I knew some people looked at white people that way. I even remember wayyyy back in the 2005-2010 era, white people were encountering more people who had that view online (they had never met a non-white person who expressed a racist belief about them as white people).
I remember making a thread about it on here, like wayyyy back in 2012 or 2013. I posted the two different definitions, the one that most people used and the one that involved some subjective assumption of power and privilege and such.
I was surprised to see the split was closer to 50-50 on here. I thought for certain it would be around 90-10...or 95-5. It was pretty even though. It didn't seem ideological....it seemed age based.
I still don't know how or why that definition gained acceptance. No other type of bigotry has some power matrix involved (we don't consider bigotry against non-English speakers as something that is power based...for example, an English speaker chastising the Japanese in Japan for not speaking English doesn't suddenly become a valid viewpoint).
I have thought maybe it was because they had so little pre-exposure to black people before the internet....they felt like it was wrong to point out. I also considered that black people who similarly hadn't been called racist before latched onto the new definition as a defense mechanism.
Maybe a mix of the two. Maybe something else entirely.
What I did know was that people were being really dishonest. They didn't actually examine power relationships when calling people racist or declaring a statement or behavior racist. Likewise the excuse the a non-white person was merely engaging in a racial stereotype (not racism) was often said to be immoral....yet it was disregarded as not worthy of concern. The other excuse I commonly heard was that it must come from a viewpoint of racial superiority....which black people simply didn't have.
Yet it's contained in the racist beliefs themselves. White people are oppressors is a racist viewpoint. It contains a moral accusation...if not a legal one. If black people considered themselves just as capable of the same level and scope of immorality....the same kind of oppression....why even bother saying it?
I have to wonder how things might be different had we not bent the rules for black people on racism. Could it have led to a self examination of racism in non-white communities and we would be closer to that colorblind society?
Maybe. Maybe not lol.
Every racist believes their racist beliefs are valid...not just correct, justifiable. Racism wasn't invented to provide a convincing excuse for slavery....it became attached to ideas of racial limitations. It was the explanation for why those European explorers never found a African Shakespeare or Central American Michelangelo. If you were only capable of x....you were only good for y. It seemed both reasonable, readily observable, and a fact of history. Why wouldn't they believe the theory of race?
It was such a powerful explanation that it was not completely disproved until the entire genome was mapped. Racist beliefs had already fallen out of popularity...too much counter-evidence existed. Many scientists still expected to find
something though.
We generally stopped using race as an explanation for anything by 2000...it was called out frequently when made public. We had plenty of issues to work on...but it seemed like we were heading in the right direction.
Now a racist belief has circulated around a bubble of academia and gained a level of legitimacy in the public through repetition and intimidation.
It's a racist idea though, and as ideas that inform worldviews go....racist ideas have a really bad track record. They're never right.
