What we mean when we talk about racism

Sometimes it seems to me that people are envisioning different things when discussing racism. Is a person a racist? Or does it speak to a certain configuration of society, which makes any systematic "othering" racist, whether it literally has to do with skin color or not? An article in The New Yorker talked about two recent books. One is "How to be An Antiracist" by Ibram X. Kendi. He has a towering reputation as a scholar. I question some of his conclusions, though.

The fight to redefine racism

According to Kendi, Barack Obama was being racist when, as a candidate in 2008, he spoke of the "erosion of black families."

Quote:

Although Obama noted that this erosion was partly due to “a lack of economic opportunity,” he also made an appeal to black self-reliance, saying that members of the African-American community needed to face “our own complicity in our condition.” Kendi saw statements like these as reflections of a persistent but delusional idea that something is wrong with black people. The only thing wrong, he maintained, was racism, and the country’s failure to confront and defeat it.

He sees racist thinking in his parents, and, as a high school student, in himself:

Quote:

Kendi’s parents taught him black pride, and he took these lessons seriously. As Kendi tells it, his parents’ belief in black pride led them to embrace black self-reliance, a doctrine that urged black people to overcome the legacy of racism by working hard and doing well.

He came to believe this thinking implies that there's something wrong with black people. And I see his point. But does that mean his parents were wrong to stress self-reliance? Isn't it a positive for individuals to aspire to self-improvement?

Quote:

By the time he got to college, Kendi was outspokenly pro-black: he “pledged to date only Dark women,” as a personal protest against standards of beauty that favor lighter skin.

He was at a historically black college, so I'm thinking he's saying that he wouldn't date a light-skinned black woman. Which kinda strikes me as ... racist. His dates had to be black enough, no matter what other qualities they might have.

Moving on from him, we have Robin DiAngelo, "a white workplace-diversity trainer." She wrote "White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism."

Quote:

In the sanctuaries she creates, one of the rules is that white people, especially white women, should not cry. It attracts too much attention, and it may upset nonwhite participants, by evoking the “long historical backdrop of black men being tortured and murdered because of a white woman’s distress.” If DiAngelo herself can’t resist, she performs a ritual of abnegation. “I try to cry quietly so that I don’t take up more space,” she writes, “and if people rush to comfort me, I do not accept the comfort.”

That seems ... like a reach.

The author of the piece, Kelefa Sanneh, gently mocks DiAngelo's nobilization of "people of color," and he puts the phrase in quotes, saying it conveniently boils the world down into 2 categories, white and nonwhite. He also has criticism of Kendi, but it's quite respectful. Both of these authors have put a lot of thought into how they define racism and I was wondering if forum members have their own definitions and perhaps their own remedies, if any are needed.

via International Skeptics Forum https://ift.tt/30jddb1