Personally, I'm sick to death of white identified folks "whining" every time someone calls out white racism.
Lately it seems that the question of white racism can't be raised in a diary without someone popping up to suggest/argue that framing the issue as white racism is itself offensive, unfair and even racist. I have to wonder what kind of bubble such people are living in.
Personally, I'm sick to death of white identified folks "whining" every time someone calls out white racism. If you're not a white racist, why the devil would you feel personally offended by someone calling out white racism?
I think problems communicating across the color line on this subject grow out of the fact that folks who identify as white seem to define racism purely in terms of personal bigotry and prejudice, without regard to the actual material outcomes on a social and political level.
Racism cannot be reduce to a personal moral or ethical failing in this manner. Racism isn't simply the existence of bias or bigotry on an individual level. It is a ideological principle of social and political organization. That makes it a question of power as much as prejudice.
This has real, material consequences for flesh and blood people.
Do bigotry and prejudice exist in communities classed as non-white? Of course. But it is nonsensical to suggest that the existence of such bias effects those classed as white in a systemic fashion in any way comparable to that experienced by those classed as non-white. It wasn't those classed as non-white who created and institutionalized a color distinction whose sole purpose was to elevate those classed as white to the status of "master" while degrading all others. Neither was it those classed as non-white who enforced this system through centuries of bloodshed, coercion and terror.
The legacy of white supremacy has tainted our society and institutions from their inception. That taint is with us still, despite the election of Barack Obama. It is a taint which does not effect all equally. It benefits some while penalizing others. It is an inequity rooted in the foundations of US society, culture and politics. Its consequences are readily apparent to anyone who examines the wide disparities, economic, social and political, that divide those classed as white from those classed as non-white.
In this context, any pretense of a material equivalence between racial prejudice amongst those classed as white and similar prejudice amongst those classed as non-white is absurd. It is comparable to arguing that there is no distinction to be drawn between the slaveholder and the slave, the armed robber and the police officer or the purveyor of fraudulent mortgages and the mortgage holder saddled with such. Moreover, in a system predicated on and conditioned by white supremacy and racism it isn't sufficient to simply abstain from active racial bigotry. If one is not actively opposing the material legacy of white supremacy, one is passively supporting it.
Certainly one can argue that on an individual moral level bigotry and racial prejudice are bad things, regardless of who holds such beliefs. However, that is a spiritual and philosophical, rather than a political question. When we move from the realm of idealism to the world of practical outcomes, a different criteria applies.