@noahtheduke posted:
i’m mostly writing this now to incentivize writing more later. tired of merely thinking this
@noahtheduke posted:
in the comment of the above, @fracture wrote:
Are they redefining it, though? That's always been the idea behind the word, and both of those examples fit. It's a word to describe an ideology based around building racial hierarchies and structuring society around them, it's an -ism like capitalism or communism. You can have capitalists and you can have people who think it's all a scam but still believe in shit like reaganomics or w/e
i didn't know the history of "racism" but having just read the wiki page about it, looks like the word has been in usage for ~120 years and has had the connotations of "belief in the superiority of one race over another" for ~80 years. hard to say how much of that time has been "systemic racism" vs "interpersonal racism" or when such a change might have occurred.
given that, words follow usage and trying to get people to use a definition that is no longer in wide use is imo futile. like how in the 90s and 00s it was a common joke topic to be mad about "whom vs who" whereas now no one uses "whom" or talks about it because the language-as-used-by-everyone has moved on.
in my personal experience having grown up in the 90s and 00s, popular culture was very focused on "color blindness" and then later "celebrate our differences", with stories and schooling and DEI interventions being focused on interpersonal racism as the major problem that can be handled by education and kindness.
at some point, we're losing discursive ground to shitlords because when we say something like "you can't be racist to white people", we're using versions of "racist" and "white people" that have a massive academic-based context. it's trivially easy to both imagine and give real-world examples of "interpersonal racism against people with light skin" and when "racism" is popularly understood as "interpersonal racism", we look like idiots who are either racist ourselves or lying.