Can’t believe I’m having to post this on the account I made to make fun of crypto and finance bros lol

The 'reverse racism' card is often pulled by white people when people of color call out racism and discrimination, or create spaces for themselves ... that white people aren't a part of. The impulse behind the reverse racism argument seems to be a desire to prove that people of color don't have it that bad, they're not the only ones that are put at a disadvantage or targeted because of their race. It's like the Racism Olympics. And it's patently untrue" (Blay, 2015).

REVERSE RACISM IS A MYTH

While assumptions and stereotypes about white people do exist, this is considered racial prejudice, not racism. Racial prejudice refers to a set of discriminatory or derogatory attitudes based on assumptions derived from perceptions about race and/or skin colour. Thus, racial prejudice can indeed be directed at white people (e.g., "White people can't dance") but is not considered racism because of the systemic relationship to power. When backed with power, prejudice results in acts of discrimination and oppression against groups or individuals. In Canada, white people hold this cultural power due to Eurocentric modes of thinking, rooted in colonialism, that continue to reproduce and privilege whiteness. It is whiteness that has the power to define the terms of racialized others' existence. Tim Wise explains how, for white individuals,

"When a group of people [such as racialized individuals] has little or no power over you institutionally, they don't get to define the terms of your existence, they can't limit your opportunities, and you needn't worry much about the use of a slur to describe you and yours, since, in all likelihood, the slur is as far as it's going to go. What are they going to do next: deny you a bank loan? Yeah, right. ... White perceptions are what end up counting in a white-dominated society. If whites say [Indigenous people] are savages (be they of the "noble" or vicious type), then by God, they'll be seen as savages. If [Indigenous people] say whites are mayonnaise-eating Amway salespeople, who the hell is going to care? If anything, whites will simply turn it into a marketing opportunity. When you have the power, you can afford to be self-deprecating, after all" (2002).

Ricky Sherover-Marcuse asserts that "we should not confuse the occasional mistreatment experienced by whites at the hands of people of color with the systematic and institutionalized mistreatment experienced by people of color at the hands of whites" (p. 2). While expressions of racial prejudice directed at white people may hurt the white person/people individually or personally, and are never to be condoned, they do not have the power or authority to affect the white person's social/economic/political location and privileges.

"Racism has nothing to do with feelings. It is a measurable reality that white people are not subject to, regardless of their income or status" (Harriot, 2018).

Reverse racism is a myth because it attempts to ignore the power/privilege dynamic between the individuals/groups involved; the myth of reverse racism assumes that racism occurs on a so-called level playing field, when in actuality, it does not.

One claim of "reverse racism" that is often made is in relation to affirmative actions programs: programs that were created to help ensure that non-white individuals are given equal consideration and opportunities, whether it is in regards to employment, school, or scholarships etc. For white individuals, programs such as this might feel like something is being "taken away." Zeba Blay outlines how white people often "believe deserving white students are discriminated against while academically unqualified students are given highly coveted college or company positions -- just because they happen to tick the 'ethnic minority' box.

This argument ignores the fact that affirmative action did not come out of nowhere -- there was a need for a system that would address the decades of underrepresentation of people of color both academically and in the job world." Sherover-Marcuse explains how "[a]ffirmative action programs are attempts to repair the results of institutionalized racism by setting guidelines and establishing procedures for finding qualified applicants from all segments of the population" (p. 2). In other words, these programs do not privilege people of colour but are an attempt to "level" the not-so-level playing field that has historically privileged a certain type of candidate.

↳ See our definition of White Privilege/White-Skin Privilege

References:

Recommended Readings:

  • AcidSmiley [she/her]
    ·
    2 years ago

    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.