That, according to every single commonly accepted definition in existence, is simply false. By trying to change the definition of racism you are accomplishing nothing but the justification of discrimination and racism against white people.
People of ANY skin color can be racist towards other people of ANY skin color regardless of how much perceived power or privilege they have.
Hmm, here and here. I can get more. Yes, I am white!
Let me tell you: when, as a trans person, I say “all cis people are terrible”, it ends in cis tears. That’s it. No loss of jobs, no loss of safety, no loss of life, no - ahem, ahem - knife assualts in a public place that are blamed on you for “inciting” them to do so by being who you are, no police killing you and then denying it until it’s revealed they were caught on camera, nothing. It’s metonymical.
When a cis person says “all trans people are terrible”, it ends in people being killed. People I knew being killed. My own assault. That’s the difference! That’s the difference between racism/discrimination towards minorities and anger towards oppressors.
By definition, perhaps you’d be right.
In practice… Well, that’s another story little brother.
@Bagelthief
The majority of those articles were filled with nothing but the authors opinions, most of which I disagree with, and were backed up by little facts or evidence. Suffice it to say I found them rather unconvincing.
I never assumed otherwise.
That is a pretty massive blanket statement, one we both know is over-exaggerated. Someone saying that trans people are terrible is by no means guaranteed or even likely to result in any physical harm being done to anybody.
Pherhaps this is simply a fundamental difference between us but I’m not of the opinion that racism and hated towards any group is justified, regardless of whether they’re the oppressed or the oppressor.
I fail to see how it’s different “in practice”.
As I just told you,
it’s called metonomy. [quote=“Verand, post:149, topic:15997”]
Someone saying that trans people are terrible is by no means guaranteed or even likely to result in any physical harm being done to anybody.
[/quote]
I’ve been physically assaulted by two cis people that said that, and abused by another two in my family who said things along the same line. But, please carry on.
/It’s not like people with any first-hand experience of these kinds of things have any authority on the matter, after all. /s
You’re missing the point, but okay. Sure. I won’t deny you your viewpoint.
Bonus round: everyone should go look up the lovely paper: “Whites See Racism as a Zero-sum Game that They Are Now Losing”. Quick search on Google. Lovely stuff. I would link the PDF myself but it’s bedtime already. Night!
I think what @Bagelthief means re: trans attacks is that statistically, a cis person is far more likely to hurt a trans person than vice versa because of their gender identity. And that’s the same for people of color with white people.
Most people of color do not like the textbook definition of racism because of its simplification of a prejudice that is still carried out through law and social standards, or because of its implication that the prejudice a white person may experience from a brown person is the same as the other way around. I admit I didn’t read the articles but my life experiences and the experiences my friends have shared with me have taught me that a white person will be treated more positively than I will be, and that I, as someone who is half-white, will be treated better than someone who has a harder time passing as white than I do.
You shouldn’t dismiss the articles because they’re just “opinions,” though. This is a forum where we are all sharing our opinions and hoping to influence people to understand our opinions, after all.
I think… I’m just gonna delete my post o’er there.
I’ll sleep better knowing I didn’t pick a fight with our 'lil brother Verand.
(cough)Ipreferpinchinghiscutewittlecheeksoverbustinghischops(cough)
Besides, the kid’s a visionary, and I can appreciate that.
@Bagelthief
Woops, didn’t see that. My bad.
I deliberately tried to word that so as to not cause offense. If I failed in that in apologize.
However I do stand by my point. Simply spewing hated is by no means guaranteed to result in violence. Sure, violence definitely happens (which it seems I don’t need to tell you) but the majority of ignorant people are simply ignorant, never acting on their thoughts and never convincing others to act for them.
We simply disagree here. I believe that any prejudice based on race is racism, pure and simple. I understand where your coming from and I can respect your opinion, but I fundamentally disagree.
