Originally Posted by Paedantic Basterd

How racism is defined academically differs from field to field and from professor to professor. I was confused by the idea that "you can't be racist towards white people" until I probed deep enough into the issue to learn that under some working definitions, "racism" refers not to prejudice or discrimination alone, but to participation in or benefit from a societal or institutionalized system that racism is a product of.

The idea being that because white people are always in some way benefiting from such a system whereas people of colour have less equal, more mixed (usually worse) experiences in the same system, it's not possible to be racist towards white people--because that involves setting up a society and institution in which their whiteness results in their oppression, which describes probably no society currently in existence.

Not an expert by any means, but this is my understanding of what people mean when they say you can't be racist to whites. It's not because those people are libtards, it's just that they have a different working understanding of the term "racism" that is much more nuanced than the word the common public knows and engages with.

Originally Posted by djchameleon

You can be prejudice against whites but not racist in the same way as having systems set up against you. Yeah Ped explained it well though.

Originally Posted by J.R.R. Tolkien

There is only one bright spot and that is the growing habit of disgruntled men of dynamiting factories and power-stations; I hope that, encouraged now as ‘patriotism’, may remain a habit! But it won’t do any good, if it is not universal.