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Comment by sidlls | Hacker News Reader

> There really seems to be a prevailing opinion that racism and sexism are just fine when directed towards white men.

White men benefit immensely from our position of privilege. The notion that "racism" and "sexism" against white men exists in our society (the US) is just completely out of alignment with the facts as they are.

Your statement is roughly analogous to someone opining that restraining a prison guard from beating inmates is tantamount to imprisoning the guard.

This isn't to say that white men aren't victims of discrimination (race or gender-based), but only that this sort of victimization is highly context-dependent and not at all systemic. It's not on the same level as "racism" and "sexism" as it applies in this context, as these two things require a significant power imbalance. White men have no shortage of advantage on the balance of power.

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You're using the relatively recent redefinition of the term "racism", that claims that racism is only systemic prejudice from a position of power (the so-called prejudice+power definition).

With this definition, yes, it is impossible to be racist to white males in US.

The problem is that this definition is not what the word actually means in colloquial English. So when most people talk about racism, they have that conventional definition in mind, not the stuff that social studies use these days.

And frankly, this attempt to rewrite the dictionary doesn't seem to have any reasonable justifications. We already had various terms and combinations of terms that describe the nuances fairly well - we had "racism" to mean "racial prejudice", and we had "systemic racism" to mean prejudice+power.

The only reason why I can see to change these around, to, effectively, replace "racism" with "racial prejudice", and "systemic racism" with just "racism", is because "racism" became a word with extremely heavy negative connotations. And some the same people who campaigned for it to become that - and rightly so, IMO - became uncomfortable with the fact that those negative connotations now also applied to some members of minority groups (e.g. the New Black Panthers). With the new definitions, this problem disappears - NBP is "prejudiced", but they're not "racist" anymore.

And this is very problematic, because the result of that is that bona fide hate speech - like, literal explicit calls for murdering people based on their race - is treated as more acceptable than e.g. pay disparity.

The whole "power imbalance" definition is a tremendous wedge to divide and conquer groups that would ordinarily be on the same side of an issue of basic human decency. "I can say what I like and it's not racist because I am [fill in the blank]."

To say nothing of the muddiness of a 'power imbalance'. I have been the only white kid on my block, and I got my ass kicked more than a few times because of it. Was there a power imbalance on the block? Sure. Was there a power imbalance in the school or court system the other way? Absolutely. Who's the victim this time? Where does the dividing line between them being racist and me being racist lie?

The stop sign? The school boundary?

Lot of those dudes, we became friends after knocking the hell out of each other for no reason, and let me tell you, we walk into their house and systemic racial prejudice popped right up again, poor family, bad education, trouble with the law. "You're so smart, help Alejandro with his homework and then you can play nintendo. Yes Ms. P."

So at school, I'm racist, on the block, they're racist, inside their house, I'm sort of racist but I still might catch a beating if the wrong cousin was hanging out because his dad was in jail again and he's looking for a skinny white kid to blame.

What a muddled mess. How could you make sense out of that gibberish?

I fundamentally reject the new definition of racism and sexism as requiring a power imbalance. Racial or gender prejudice is racial or gender prejudice. Full stop. Don't do it. This novel attempt to muddy the waters of racial prejudice by defining racism as the exclusive perk of minorities is self-defeating and ugly. A just and equal society is a better society for all within it, and by allowing the struggle to be characterized as a zero-sum game, we allow ourselves to be divided in the pursuit of basic human decency.

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