As Rosa Parks once said, “Racism is still with us. But it is up to us to prepare our children for what they have to meet, and, hopefully, we shall overcome.” Racism still exists, there is no denying this. There is no denying white privilege and the benefit the white community receives from racism.
Yet, despite popular belief, white people are the only race capable of being racist.
The idea of being racist against whites, or reverse racism, simply does not exist. Reverse racism is an impossibility in Euro-American culture due to the fact that the oppressed race does not hold the social, economic, or institutionalized power to hold systematic discrimination true.
Racism, as defined by sociologists, is a set of beliefs put in place and supported by the institutions of society. In order to be racist, one needs to possess two traits.
The first is privilege: an institutional, social, and structural advantage. White people take up positions of racial privilege due to the fact that unemployment rates for the black community is consistently twice as high as whites and that if you apply for a job with a white sounding name, you’re over 50 percent more likely to get the job than if you applied with an "ethnic-sounding" name.
Furthermore, one must also have power in society: the ability, backed up by social institutions, to be a social influencer, with more leeway when it comes to what you do, where you do it, and how. In our society, whites have the bulk of power in social institutions such as courts, corporations, and schools.
For example, white people benefit from their affluent status and power when they are not arrested for crimes at superfluous rates, while the black population experience racism when they are arrested, and sentenced, for the same crimes.
“This reflects a racialized power imbalance in the justice system."
It is about the privilege and power of white offenders, who are less likely to be racially profiled, more likely to be able to talk police officers out of an arrest, the lack of social status for black offenders, and greater likelihood to have strong legal representation. Throughout the history of America, there have consistently been national laws, like slavery and Jim Crow put in place specifically to methodically target and oppress black people. These kinds of oppression still exist today in the form of systemic racism.
All of this institutionalized racism has constantly pushed the black population to a rank that is "less than," which is something that has not happened to the white population. There has never been a national set of laws put in place to systematically oppress white people.
Not all hatred is created equally.
Therefore reverse racism can never truly exist. White people do not get to say racism exists against them because it does not. The black population lacks the institutional power and support to back them up and protect them when they are prejudiced towards whites. Racism is not one's individual thoughts but a system of beliefs against another race.
Black people do not hold the social power or have institutions behind them to spread such beliefs about the white population. Therefore, reverse racism does not affect the daily lives or perception of white people. Therefore, they cannot be racist.
Yes, it is possible, as a white person to have felt like someone made you feel bad about yourself due to the fact that you were simply white. There is a crucial difference, however, between discrimination that happens on an institutional level and an individual level. When blacks hate on whites it does not perpetuate a system that is already in place. But when whites hate on blacks, it does.
“To pretend there is not a different, harsher meaning attached to discrimination against a member of any disadvantaged group is to deny everything about the reality of the world around you."
