On the origin of "Black People Can't be Racist"

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In case you are wondering where this argument stemmed from, this video explains who these academics are and what they mean by it:



There is a clear conflation between individual power and responsibility and is based on a very over simplistic and flawed power model informally called "the stack". This has a lot to do with Intersectionality, more on that ideology later.

These academics form part of the basis for a movement, these are not fringe ideas.

I will go further. These people know full well that their definitions of racial prejudice and racism will get confused in peoples minds a people aren't going to qualify. People will and do start believe that their bigotry is not bigotry or somehow justified. Or they are somehow less responsible.

Personally I'd rather follow the example Martin Luther King Jr. by judging people by the content of their character not the colour of their skin.

Our behaviour in the hear an now. When a person who happened to be black was racist towards and Asian person on a train I was on that is racist no matter how you cut it. If someone of one person was to kill another person in a racially motivated attack, they have power to do that. Institutional power is irrelevant in that scenario.

Moving the goal post intends to make light of bigotry based on race, which itself is racist idea.

The idea that black people as a whole to kill all whites is as stupid people who think black people can't be racist.

For one plenty of black are criticizing these movements and identify as free thinking individuals. I will post some examples tomorrow. My thread on taboo as propaganda is why they have a hard time speaking up.

Lots of people have been swept up in the hysteria without properly reading the doctrine of the leadership of these movements or having a balanced perspective.

If anything this ideology has a lot in common with the separatists and supremacist on the white side. It doesn't matter which side, they are both looking for a race war and making everything about race. Like Morgan Freeman said stop making everything about race.

I do think however the the ideology that is being taught is a bad one and not in the spirit of the principled leader of the civil rights movement and their ideas are badly flaw. There is definitely some assessment of violence, which like I say is vindication to extremist on the other side.

Patricia Hill Collins and Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw have arguably worsened race relations and undermined the civil rights movement. Critical Race theory is one aspect, but the overall ideology of Intersectionality is the practical application in undermining civil rights. That reductionist and divisive movement is deserving of its own thread especially the flawed power model.

I would argue the umbrella organization Movement for Black Lives' manifesto is directly at odds with the civil rights leaders of the 60s. Especially the message Martin Luther King Jr.

MBL if anything has more in common with Maoist and Soviet Ideas than black culture (although it does apease some negative aspects of culture), as well as some fascist movements. What it does is racialise the the proletariat and bourgeois.

It is about primarily dividing people along racial lines, (and also sexuality and gender), which is not dissimilar to white supremacists ideology.

[Moderating]
Topics centered on issues relating to race, racism etc. are perfectly acceptable in PPR.
Generalizations about what people of a certain race believe, want, think, etc. are not acceptable, criticism of specific beliefs, goals and ideas are fine. Don't discuss what typical, average or all people of any specific race believe.

[Not Moderating]
Interesting topic.

I agree that this is a pernicious idea and it's irritating that its proponents have tried to redefine a useful word and insist that it means something misleading. This kind of tactical obscurantism is frequently employed by people who know that their enterprise is immoral, shameful or wicked.

I think it takes a perspective almost entirely free of historical information to say that these BS academics and semantic contortionists have "worsened race relations"--race relations in the US began as a nightmare and improved to bad. There is a movement to pretend that the present doesn't take place in the wake of the past, and that is just a much an obscurantist position as CRT, etc.

As a student of sociology, let me bottomline this for you...

In sociological terms, racism=racial prejudice + the power to oppress others on the basis of that racial prejudice

As a rule, black people in America cannot do this because they don't have power. If they did, many could and would be racist.

That's all.

The rest of that video is just semantic games and BS. It's not clever. It doesn't invalidate sociology or expose academics as being hypocritical or having some unfair, anti-white agenda.

It's just simple minded and sad.

And another thing...

Intersectionality is another technical term used by sociologists.

It is the interconnected nature of social categorizations such as race, class, and gender as they apply to a given individual or group, regarded as creating overlapping and interdependent systems of privilege, advantage, discrimination or disadvantage.

Its a way to look at people from MULTIPLE angles and but them in full context relative to society.

For example:

I am...

White-- +2

Male-- +2

Middle Class-- +2

Educated-- +2

Short-- -1

Quadriplegic-- -2

HFA-- -1

Chubby-- -1

Speak with an accent-- -1


Net privilege of +2.

It's just a useful framework for studying people in society.


Let me say it again--That video is pointless.

I don't give a good goddamn what we call it, systemic oppression on the basis of race exists in America today and it is aimed at nonwhites.


Yes, it would be nice if we could judge each other by the content of our characters rather than the color of our skins.

But guess what? There's some pretty good research to suggest that we are hardwired to have antipathy for others we perceive as different.

And, we naturally perceive those with skin colors different from our own as DIFFERENT.

Until that changes, race relations will be an ongoing concern that we cannot ignore.

Last edited by GoonSquad on 15 Oct 2016, 1:28 pm, edited 2 times in total.

The Oxford Dictionary defines racism as...

On that basis it is perfectly possible to be black, white, yellow, green or purple and still be racist.

As a human being who speaks the English language, let me bottomline this for you:

Racism means a belief that race determines human traits and that some races are intrinsically better than others. More colloquially, it means prejudice based on categorizing others by their skin pigmentation.

