yeloson | Racism for Dummies

hederahelix lays it out and speaks the gospel on racism and touches on and relates the issues to sexism, heterosexism, classism, etc. With much more patience than I could ever muster.

Some juicy excerpts:

On, "I didn't mean to be racist"

The same thing is true of racism which is why saying “but I didn’t mean for it to be racist” is never going to diffuse the racism in an act for the people on the receiving end of said act. Since racist acts don’t exist in isolation as the work of a particular bigoted individual, since racism as a form of oppression relies on the strength of other acts to send its message to people of color to keep them in their place (and to white allies who might want to end it as well, although obviously to much a lesser degree), any act that doesn’t intend to be racist benefits from the strength of the other racist acts that have gone before it.

On Reverse Racism

White folks only get to start protesting about reverse racism after we’ve been knowingly given blankets infected with a disease we didn’t have immunity to, or after we’ve been prevented from receiving treatment for a disease after a drug was discovered after the trial we signed up for started because some researchers wanted to see what end stage syphilis looked like, or you know, we had our land systematically stolen from us, our language beaten out of us, and so on for hundreds of years.

And really- my own experience:

People of color talking about race with white folks never know when a potentially normal, seemingly nice, apparently not bigoted white person will bust out with racist bullshit. If you’ve ever lived in a state of fearful anticipation that a person you care about and trust could turn at any moment, you know how exhausting, degrading, and downright toxic living like that can be.