Okay, so I admit to being a little behind on the Unviersity of Delware's support of racist views, but nonetheless let me weigh in. Here's the quote from the pamphlet UD distributed: "A racist is one who is both privileged and socialized on the basis of race by a white supremacist (racist) system. The term applies to all white people (i.e. people of European descent) living in the United States regardless of class, gender, religion, culture or sexuality. By this definition, people of color cannot be racists, because as peoples within the U.S. system they do not have the power to back up their prejudices, hostilities or acts of discrimination."
In the quote they define racism as white supremacism. However, if we break the word down, we see that "white" supremacism is not found in the word at all. Any time you have an "-ism" you have an ideology based on the root you attach "-ism" to. Thus, "racism" is an ideology based on race. Any time you have any kind of ideology that requires that you consider race, you have racism. So when you have a statement that "X applies to all Y kinds of people," you have a racist statement. Power is not involved in whether you believe in any sort of "-ism," and in fact, many "-isms" in the world are believed by minorities within a majority culture. It would be ridiculous to say that someone in the United States cannot believe in communism because the communists don't have the power to back up their ideology.
But let us, for the sake or argument, accept the idea that to be a racist, you have to have power. The last sentence would still be nonsense, as the victims of the Black Panthers know. A small group of people can easily get the power to back up their prejudices, hostilities or acts of discrimination. Or didn't the people in charge over at UD not notice what happened on 9-11?
So we have seen that sentence 1 is at best a bad definition. The second sentence is an outright racist statement based upon the actual definition of racism. And the third sentence is an outright lie.
This analysis does to some extent have one problem: it masks my true outrage at this statement. In saying I am a racist, it is saying that I hate my Mexican-American wife and our daughter. And for that I demand an apology!
1 comment:
Well said, Dr T. The definition of racism provided by U of D is a racist statement in itself.
Martin Luther King dreamed of a day when the color of our skin wouldn't matter. That is a reasonable goal. The anti-racist racists of today seem to want us to give up all vestiges of non African culture, and that seems to say that we have a long way to go to achieve Dr. King's dream.
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