{"id":3015,"date":"2006-12-11T18:12:07","date_gmt":"2006-12-12T01:12:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.amptoons.com\/blog\/archives\/2006\/12\/11\/racism-and-racists\/"},"modified":"2006-12-11T18:12:07","modified_gmt":"2006-12-12T01:12:07","slug":"racism-and-racists","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=3015","title":{"rendered":"Racism and Racists"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>Editor&#8217;s note: Last week I started a big debate over at my blog with <\/em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.rachelstavern.com\/?p=280\"><em>this rant\/post.<\/em><\/a>\u00a0 The post below is inspired from that debate.<em>\u00a0 I&#8217;ve been really frustrated with the &#8220;I&#8217;m not racist&#8221; refrain that I keep hearing over and over, and Dumi over at <\/em><a href=\"http:\/\/blackatmichigan.blogspot.com\/2006\/12\/reclaiming-racist.html\"><em>Black at Michigan<\/em><\/a><em> put some of my views into his words, so I gave a short ranting response that lead to a good discussion on racism.\u00a0 I&#8217;m posting the follow-up post where I discuss racism and racists in more depth, but in order to follow the meaning of this post, I suggest following the debate at my blog, and reading the post at Dumi&#8217;s blog to put this in perspective.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>The I&#8217;m a Racist and I Participate in Racism thread has really touched on many important issues, and I thought it would be useful to further discuss some of the issues that people brought up in the comments section.\u00a0 Let me first say that I don&#8217;t really think that we can separate racism and racists.\u00a0 I see racism existing in four major forms:\u00a0<\/p>\n<ul>\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n<li><strong>Individual or isolate<\/strong>\u2014actions or incidents that are the products of isolated individuals, who intentionally or unintentionally harm people physically, psychologically, or socially because of the race, gender, national origin, etc.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Small group&#8211;<\/strong>actions or incidents that involve a relatively small number of people, who intentionally or unintentionally harm people physically, psychologically, or socially because of their race, gender, national origin, etc<\/li>\n<li><strong>Direct Institutional<\/strong>\u2014laws, policies, and formal and informal practices encoded in institutions that are specifically designed to exclude minority groups from access to resources<\/li>\n<li><strong>Indirect institutional<\/strong>&#8211;laws, policies, and formal and informal practices that are not specifically designed to exclude minority groups; however, the result of these policies is such that minority groups are disproportionately affected. (These typologies comes from <a href=\"<a href=\"http:\/\/www.socioweb.com\/sociology-textbooks\/book\/0136747221%22%3EFeagin\">http:\/\/www.socioweb.com\/sociology-textbooks\/book\/0136747221<\/a>&#8220;>\u00a0Feagin and Feagin.)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Feagin&#8217;s model could be used for any type of discrimination, but in this case I wanted to focus on racism.\u00a0 I think racism exists on two major levels&#8211;the institutional levels and the interpersonal level.<br \/>\nOf course racism, is not the same as racists.\u00a0 Racists would be the people who participate in racism whether it is institutional or interpersonal in its nature.\u00a0 When most people think of racists, they think of people engaging in interpersonal racism, but I think anyone who participates in upholding racist structures or institutions is indeed racist.\u00a0 I know that won&#8217;t sit well with many folks because they view racists as people who act with a deliberate intent to cause harm, but I would contend that many people do not intend to cause harm.\u00a0 In fact, some people are relatively powerless in a social system, and they engage in racism even though they may think that it is wrong or harmful.\u00a0 In his famous essay on racism and the American creed, sociologist, Robert Merton ((Merton, Robert K. 1948. &#8220;Discrimination and the American Creed.&#8221; Pp. 99-126 in R.M. Maclver, ed. Discrimination and National Welfare. New York: Harper &#038; Brothers.)) mentions a group of people he labels non-prejudice discriminators.\u00a0 These are people who do not hold prejudiced beliefs, but engage in discriminatory behavior.\u00a0 I think in many cases non-prejudiced discriminators are relatively powerless.\u00a0 Take the example of a loan officer at a bank that has redlining policies or a cashier in a store that has informal policies of targeting black customers as shoplifters.