Referring to people as "whites" is describing them. But calling whites anything doesn't contribute to systemic disadvantage or physical violence against them, so it's not racist https://twitter.com/Doujinshi_Dojo/status/1244161026599186434

I don't know why I'm doing this for someone who's ultimately going to refuse to understand, but here's why this weird conception of "racism" is just incredibly poor basic logic to begin with.

The argument that "racism against whites is just as bad" implicitly acknowledges that racism is bad. So at least we're on the same page so far. Now, why have we globally decided that racism is bad?

If it was just a matter of people feeling bad because they're being called names, we wouldn't have a separate conception of "racism." That would just be name calling, and we all get how that can sting and be impolite.

So the whole idea of "racism is bad" needs to mean something more, right? Not just name calling. That's why you see people saying that racism is systemic; it's useless as a term without that connection.

So you have these systems that white people have created that implicitly, systemically disadvantage non-white people. The law, healthcare, systems of credit. You name it, white folks fare better.

And very early on it was easy to see that these systems were unjust. So to soothe the white conscience, you had to believe that non-white people were inherently somehow lesser than white people.

That was done in a number of ways, but especially relevant to this conversation were the intentionally denigrating names used for people of color. Whites could invoke these as a way of bypassing the humanity and individuality of a group they were actively oppressing.

And that's what a "racial slur" is. It's intimately linked to the systemic enshrinement of the idea that white people are biologically, genetically, superior to people of color.

For that reason, people of color often hear racial slurs just before or as they're being mobbed or beaten. That kind of violence is a verbal extension of the idea that we are not human.

By contrast, if I call you "a white," or even a cracker, that action has no ties whatsoever to systemic oppression. It will not make you less human, and laws that degrade your humanity will not be passed if enough of us start calling you, really, anything.

So if you do buy in to the idea that "racism is bad," you cannot believe that calling white people "whites" constitutes racism. Those are two fundamentally opposed beliefs.