Anger itself isn’t racism. When that anger turns into prejudice and hated for the group your oppressors belong to than again, I believe it is racism. Somewhat more understandable racism but racism nonetheless.
No argument here. They certainly couldn’t be systematically racist.
Only if you believe that racism must be systematic for it to qualify as such. A black man screaming racial slurs at a white guy would in my opinion be his racism being expressed and as you said, coming to fruition.
If you consider racism to be discrimination based on race than racial scholarships most definitely qualify as such.
This just goes back to our fundamental disagreement as to what constitutes racism. It doesn’t matter to me whether racism is expressed at a systematic or individual level, I still view it all as racism.
I think we’ll just have to agree to disagree.
I get what your saying about the different reasons done might onbject to the textbook definition of racism. Personally I don’t think that a more stringent definition is the best definition to implement but I can understand how some might think so.
I was perhaps a bit too quick to dismiss the articles, although I do believe that opinion pieces such as those should be taken with a pinch of salt unless backed up by solid facts and sources.
Darn it Verand, you weren’t supposed to read what I typed up! 
Now you’ll never look at me the same way again!
Here, have a like.
And have a nuggie at that you 'lil twerp! 
Scholarships based on race aren’t there to discriminate against and prevent opportunities to white people but to give people of color a chance to have the same opportunities as white people.
Edit: Also, while spewing hatred doesn’t always lead to violence it always takes away a sense of safety for the victim and it lets racists, homophobes, and transphobes feel that their beliefs are popular and does eventually cause violence from somebody.
You know, I actually thought your post was pretty informative. I may disagree with several points of yours but I feel like I can better understand where your coming from after reading it.
I get why scholarships based on race exist and understand why people view them as nescessary but I feel they go against my principles. Call me a idealist but I’m of the opinion that discrimination based on race, whether it’s positive or negative, is never a good thing.
No real argument here. It’s important to try to combat these ideas and expose them as the stupidity and ignorance that they are.
“Being racist” and “living in a world that privileges one skin color over all others” are subtly different concepts. There’s often this idea that racism is about a constant barrage of taking oppressive actions, ie intentionally acting out of prejudice towards a group of people. “You are X, so I hate you and act against you.” That’s often not how modern racism is experienced in the Western world, however. It’s more systematic.
I’ll give you an example. Suppose a person of color decides to make a derogatory comment towards me for being a white person. By your statement above, I’m experiencing “Racism,” but here’s the thing. I will continue to benefit from a system that rewards white people economically and socially and politically, regardless of this single individual’s feelings towards me. I drive through gated neighborhoods and no one asks to see my identification. I drive across the country and I’m not frequently stopped, as African American friends of mine are, to check and make sure there are no drugs in my vehicle. I’m not perceived as a threat. Police speak gently to me. I’ve heard friends describe being harassed by a police officer until after showing their student ID, as if this somehow made them trustworthier.
So yes, let’s say I receive a single moment of “Racist” derogatory comments towards myself as a white person.
In the worst possible scenario, where that hatred could become violent, the law would be more sympathetic towards me as victim as opposed to a person of color as victim. Quite literally, as @bagelthief mentioned, the result of such hatred towards them can be fatal. And their attackers may face no repercussions. There is a fraught and bloody history of white people blaming people of color for perceived slights against a white person and justifying their violent reactions out of fear, and sadly it continues even now. As mentioned before, the same is true for violent actions against the trans community.
So that is why I would not be so quick to dismiss the points of “power” and of “privilege.” They do change the balance of the scales, immensely.
@Verand
To quote my own comments on the earlier thread:
@Bagelthief
You can acknowledge the harm that institutional racism inflicts on its targets without excusing the fact that a person who hates or targets another person because of their race is still a racist. Having come from a culture which has spent millennia colonising, dominating, and dehumanising its neighbours, to live in one where I’m seen as an economic, intellectual, and security threat due to the colour of my skin and the sound of my last name, I can tell you that the hate which an oppressor bears for the oppressed and the hate which the oppressed bears for the oppressor are two sides of the same coin, and the anger of the marginalised will become the repression of an imperial power should the dynamics of that power (and they do, on a frequent basis) reverse.