Attempts to replace this well understood meaning with a more refined one that introduces the idea that members of any one racially defined group can't express that kind of prejudice towards another because of imbalances in power at the racial group level are irrelevant (academic specialists don't get to dictate the consensus meaning of language) and harmful (deliberately choosing to use a term with a commonly understood meaning to mean something else is destructive to the possibility of communication.)

Sonny Carson was a racist. No amount of pissing about with theories of power will make his nasty views any the less disgusting.

The word racist has power as a term of vilification.

That power comes from a recognition of the nastiness of one human being treating another human being badly because of their race. There is a different dimension when a bunch of nasty racists get together and become a terrorist organization like the KKK or a totalitarian racist death machine like Nazi Germany, but that doesn't somehow negate the particular offense of one person dehumanizing another because of race.

On the day when a faction of sociologists are given dictatorial power over language, then "we get to define terms this way" will be a valid argument. Until then it's just noise.

And anybody who wants to hide behind this empty sophistry to make derogatory comments about people based on race is a rotten human being, whatever term you want to label them with.

Look, I don't care what words you use or misuse. This argument is asinine and depends on a willful misunderstanding of a word and its legitimate technical use in the science of sociology.

Sociologists don't use/define the word the way they do to confuse stupid people. That's just a bonus.

Can Black people be racist as you define the word?

Yes, without question.

That doesn't change anything.

Institutional racism as it exists in America today is still perpetrated mostly by whites, solely against nonwhites.
And there's no place in American today where blacks can do the same to whites.

That's reality, no matter what words we use.

If a black man gives you a beating for being white, he certainly has the power to give you the beating. It's completely absurd to claim that every single white person has "power", while every single non-white one doesn't.

That's the power to assault someone, not the power to oppress them.

Not to mention, that black man will very likely get shot or beaten to death after you call the police.

That's true enough now that "The Cosby Show" is no longer on the air. Oh hang on a minute, if you happen to be white and live in South Central LA you can definitely oppress blacks can't you but even gun toting black street gangs have no power to oppress you or charge you protection money in exchange for not burning your house or business to the ground, with you in it, so long as you're white? That's okay then.

Last edited by Jute on 15 Oct 2016, 2:43 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I don't think so. The problem is that some nonwhite people with deplorable, bigoted views try to deflect criticism of their hateful expressions using precisely this misunderstanding.


Of course, that's true.
So why not just use the phrase "institutional racism" to be explicitly clear. Why confuse the discussion in such a way that some people do attempt to justify personal racism by saying they can't be racist?

It doesn't seem helpful to any discussion.



Sometimes the words that we use help to clarify and sometimes they serve to confuse.

I can see some new posts have gone up while I was writing this and I think they serve to illustrate the point: using the word racism to mean only institutional or structural racism is not helpful.

I'm so glad you use the flawed arithmetic of the "stack" becuase I look forward to putting holes in this power model from intersectionality, when I make that topic.

All you have done is shown how your branch of sociology is not at all objective or nuanced. Your model is about as crude as it gets, straight out of a satire.

You choose to use the word racism for your theory, knowing full well it will be conflated, which is an intentionally misleading. You think this is harmless?

The video has it right, you are conflating institutional power with individual power and power is way more dynamic than you would admit.

You are making a blanket statement about people, which has real world consequences. You know full well that this is not just an academic argument, it is basis for policy which means people who you know nothing about, are judged by this crude stack whether they have power or not. The whole ideology is hypocritical becuase you are about judging people based on crude classification, whist saying we should not be discriminating.

Two wrong don't make a right, you don't solve discrimination with more discrimination.

The goal here is not equality, it is simply a manifestation of resentment. Precisely the opposite of what the civil rights leaders of the 1960s were about.

Last edited by 0_equals_true on 15 Oct 2016, 3:28 pm, edited 2 times in total.

But see, the power to oppress is really the important part of racism, and that's usually the point people are trying to make when they go down this particular rabbit hole.

Things might be different for you, but I know personally, I couldn't give a crap less what most people think of me--especially if they don't have power over me.

I've been called names by nonwhites--slurs like cracker, white trash, red neck... But they just don't bother me, mainly because the people saying those words were powerless and I really didn't value their opinions.

It takes power to make those slurs sting. Usually, nonwhites don't have that.



People intuitively know there's a difference between slurs and it has to do with power...

Here's the best clip I could find for the old SNL word association sketch with Chevy Chase and Richard Pryor:

Pay attention to the pattern of laughter... When things get heated, people laugh at the "white slurs"--cracker, honky, etc. but not the black ones....

I think that's interesting and speaks to the difference between white racism and black racism too. Blacks just don't have any words as powerful as the n-word.

That means something.

The above is partial example of how the newer definition of racism IRL is most often used to invalidate people. To successfully label someone a racist is one of the most derogatory thing a person or group can do to another in 2016. If I get successfully labled a racist in most cases anything else about my life will not matter or be a footnote to my racism. Any point or argument I make will be viewed as wrong because I am a racist and I will be viewed as stupid. If it is widely believed I am a racist I will likely lose my job or business be threatened with if not have actual violence used against me.

So I agree with you it is about a lot more then semantics.