No, racism and sexism don't "go both ways"

[DirkGently]

10. Institutional or systemic animus works systemically. Personal animus still matters.

So, yes, it's true people try to argue a false equivalency between systemic or cultural oppression based on identity and personal animus.

People who would like to dismiss widespread discrimination will imply that because anyone can be racist or sexist or religiously bigoted, that it all kind of "balances out" somehow, which of course it doesn't. It *matters more* when an empowered group hates or discriminates, but it doesn't make it the only thing that matters.

We have words for institutional or systemic or culture-wide inequalities already. "Racism" and "sexism" already have definitions, and they refer to personal, not societal thinking. One leads to the other, but that doesn't make them the same thing.

Trying to redefine personal animus based on race or gender or religion, which is always harmful and always a bad idea, so that only some people can ever be guilty of it is a weird, unsupportable dodge with some pretty terrible implications.

Under this rubric, we're supposed to excuse personal animus, which is just as foolish, just as narrow-minded, just as hateful, on the basis that someone engaging it can't really hurt anything, which simply isn't true. It invites an irrational scrutiny of everyone's cultural identity that relies on the same racist or sexist or bigoted thinking that causes the problems we're all talking about. It also doesn't allow for any fluidity in cultural norms.

How does that all work when we get past America's problem of the simplistic identities of "black" vs. "white?"

Are we okay with a Pacific Islander who won't rent his apartment units to Malaysians because he thinks they are lazy, based on weighing whose identity has the most theoretical power in society? Is no harm being done if an Atheist, whose group has virtually no societal advantage, assumes that Protestants are too stupid to be promoted at work?

How do we know, by the way, when judging these things, what people's identities really are? Race is a cultural construct to begin with. Even gender identity is being increasingly recognized as something that varies in ways we can't instantaneously recognize. Mike Huckabee spent last week talking up the Dredd Scott decision, which held

Any person descended from Africans, whether slave or free, is not a citizen of the United States.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dred_Scott

This was in keeping with America's "one drop" (of blood) theory of racism, wherein any kind of African ancestry rendered someone a lesser person. Now we laugh when racists go on television and discover they are of African descent as well.

But we don't stop calling them racists.

Recall we are talking about what people look like, or really, what other people think they look like. The implications for how we treat each other are real, but how do you go about convicting or absolving people of racist thinking based on that? If a person from Asia is mistaken for someone from South America, what level of racism is okay for them to apply? And how do you mix in religion, physical ability, or whatever else we are mistreating each other over? Can someone "trump" someone else's entitlement to bigoted thinking by revealing an additional oppressed identity?

And what happens when things DO get better, as we hope they do, a little at a time? Will we give and take absolution for bigoted thinking based on how a particular identity is doing in the global or American pecking order?

Words have meaning for a reason. Hating, mistreating, assuming superiority over, or claiming a right to treat people differently based on appearance, background, or physical characteristics, -- yours or theirs -- IS racist or sexist or bigoted, whether society is carrying out your foolish thinking or not.