History is full enough of examples of the oppressed, driven by their hate to become worse than their previous oppressors.
Incidentally, I’m not sure if anyone’s noticed yet, but nearly the entire cast of Sabres of Infinity and Guns of Infinity are PoC, both in the ethnic sense, and in the political sense.
The former, I suppose is a lot more subtle. Aside from the cover art, a few throwaway descriptions, a few cultural references which you probably wouldn’t catch onto unless you grew up eating Shandong peasant food, and a racial slur or two slung at ethnically Tierran characters, you might be excused for assuming that Tierrans are white (as did one reviewer on Google Play, who granted, somehow missed the brown guy standing tall on the cover) . After all, that’s what a surface reading of Tierran culture (copied in great detail, from Western Europe, especially from Regency Britain) would imply, right?
All part of a cunning plan.
As far as I’m concerned, the theme I want to pursue is based less on the idea of ethnicity as a driver of discrimination and oppression, but power, namely the idea that what some call “whiteness”, is in fact merely the current manifestation of “imperial culture”. While Tierra’s ethnic makeup is a mash of what we might consider North African, Slavic, Celtic, and Han Chinese, its political situation is reminiscent of that of China in the late 19th century in relation to the Great Powers of Europe and Japan, or the Cherokee in relation to the Early United States: a nation forced to curtail its own agency to serve the interests of the Imperial Powers with hegemony over it, a culture and a people who get to spend their lives being told in subtle and overt ways that they are inferior, and that their inferiority is backed up by a power they can’t contend with.
Ultimately, one of the themes I want to examine within the series is that of the oppressed, and their struggle for what some would call “justice” and others would call “revenge”, and why our own history is filled with so many cautionary tales of what happens when the desires fuelling that struggle are left uncontrolled.
It’s working.
The thread’s mentioned elves as a stand-in for PoC before. I’ve got elves too, only they’re not poor parodies of the First Nations, or Imperial China, or what have you.
My elves are white people: blond, blue-eyed, smugly arrogant, regally condescending masters of the Infinite Sea. Their privilege is the privilege of middle america, of a placid certainty that they are in the right, and that the day that everyone else figures that out, the world will be a better place for it.
And judging by my how people have reacted to them. People fucking hate my elves. For every perceived insult, there are half a dozen plans to break them politically, to subjugate them militarily, to humiliate them culturally. I think there’s even a few to commit outright genocide on them. If nothing else, I’ve made my players feel the indignant rage which fills the hearts of so many people who are subject to the same sort of thing in our world, and if they stay with me, they’re going to see exactly where that leads them.
Sorry, kind of got sidetracked there.
It’s okay!
I hate your elves too. 
(I’m just joking! Don’t hurt me!)
Kinda makes me want to have another go with the Infinity series.
If you have these kind of themes in your work, I will tear the games from your hands and replace them with my cold hard cash. 
No complaints if I (accidentally) rip those hands off though; who wouldn’t want the hands that wrote Guns and Sabres?
The hurting will likely be the new misses @Cataphrak 's job right? 
With the way she’s going to have to keep the rabid fans off him soon I bet she’s practicing kung-fu and the old brick in the purse daily.
Also I don’t hate your Elves, some of them are at least very cute blond, blue-eyed, smugly arrogant, regally condescending guys. 
Similarly “oppressed”? That’s a stretch if ever I’ve heard one, at least it is in the United States of today. Nobody judges Sanders immediately upon visual inspection. Nobody will cross to the opposite side of the street, regardless of whether he’s wearing a hoodie, because they fear he might assault them. As an Ashkenazic Jew he is visually indistinguishable from any other white. Even his last name doesn’t give his ethnic Jewish identity away. And if others do discover his ethnicity, the most conservative of Republicans will still embrace his Jewishness and defend his right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness even if they don’t like his “socialism”. Furthermore, this “oppression” of which you speak doesn’t prevent Jews from making up a disproportionate percentage of America’s millionaires and billionaires. I’m thus hard pressed to understand your logic here.
