi race "science". In that ideology, if you are white or not is front and center and the standards for being "nonwhite" are so strict that even the nazis thought of them as too rigid. For a Black person living in America and not being familiar with the details of nazism and WW2, it most likely sounds as if i'm belittling their lived experience when i argue that a Pole or Russian, who would never face systemic racism in America, can be subject to not just racial prejudice, but outright racism that has historically been used to justify a genocide.

So i'm extremely reluctant to say "yes, racism against slavs is real" when i make that point in an American context. In no small part because "anti-white racism" is also a fash talking point here in Germany, where chuds think being called a Kartoffel or an Alman by muslim kids is akin to being called the n-word, which obviously is the biggest bs imaginable. As a trans woman i know what it's like to see people use actual slurs for me. When people call me a Kartoffel, i can shrug it off without problems, that doesn't affect me, that doesn't threaten me, that isn't tied to a very real risk of violence and discrimination i face for being trans. Equating that kind of prejudice, that kind of "crackerphobia" or w/e with racism against Black people, with islamophobia and antisemitism, with queerphobia, with ableism, that's a fucking joke. We do not need to argue that. I have a direct comparison and it's just laughable to equate this. But we Kartoffels and yanqui crackers aren't the only white people out there - there's lived experiences that are very different from ours and the historic context they're placed in makes it seem highly problematic to discount them.

The question here is mostly if we understand racism as something that works along the lines of "white" and "non-white" or as something that works along the lines of "aryan" and "not aryan". If it's the latter, than there are some white people that suffer from racism. but they do not suffer from it for being white, they suffer form it for not being considered white enough, and that racism is coming from other white people, not from non-whites.