I'm gonna turn to the "pros" so that people start doing some shutting the fuck up about racism because this quoting the dictionary and "well this is my opinion" shit is annoying
“The concept of ‘racism’ has meant much more than personal prejudices and scattered episodes of individual discrimination. In its fullest definition, racism is a system of oppression of African Americans and other people of color by white Europeans and white Americans. There is no black racism [Mod note:reverse racism as you ass clowns love to call it] because there is no centuries-old system of racialized subordination and discrimination designed by African Americans that excludes white Americans from full participation in the rights, privileges, and benefits of this society. Black racism would require not only a widely accepted racist ideology directed at whites but also the power to systematically exclude white from opportunities and rewards in major economic, cultural, and political institutions”
-Joe Feagin (who is White) and Hernan Vera in White Racism (2001)
“[Systemic] racism includes a diverse assortment of racist practices; the unjustly gained economic and political power of whites; the continuing resource inequalities; and the white-racist ideologies, attitudes, and institutions created to preserve white advantages and power. One can accurately describe the United States as ‘total racist society’ in which every major aspect of life is shaped to some degree by the core racist realities.”
-Joe Feagin in Racist America: Roots, Current Realities, and Future Reparations (2001)
“[Discriminatory] practices have gone underground, becoming more subtle but remaining quite effective in perpetuating racial stratification. Likewise, although principled racism as waned and raicst views are rarely voiced, substantial shares of whites continue to hold negative stereotypes about African Americans and unconsciously harbor negative stereotypes about African Americans that cause them to avoid contact with African Americans in families, schools, neighborhoods, churches, and other settings…Since white Americans no longer see open discrimination around them, they believe it has been eliminated from U.S. markets, and since they no longer hear racist principles being espoused by respectable people, they believe racial prejudice has receded, if not disappeared. They embrace the view that the United States has become a race-blind society and that state efforts to improve welfare of African Americans violate the principles of racial neutrality. Hence, they oppose most federal programs and enforcement actions that have been proposed to close the gap between race-blind principles and racially stratified outcomes, which they attribute to nonracial causes”
-Douglas Massey in Categorically Unequal: The American Stratification System (2007)
“By ‘racism’ we mean the predication of decisions and policies on considerations of race for the purpose of subordinating a racial group and maintaining control over that group…Racism is both overt and covert. It takes two, closely related forms: individual whites acting against individual blacks, and acts by the total white community against the black community. we call these individual racism and institutional racism”
-Stokley Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton in Black Power: The politics of Liberation in America (1967)
“The new racism reflects sedimented or past-in-present racial formations from prior historical periods. Some elements of prior racial formations persist virtually unchanged, and others are transformed in response to globalization, transnationalism, and the proliferation of mass media”
Patricia Hill Collins in Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism (2005)
[Mod Notes: I acknowledge that these quote come from academics which present a very narrow, problematic, and often poorly accessible stream of knowledge. That, however, does not make these statements any less true.
Many of these quotes are framed in a Black vs. White construction of race and racism which is not progressive; however, I believe that these statements hold true across multiple vectors of racial oppression.
I am a cisgendered Latino/Dominican/Boricua/Afro-Caribbean man. I hold a BA in Sociology and Afrikana Studies (no that’s not a typo), I’m presently a graduate student in sociology.]
