Recently an apparently sincere white guy in the PNW made the statement along the lines of “white people aren’t that racist anymore,” and used as an example how we in the PNW are much nicer to “those people.”
I’ve changed his name to “Sam” in my response here because I don’t think his post in a private group is something to bring public, but I will bring my response out in the open.
Sam, I’m afraid my eyeballs have rolled so far back up my head I had to walk six miles just to go get them.
“Racism” is not something bad people do, Sam. Racism is not white people using the “N” word. I mean, yeah, there are bad people and there are derogatory names.
Racism is the power structure. A power structure where you, Sam, as an apparent white guy, can live an unexamined life and be successful and happy, and our fellow humans, brothers and sisters, Americans, constantly experience blocks and slurs and denigration for no reason other than (a) they look different and (b) we white people have invented a value and power system where we white people are good, in charge, and rule by default.
Racism is the hazy awareness that something might be wrong, but because we are good people living in our nearly all-white neighborhoods with our nearly all-white schools and working at our nearly all-white jobs, that the only thing wrong is that black Americans just don’t try hard enough, or go to the right schools, or dress appropriately, or worship Jesus enough, or teach their kids to respect/fear cops, or pull their pants up or … you get the drift. It’s the white life of not having to worry about anything unless something truly unpleasant happens, and then we can tut-tut and find fault.
Racism is the power structure where we charge police to enforce the law, brutally and without real oversight or consequences, because we know *we* will never experience the treatment our black American citizens experience routinely. Witness people like Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, a Republican’s Republican, stating that *he* gets pulled over. Witness the testimony of our own Ron Sims, former King County Executive, popular, re-elected several times, living an exemplary life of principled leadership, pulled over eight times because he was “driving while black,” in several cases because he had a “broken head/tail light.” During daylight hours.
Are all white people 100% uniformly totally racist? I honestly don’t know. I know a lot of them are, including me. I am racist. Admitting it is just honesty about the way I have embraced my American life. Making it so that my life is just *and* that my fellow Americans, black and brown and yellow and white, all have exactly the same privileges and rights and blessings as I do — because they are free, equal humans, Americans guaranteed by our Constitution with full human, civil rights, not provisional on good behavior or being “nice” to cops, but just because We Are Americans.