[user104658]

Originally Posted by Shaun

Obviously anyone can be racist (Avenue Q promo?)

Yes there's a huge difference - in terms of how big a problem it is and how unjust it is - between personal instances of racism and widespread/institutional racism (ie. the police discriminating against black people) but it exists as a rarer phenomenon.

I've argued this point blue in the face on this site (and others) a couple of times - the main problem is that for some reason, there are people who simply straight up refuse to acknowledge or use the term "institutional racism", and define it separately to "racism". They want to define "racism" AS "institutional racism", and leave no term to replace the word "racism".

There is NOTHING WRONG with the term institutional racism! Why don't people want to use it? Why do people think it for some reason dilutes the term? Drives me nuts... the insane need to make language more convoluted than it should be. So that Institutional Racism suddenly doesn't exist, that's just racism, and other "racially motivated prejudice" is "just prejudice not racism".

Which is frankly ****ing retarded, not just because of the dictionary definition of racism, but because of the word origins of an -ism itself. It's a simple word. Race, and -ism. NEITHER term has ANYTHING to do with power structures. The word has nothing to do with the balance of power in any situation. Racism IS racially motivated prejudice. Nothing more, nothing less, no further discussion nor information required. The addition of the word "institutional" is what makes power significant. Not only is there no reason to cut the word out... doing so is completely counter-productive. Institutional Racism as opposed to Personal Racism. A person of a majority group cannot experience institutional racism but they can certainly experience personal racism (and of course the same goes for the -ist... a minority member can absolutely be personally racist but will not be able to enforce institutional racism).

TL;DR the main problem is that people are absolutely ****ing desperate to dumb-down language.


The second issue of course is that a lot of this rhetoric stems from the United States, and the United States (as a whole) struggles to have any sort of perspective that is not based on their own country. In the US as a whole "only white people can be institutionally racist" because the majority of US citizens are caucasian. This applies ONLY in countries where the majority population, or the majority in power at least, is caucasian. In China or Japan, for example, there is PLENTY of racism - both personal and institutional - experienced by white people and people of any other non-majority race.