Why Reverse Racism Isn't Real

[ismnotwasm]

110. If you take racism as a concept

And follow history, I think you'll see what I'm mean. I once took a class where the prof thought that modern racism could be traced to the English defeat of the Spanish Armada-- interesting theory, but the point being American Racism had had it's own journey, is unique in it's own way, as opposed to the fear of difference that seems to have always existed with origins in the fear of the other

American Blacks are huge recipients of this, as are Latinos (who actually out number Blacks at this time) but African Americans have become unwilling symbols of racism. Take any oppressed or objectified group, and you will find arguments comparing it to the African American experience of racism. While this might be acceptable in a legal sense, I don't find it acceptable in the personal sense. However, I'm white and can't speak for POC.

Now, drop my white ass in the middle of China, and if I experience racism, It would be nice to say it's 'pure' racism, I'm not the dominant culture or color. Bit it's still leaving out a hell of a lot of history and western, white influences--but at least it won't be American racism

Here's a short interesting article:

by George M. Fredrickson

Racism exists when one ethnic group or historical collectivity dominates, excludes, or seeks to eliminate another on the basis of differences that it believes are hereditary and unalterable. An ideological basis for explicit racism came to a unique fruition in the West during the modern period. No clear and unequivocal evidence of racism has been found in other cultures or in Europe before the Middle Ages. The identification of the Jews with the devil and witchcraft in the popular mind of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries was perhaps the first sign of a racist view of the world. Official sanction for such attitudes came in sixteenth century Spain when Jews who had converted to Christianity and their descendents became the victims of a pattern of discrimination and exclusion.

The period of the Renaissance and Reformation was also the time when Europeans were coming into increasing contact with people of darker pigmentation in Africa, Asia, and the Americas and were making judgments about them. The official rationale for enslaving Africans was that they were heathens, but slave traders and slave owners sometimes interpreted a passage in the book of Genesis as their justification. Ham, they maintained, committed a sin against his father Noah that condemned his supposedly black descendants to be "servants unto servants." When Virginia decreed in 1667 that converted slaves could be kept in bondage, not because they were actual heathens but because they had heathen ancestry, the justification for black servitude was thus changed from religious status to something approaching race. Beginning in the late seventeenth century laws were also passed in English North America forbidding marriage between whites and blacks and discriminating against the mixed offspring of informal liaisons. Without clearly saying so, such laws implied that blacks were unalterably alien and inferior.

During the Enlightenment, a secular or scientific theory of race moved the subject away from the Bible, with its insistence on the essential unity of the human race. Eighteenth century ethnologists began to think of human beings as part of the natural world and subdivided them into three to five races, usually considered as varieties of a single human species. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, however, an increasing number of writers, especially those committed to the defense of slavery, maintained that the races constituted separate species.

The Nineteenth century was an age of emancipation, nationalism, and imperialism--all of which contributed to the growth and intensification of ideological racism in Europe and the United States. Although the emancipation of blacks from slavery and Jews from the ghettoes received most of its support from religious or secular believers in an essential human equality, the consequence of these reforms
More: http://www.pbs.org/race/000_About/002_04-background-02-01.htm