Are All White People Racist?
Not all white people are racist, because not all white people live in a country where being white gives them an advantage.
When I first saw the headline, “ All White People are Racist”, my first thought was, “That’s a racist thing to say.” My second thought was, “This person must define racism differently than I do.”
I had thought of racism as what happens on the personal level, and discrimination as what happens on a societal level. I thought that making a judgement of someone or treating them differently based on the color of their skin was what racism was. After doing a little Google research, though, I’ve come to believe that what I thought of as racism is currently defined as racial prejudice. Racism, on the other hand, is what happens on a societal level when people have certain advantages or disadvantages based on their ancestry, or, more accurately, on what their ancestry appears to be. By this definition, if I’m understanding it correctly, anyone who has benefitted from being born in a society where their apparent race is advantaged over other races is a racist.
If I’ve understood it correctly, this would mean that Japanese people living in Japan are racist, but people of European descent living in Japan are not, because having Japanese ancestry in Japan gives a person advantages, while having European ancestry does not (at least not on a societal scale).
I’m guessing that if you have European ancestry and grew up in China or Saudi Arabia, you would also not be a racist by this definition. I’m guessing there are many countries where people of European ancestry are not racist, by this definition of racism. It may even be possible that people of European ancestry experience racism in these countries.
To me it seems unfortunate to define racism in such a way, since many people do use the terms “racism” and “racial prejudice” interchangeably. “Being racist” and “having white privilege” seem synonymous in countries like the U.S.A., where the dominant culture confers advantages to people who appear to have mostly European ancestry. Instead of a headline saying, “All White People are Racist”, it would be more accurate to say “All White People in the U.S.A. are Racist”, and less inflammatory (and perhaps clearer) to say, “All White People in the U.S.A. have White Privilege”.
Perhaps I’ve misinterpreted what I’ve read, and I don’t understand the definition of racism being used by people who say that all white people are racist, and that it is somehow different than white privilege. If I’ve misunderstood it, though, probably a lot of other people also have, and it might be fruitful to find language that’s less divisive as we work together to continue to address the issues of racial inequality in the U.S.A.
