| If you look up the definition of racism you find: "Discrimination or prejudice based on race." - from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition. Since discrimination based on race is racism, once you make race a factor in your judgment (even if it's one factor out of many) then you are discriminating based on race and therefore racist. It doesn't matter if you are trying to help a specific race or hurt another race, privilege or oppression, they are two sides of the same racist coin. You may think you can justify your racism by appealing to historical racism, but it doesn't change the fact that you are being racist. I happen to think that all racism is evil, I don't care about your intentions or which group it's directed at. After all, even Hitler claimed to have good intentions. There has yet to arise a racist that doesn't believe that he is doing something good. That's why I think trying to excuse some forms of racism while condemning others is arbitrary and hypocritical. Ends don't justify means. If you actually want to help people, find a way to do it that is not racist. Edit: forgot to respond to CRT / structural racism If by structural racism you mean anything other than laws/policies that are overtly racist or intentionally designed to target certain races despite having no overt racist language, then I agree that that is a problem. If you however conclude from a disparity in outcome that racial discrimination must be the cause of the disparity, then I think you are committing a logical fallacy (affirming the consequent). The fallacious argument is: (1) If there is structural racism then you will see disparity in outcome for different races.
(2) there is disparity in outcome for different races
(3) therefore there is structural racism There can be any number of reasons to explain a disparity in outcomes across races. The existence of the disparity is not enough to prove racism. What I find is that the accusation of racism is made too easily, because there is political currency in victimhood. It's sad because tilting at windmills obstructs the actual progress that can be made at solving real problems, because we are distracted with thought-policing our white neighbors. |