\u00a0 While the loan officer and the cashier may think these policies are wrong, they could fear losing their jobs if they do not comply with the institutional rules.\u00a0 Are these people racist?\u00a0 Yes.\u00a0 However, they are likely not as culpable as the people who create and enforce such racist policies.\u00a0 Moreover, we could also have social institutions that include people who are not racist in their interpersonal lives, but a part of systems that support institutional racism.<br \/>\nMany people immediately jump to a discussion of culpability when racism comes up&#8211;the key question they ask is, &#8220;Who is to blame?&#8221;\u00a0 However, I think if we just started from the point that blame is less important than eradicating racist behaviors and institutions, we would all be better.\u00a0 Personally, I think everybody deserves a little blame, but some deserve more blame than others.\u00a0 For me culpability is directly related to power&#8211;the more power a person has the more culpability he or she has.\u00a0 Nevertheless, the blame discourse is not really going to get us further because it exacerbates social inequalities that already exist.\u00a0 I&#8217;m not saying; don&#8217;t speak truth to power, but I am saying that it is important as a strategy to work of redistributing power more than placing blame.<br \/>\nPersonally, I use the term white racism, not because I want to &#8220;blame&#8221; all whites for racism.\u00a0 I use &#8220;white racism&#8221; because I agree with the commenters that institutional racism is much more insidious, and institutional racism in the US is undoubtedly &#8220;white racism.&#8221;\u00a0 Racism is not just &#8220;white&#8221; because of who created or maintained it; it is also white because it upholds white supremacy.\u00a0 There is no history of social institutions in this country that upholds &#8220;black racism&#8221; as an ideology.\u00a0 Many people of color also participate in white racism&#8211;one primary example being colorism which exists in numerous societies.<br \/>\nMany commenters also suggested that &#8220;reclaiming the term racist&#8221; and arguing that everybody is racist may not be an effective strategy for social change because it is either 1) too radical for people to accept or 2) it is so conservative that people may say why change. I think the question about strategy is important.\u00a0 I don&#8217;t have a simple answer as to what the best strategy would be, but I do have a collection of random thoughts about it:\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n<ul>\u00a0<\/p>\n<li>I would like to change how people define racism.\u00a0 To me racism is not about hate or evil, although I do think it is morally corrupt.\u00a0 If we could focus more on behaviors and practices and less on &#8220;good vs. evil,&#8221; we may be able to make a dent in racism.\u00a0 Part of what started my rant was the fact that people were engaging in very clear (interpersonal) racist behavior, and saying they weren&#8217;t racist because they were nice people, etc. etc.<\/li>\n<li>Part of the problem we have now is the emergence of a colorblind\/raceblind rhetoric.\u00a0 Reclaiming racist challenges colorblindness and can make institutional and interpersonal racism more apparent.\u00a0 People don&#8217;t like the r-words (racist and racism), but many really don&#8217;t have a problem with engaging in racist behavior or turning a blind eye to racism.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I could write more, but I&#8217;ll turn it over to the readers.\u00a0 Do you think it is worth it to try to put the word &#8220;racism&#8221; and &#8220;racist&#8221; back into the lexicon?\u00a0 If not, why?\u00a0 If so, what strategy do you think we be effective.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Editor&#8217;s note: Last week I started a big debate over at my blog with this rant\/post.\u00a0 The post below is inspired from that debate.\u00a0 I&#8217;ve been really frustrated with the &#8220;I&#8217;m not racist&#8221; refrain that I keep hearing over and &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=3015\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[93,92],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3015","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-race-racism-and-related-issues","category-whatever"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3015","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3015"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3015\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3015"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3015"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3015"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}