I’ve been looking for a resource for my white friends to explain how systemic racism and micro-aggressions are different from the big-R ‘Racism’ in their heads. I have struggled to explain that as a group, white people are racist. There is a difference between systemic racism and individual acts – the big-R racists with their jackboots and their Swastikas, the cliched ‘racist’ which people mentally associate with racism. The sort we have seen very recently attacking the police in London and strangely pissing on memorials while claiming to ‘protect the statues’ and support the police!
Yet in the systemic sense, yes white people are racist because we prop up and benefit from the system that have made such actions profitable through the exploitation of other races. It is a toxic soup all around us, we breathe it in, we live in it. To steal back the metaphor from the alt-right it is our Matrix, it is like a virus we cannot see, infecting every generation.
White supremacy is everywhere and we benefit from these privileges and those of other races still are brutalised, harassed, insulted, killed and structurally disadvantaged by this system. And our silence lets that grow. We are complicit.
In the individual sense, no you’re probably not ‘racist’, but as a group sense, yes we all are (as white people). And we have an individual responsibility to actively fight against both types of racism – Dr Robin helpfully describes it as the ‘New Racism’ – otherwise we are enabling it.
Upset by any of those statements? About to get all huffy and post a nasty comment? Watch the video by Dr. Robin DiAngelo FIRST. It explains all of these things far better than I, and the fact that people get defensive and angry like you are now are, it is part of the problem which she explains. I will not answer comments unless they have watched the whole thing. No ‘but ifs…’ or ‘what abouts…’.
Watch it. And maybe learn.
Leave a Comment! Be nice….