Peterson's 12 Rules for Life v2.0-- actual book discussion

[Rev. Rye]

Ok, there's the general sense of the word "racism" and there's the more narrow, specific sense. When I speak of racists in this context, I am talking about the latter sense, not the former. In this sense, racist refers to one who has bought into the system that harbors systemic prejudice and discrimination against oppressed groups, often treating them as inferior groups. Someone who's not a racist will typically oppose the injustices that stem from such system. So in this sense, you can't be racist against white people.

But I think black people can be racist against other black people, and Latino people (for example) can be racist against black people as well. I do think white people, on average, continue to be more racist than other groups, just a hunch.

I honestly think using just the term "racism" to refer to one specific type of racism ("instututional racism", as Stokely Carmichael called it) is extremely reductive, borders on being a sophistic word game, and likely causes more harm than good.

On a macro definition, if one specifically defines "racism" as being "institutional racism", then the statement about it not being possible to be racist against white people does, in fact, hold, since the social structures of the Western World are, in fact, jacked to favour white people and a suspect number of rich minorities. But on a smaller level, it's certainly possible for one to be racist against white people. Clearly, a white person having a bad run-in with a sufficiently pissed off member of one of those 233 SPLC-recognised Black Nationalist groups doesn't even come close to invalidating or even equalling the massive power structures that repressed them so badly that they were convinced they needed their own organization to be as bad as their oppressors (no matter what all the right-wing news outlets may make it out to be), but there's an even more basic problem at fault underneath all the complex power structures: Tribalism. It's the basic problem underlying everything and to shift it ALL to issues of power (which certainly does make everything worse) feels like entirely missing the point.

After all, even with a conclusive switch in who's actually holding the power (see the Hutus in Rwanda, the French and Russian Revolutions, and Mugabe for just a few examples), the transfer of power to the historically downtrodden does not necessarily make things better.