Daily DuhEverything Is Racist!

If You’re White, You’re Racist, and There’s Nothing You Can Do to Change It

The truth isn’t true until you see it in a chart on a Pow­er­Point slide.

Teach­ers in an Illi­nois high school were bemused to be giv­en a list of racist things they were guilty of, and on the tax­pay­er’s dime to boot. You’re prob­a­bly guilty too, so grab a pen­cil and jot these things down; they are ter­ri­ble crimes against human­i­ty:

  • Snow shov­el­ing (which we cov­ered last week)
  • Pub­lic edu­ca­tion, which is “based on a foun­da­tion of white­ness”
  • Being white
  • Spir­i­tu­al­ly mur­der­ing high-school stu­dents
  • Using the phrase “Make Amer­i­ca Great Again,” which is a dog whis­tle used by KKK mem­bers that real­ly means the n‑word
  • Colum­bus Day
  • White priv­i­lege, white fragili­ty, white cul­ture, white­ness
  • Any form of school dis­ci­pline: Sus­pen­sion, deten­tion, extra home­work, zero tol­er­ance for, well, any­thing (does that mean stu­dents can start bring­ing guns to school?)
  • And final­ly, treat­ing every­one with respect

Wait, what? Treat­ing all peo­ple with respect is racist?

Yep. Stay with me here: A racist per­son treats folks non-white peo­ple dif­fer­ent­ly than oth­er white peo­ple (and by the way: Only white folks can be racist. If you’re not white but you hate white peo­ple because they’re white, that’s not racism).

So if you treat every­one equi­tably and iden­ti­cal­ly regard­less of race, you’re not racist, right?

Wrong! If you aren’t think­ing, say­ing, or doing any­thing racist, you’re still racist. You have to be anti-racist before you can say you aren’t racist.

Bot­tom line:

  • If you’re white, you have white priv­i­lege, which means
  • You’re part of the sys­temic and insti­tu­tion­al racism that per­vades, well, every­thing, and because of that
  • You’re loaded with uncon­scious bias, which means
  • You’re racist but you don’t know it. There­fore
  • You’re a slave own­er, even though slav­ery has been ille­gal since 1865, and
  • There’s noth­ing you can do about any of it.

Yep! It’s like The Matrix: Racism is every­where, but it’s also nowhere.

It’s not total­ly hope­less, though: If you hire a WWP, at great expense, to scold you for a cou­ple hours, and then you make hefty dona­tions to the WWP or some oth­er per­son or orga­ni­za­tion autho­rized to grant abso­lu­tion, you’re…

…well, you’re still racist. But we’ll pre­tend you aren’t, as soon as your check clears, and right up to the point at which we’re going to need anoth­er hefty dona­tion.

Related Articles

Back to top button