You could bring up the terrible legacy of World War 2 or the parts of the world where Jewish people really are oppressed today, but Sanders did not grow up in any of those places. This is not to say that he’s never faced any sort of discrimination due to his ethnicity, but a few acts of discrimination that in no way shape or form impede his social or financial standing do not constitute oppression, and by conflating the two, you cheapen the term oppression. And while Jews may well face occasional discrimination, it’s not from those with power, but instead more often than not aimed at them from immigrants and other minority groups, which you’ve already claimed can’t be racist due to their lack of power. I doubt very much that Black Lives Matter activist who ripped that microphone out of Bernie’s hands would have done so had his skin color been black or brown. So let’s be real here.
Honestly the more people talk about the possibly of how you can be “racist” towards white people, the less the conversation stays focused on the people facing the actual brunt of racism in today’s world. I can see the frustration in having the argument stay in this circular place where white people keep posing ways they could be on the receiving end of racism, while meanwhile the status quo remains the status quo. For this reason, I’m not convinced it’s a productive conversation.
I fucking knew it! The Takarans were you giving people a taste of their own medicine all along!
People who, mind you, include Uighurs in Xinjiang, Koreans and Ainu in Japan, Tamils in Sri Lanka, and yes, even white people in Zimbabwe, none of whom are being directly oppressed by white people. Saying that you can’t be institutionally racist towards white people because white people always hold power is a reductive statement that only works in the (granted, extremely large) parts of the world that white people hold power in, and one which is predicated on the assumption that white people will continue to hold that sort of power for the indefinite future.
It’s a reactive state of mind which both stems from and is a tacit acceptance of the belief and perception that “white people rule the world”, a state of mind which allows notions of a future, “just” society to be as distorted by the current supremacy of “whiteness” in the West as the First French Republic was by the ancien regime, and as the Soviet Union was by the government of the Tsars.
The racial politics of the present could use more nuance than a dichotomy of “white people who can never be the oppressed” and “everyone else, who could never be the oppressor”, because building more equitable racial politics for the future demands it.
@Sneaks
Not quite yet. I’ve shown the power and arrogance of an imperial culture at rest. Wait until what happens when that culture is challenged.
Yes, you failed. You failed quite miserably. 
Okay, but can you point out something you consider PoC-on-white racism?
And what are these racial slurs against whites? [quote=“Verand, post:154, topic:15997”]
I do believe that opinion pieces such as those should be taken with a pinch of salt unless backed up by solid facts and sources.
[/quote]
Which is why I gave you a paper.
As I said waaaaay back up the thread, being PoC does not exempt you from being derogatory to other PoC. Racism is who is in power, which, let’s take the Ainu, are being racially targeted, their culture stripped away and were forced to assimilate into Japanese culture. That is Japan being racist against the Ainu, as they are in power.
Mugabe is a dictator, not a leader. He said “all whites should leave the country”, and liberated his nation from colonial oppression 36 years ago. Not 100, not even 50, 36. Though the methods are absolutely terrible, the concept makes sense. He does not want Americanisation and loss of his culture. That, and white people, who are less than 1 percent of Zimbabwe’s population (12 million), own 50 percent of the arable land. He cannot throw them out as they are his main source of export income. It’s, as with Trump, harmful political bullshittery.
By no means am I defending him. The violence that stems from his speeches is a parallel to Donald Trump’s fans, and rallying some horrible killings, and it’s disgusting that the LHA hasn’t gotten to doing their actual job yet in 30 years. But one has to understand what allowed this to happen in this specific case. (And yes, it is obviously a scapegoat.)