Are you currently debating online about an issue pinning two parties of different colors? Especially black and white? If yes, chances are someone was reminded that racism is ‘prejudice + power’. One cannot be racist if the ill behavior is directed at an individual with institutional power over the ill actor.
Where racism was once the simple concept of prejudicial behavior triggered by the race of the victim, it now has a polarity, a direction.
One of the implications of this is that an exchange of racial slurs between two differently raced individuals – even instigated by a party of ‘lesser institutional power’ – is now only racism on the part of one of the participants instead of both.
The word ‘racism’ only has a single root, ‘race’. It has no implicit or explicit etymological relation to any other concept. So one has to wonder why those who are desperately trying to enforce this redirection of meaning wouldn’t simply coin a new word instead of trying to repurpose one of such simplicity. This would make sense given that the attempt here is to add further nuance to a preexisting concept.
There are several reasons why this conceptual subterfuge fails, but to debunk it, we need to present the logical framework in which it does:
- society is made of a very simple type of basic building block: individuals and interactions between them
- individuals can live and interact outside of a society, but a society cannot exist without individuals and their interactions
- therefore, for any emerging social policy to be deemed viable, it must pass certain checks at the overarching social level as well as at the individual level
The new definition of racism fails at the individual level. To prove it, we will take the most simple example: a black man calling a white man a ‘cracker’, since with the new definition of racism, this is not a racist act.
If we assume these two individuals have never met before, then they have no previous mutual interaction other than whatever recent unfortunate circumstances that has brought them to head. That being true, the white man still has institutional power and is the oppressor in the situation just by virtue of his skin color. And this is where logical failure occurs. The white individual has never met the black individual, nor interacted in any negative way with him in the past, but is still his oppressor. This forces a logical fork where one of the following MUST be true:
- since the white man is the oppressor, but has never so much as met the black man whom he is ‘oppressing’, then oppression is meaningless and without consequence, or
- there is no real or even imagined state of oppression since the two individuals have never met, and the black man’s act of voicing the racial slur was indeed an act of racism regardless of any other consideration.
Putting aside the logical failure of the redirection, one still has to wonder: why is such a concerted effort put out to make sure we all consent to this new meaning? Especially when the left has no shortage of creativity when it comes to crafting new words. Words that acknowledge the complexity of the target idea like ‘microaggression’ and ‘intersectionality’. It would seem a rather mundane and common exercise, right?
The most likely reason? If there is one thing the left has understood for years, it is the notion that words can influence. Words can be recruited to serve a cause. Where once racism was a neutral descriptor of racial aggression in any direction, it is now being drafted to the left’s vernacular army in the war of ideas. And with this new asymmetrical meaning, new sordid behavior gets a pass.
Indeed after years of intentionally racializing every nook and cranny of debate, turning the very meaning of the underpinning word is another great social judo move in the quest to make a society they deem ‘equal’. It’s ok to hurl insults at individuals, because it isn’t racism, and racism is now the only real crime that matters.