Please no politics wrote:
Please do not mention any political party or person in this discussion.
The term, racist, is used often and there is much disagreement about who is and who is not one.
Certainly if you join a KIK or some other hate group you are racist.
But people can have different levels of bias for against certain groups but not to the extent of being considered a racist.
I think we all, blacks and whites have some biases, and it's foolish to think we don't. But we are not all racists. I also think hatred or demeaning thoughts toward another race is racism, and any color or religion can harbor racists. But simple bias is not racism.
Discuss.
Racism depends on several things. One of them is a belief that human beings can, in fact, be parsed into distinct races. For example: blacks, whites, Asians, Hispanics, Native Americans, Negroes, Malays, Pygmies, Esquimeaux, Nordics. You'll notice that I began with today's conventional racial categories and moved back in time to racial categories that were in effect in America in earlier times.
A second constituent of racism is the idea of attributing specific qualities--intelligence, "craftiness," sexual hunger, "inscrutability," laziness, criminality, etc., to specific races, as though those qualities basically apply to every single person who can be placed in that racial category. As though, for example, all whites were industrious and all blacks were (or strongly tended to be) lazy.
A third constituent of racism is the idea of hierarchy: the idea that some races are higher or better or better looking (or uglier, or stupider) than other races. You can't have racism without some sort of hierarchy, even if it's only implicit. The idea of white supremacy emerges here.
It has been fashionable for a long time among academic leftist to insist that racism is, in addition, defined by power: the ability to inflict your negative racial ideas on other people, and that only white people--those controlling the levers of power--can be racist, whereas others, including black people, can at worst be "prejudiced." I don't agree with this definition, but I understand what it's trying to get at, which is that racism, especially in America, was as invidious as it was because America was understood by those in power to be a white man's country.
That phrase, "a white man's country," isn't just some contemporary leftist slur. That is how American white men talked in 1900, and they had virtually all the cultural and political power. Black men had been Jim Crowed out of the right to vote, no women of any race could vote; Chinese and Indians couldn't vote, of course. Scientific racism flourished in America between the 1840s and the 1930s, Franz Boas notwithstanding. Google "Josiah Nott."
Eleven years ago, when Obama and his family took the stage in Chicago on election night, I would have said that white supremacist racism in America had more or less been stamped out as an active ideology; I might even have argued that the reason academic leftist were so concerned with the phrase "structural racism" was precisely because the other, old-fashioned sort of Archie Bunkerish racism had greatly diminished and a new way was needed of keeping the word "racism" alive.
I was a fool. It's alive and well. Not in the world of advertising--as Leon Wynter noted in AMERICAN SKIN, American advertisers continue to lead the way with evocations of America as a completely transracial place--but in many other arenas. Including, quite often, this forum.