The price of educating against bigotry by the dominant group.
In 1872, a famous eggman was quoted as saying, “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” According to the source material, he then had a great fall from the wall upon which he sat, and said no more, because he became no more than a wet splat.
In 1972, an anti-racist academic named Patricia Bidol wrote a textbook entitled “Developing New Perspectives on Race: An Innovative Multi-media Social Studies Curriculum in Racism Awareness for the Secondary Level“. Pretty dry stuff.
Bidol’s focus was not on racism in general, but on institutional or systemic racism, which works in terms of laws and policies. While such racism is implemented by individuals, it is impersonal in manner and this facelessness increases its harm. Bidol made that clear when she stipulated that the definition of “racism” she used in the book was “prejudice plus power“; in other words, systemic racism.
This is all well and good. It’s completely legitimate for someone to stipulate a more narrow definition, if that’s what their text is focusing on, so long as they make that intent clear, as Bidol did. Humpty Dumpty did nothing wrong!
Unfortunately, certain activist popularizers decided to try to make this stipulative definition the normative one, taking over by fiat. With this change, it’s not just that systemic racism happens to be the type that Bidol is concerned with in her writing, it’s the only kind of racism that they’re willing to acknowledge the existence of. If it’s not systemic racism, they insist that it is, by (their) definition, not racism at all.
This peculiar, revisionist redefinition has not caught on, except in certain niches, but those niches are highly aggressive. The modern proponents also go further than Bidol intended, claiming that that personal—not systemic or institutional—racism is likewise one-sided by definition. Their definition, naturally.
If a white person hurls racist slurs, discriminates on the basis of race, or commits racially-motivated violence, these count as racism of the personal sort. No argument here. But if a Native American did the same thing, even against a Mexican American, it “can’t” be racist, they insist. Why?!
Essentially, they’re committing the No true Scotsman fallacy. Racism is bigotry that’s rooted in the notion of race, but when we consider racism outside the dominant group, these people claim it’s not true racism solely because they’ve chosen to artificially narrow their definition to exclude it. They move the goalposts so that only they can score.
They don’t stop at racism, instead applying this notion to other forms of bigotry in the same way. They claim, for example, that sexism against men is “impossible” because men have the power. All of it, somehow. We’ll come back to this, but first let me argue against myself.
On the one hand, it’s easy to understand why we might want to focus on bigotry by the dominant group; essentially, straight, cis, able-bodied, well-to-do, white, Christian men.
This is the biggest, longest-running, most entrenched, and most harmful form of bigotry in America precisely because the dominant group has the power to not only get away with acts of personal bigotry, but to institutionalize this bigotry systematically. Not only are they above the law; they are the law. They write it and they enforce it, all to their own advantage.
None of this is merely theoretical; it is our history of colonialism and white supremacy. Moreover, it’s obvious that much of the bigotry encountered by the dominant group is, if not well-deserved, at least entirely understandable in context. It’s blowback, when the oppressed have a chance to turn the tables on their oppressors.
White supremacy is the (white) elephant in the middle of the room, so prevalent that we take it for granted. The dominant group, despite being a numerical minority, forms the baseline for our expectations, against which everyone else is contrasted.
This white, male doctor is just a doctor, but that woman is a woman doctor, that Hispanic is a Hispanic doctor, and so on. The dominant group hyphenates the rest into inferiority. They are the peak of the hierarchy, with others being measured in terms of how close they come; white men above white women, white women above Black men, Black men above Black women, and so on.
So when the elephant bellows, we can’t ignore it. It deserves to be our focus, our target, our greatest internal enemy. We should hate it and we should fight it.
However, while this hatred of bigotry is not in itself bigotry, responding in kind is. It’s good to hate Nazis, even to punch them, but it’s wrong to hate the German people as a whole just because some of them were Nazis, even if Nazis ran their country.
The latter goes past blaming the oppressors and becomes guilt by association. It generalizes to groups that people have no choice about being a member of, instead of holding them accountable for what they choose to do. This is the very definition of bigotry.
To bring the example home, hatred of white supremacy is fully justified, but it’s bigotry to hate white people for the existence of white supremacy. Hatred of misogyny is justified, but it’s bigotry to hate men. Hating people for choosing to be bigots is not bigotry; hating people because of the bigotry of others who happen to look like them is.
It gets worse. One corollary of their view is that, when minorities commit acts of bigotry, it doesn’t count because it’s just insult, not injury. We’re weak and powerless, so our mere words are not like the sticks and stones of the dominant group.
According to this, when someone in the dominant group complains of being a victim of bigotry, we should disregard them because their hurt feelings are not important compared to the broken bones of “real” bigotry. Even complaining is a symptom of “fragility” and is worthy of mockery and disapproval, they insist.
This view infantilizes minorities, denying them agency and autonomy. It falls right into the “white savior” trope, where the oppressed are too weak to fight back and it’s up to sympathetic members of the dominant group to cross the line and fight for us, making all the decisions in the process, and taking all the credit.
But not being dominant doesn’t entail being subservient. Power is never as simple as all or nothing. Not having the bulk of the power doesn’t mean being powerless. It means having less power in many places, and sometimes more power in a few. And where we have power, even the power to act personally and directly, our bigotry can cause injury, not just insult.
Minorities can certainly benefit from members of the dominant group who oppose bigotry, but we are not feeble and defenseless on our own. The whole point of our movement is that we’re all fundamentally equal and deserve to be treated as such.
Narrowing the definition of bigotry to make it one-sided is in itself bigoted, not only against the dominant group but against the oppressed. And yet it is a frequent component of performative anti-bigotry, the false wokeness that latched onto—and corrupted—Bidol’s work.
Speaking out against it, no matter how clearly and gently, is a sure way to be branded a bigot, even though all you’re saying is that bigotry is bad no matter who does it. It’s such a simple, self-evident point, which is perhaps why the counter-reaction is so vicious.
The irony is that the intentions behind this were good. This didn’t start off as a cover for minority bigotry; Bidol is a white woman. She wrote this book to teach (presumably white) high school students not to be racists. She meant well, but the idea mutated and became toxic.
By fetishizing white guilt and applying a double standard, it only serves to create more bigotry. It alienates those who would otherwise be more sympathetic, it provides a defense for bigotry against the dominant group, and it reduces the oppressed to mere victims.
And instead of being able to focus on systemic changes, the dominant group is expected to participate in endless performative public self-flagellation; mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa! When you’re busy performing, you don’t have time to do the real work.
They know what they’re doing is wrong, which is why they’re so touchy about it, but they figure that the end justifies the means. Sure, this ideology is insulting and unfair, but that’s the price we have to pay as educators to punish students for their unrequested privilege and guilt them into anti-racism.
If these activists want to make an anti-racist omelet, they figure they gotta break a few eggs, or at least bruise the feel-bads of brittle wypipo. But if Humpty taught us anything, it’s that breaking eggs makes a mess that splatters all over the place and there’s no undoing it.