Short Take: How is the actual racism of social justice advocates overlooked?

The great irony again is they're accusing everyone of being racist except themselves, but they're just overtly racist. How is that actual racism overlooked by not only the people accusing others of being racist, but how do they get away with it in broader society?

Essentially defining it out of existence. Like probably most people may be familiar with this new formulation of racism that was actually recently kind of adopted by Merriam-Webster, where it's racial prejudice plus power. So the assumption is that if you're a racial minority, it's kind of taken for granted that you cannot have social or political power, therefore you cannot be racist.

And that just kind of like throws the doors wide open. Like you'll hear some people still referring, saying that like, oh, a minority cannot be racist, but they can still demonstrate racial prejudice. Now if you're a normal person, you hear racial prejudice and you think, yes, racism.

That's what that means. But there's been this big push to redefine this word in such a way that it doesn't apply to things like telling a group of students that their skin color makes them unwelcome on their campus if they're white. You would think being racially prejudiced would still be a bad thing for obvious reasons. But again and again, what you see is that when these ideas hit the mainstream or hit the public, the attitude is kind of, if it's not racism according to the new definition, then it's fine. It's not that there's no real consideration about whether or not being racially prejudiced is bad.

It just seems to have flown out the window. And if you point this out, they already have ideological mechanisms in place to dismiss that out of hand. Like what you were saying before about if you object, it's taken as a sign of being racist.

That is straight out of Robin DiAngelo's white fragility. She says explicitly that there is never a question of whether or not some act was racist. It's assumed to be racist. And the only question that you get to ask is how was it racist? According to her, if the white person does anything in a situation in which they are confronted by some accusation of racism, if they do anything other than agree with the accusation and ask how they can improve, that is taken as an example of white fragility. So you're just barred from the start from being able to think critically about these things and agree or disagree with them.