This thread smartly fleshes out why Kendi’s definition of racism and anti-racism doesn’t work. Kendi fails to account for historic identity-based power inequalities that are reproduced and reinforced every day by people with privileged identities. https://twitter.com/b_tynes/status/1277412194867650569

Kendi’s construction of racism is prime fuel for white people who want to argue that people of color “can be racist against whites.” He defines racism as anyone’s negative individual feelings or actions, which mean very little without systemic power backing you up.

I can verbally shit on straight people all day long, but at the end of the day, they’re the ones who have always had the right to get married, to not have to come out, to feel “normal” and socially acceptable, to be safe, to make life-changing decisions about me without me.

Similarly with american systemic racism, people of color can have negative feelings about white people, & it will never institutionally or universally harm white people, because white people currently occupy (& always have) the vast majority of the positions of power in the US.

Lots of Black friends on here have said that white people are lucky that Black people want reparations and not revenge. Revenge would look like 400+ years of enslavement, mass incarceration, overpolicing & police brutality, and countless human rights atrocities.

Black Americans can resent white people (completely justifiably given the experiences they’ve had at the hands of white people for centuries) but they can’t flip a switch and take over all systems of power automatically to turn against white people (but tbh I wish...)

No one can be “racist against white people” because no other racial or ethnic group has more power now, or has ever had more power, than white people. That power has been explicitly and remorselessly used against people of color since the US began.

White people who think that people of color can be racist are making a desperate attempt to escape individual accountability for their collective actions.

Individualism is baked deeply into white supremacy as a mechanism to allow white people to self-distance from worser racism-ers. If I’m not in the KKK, then I’m not so bad, right?

Scapegoating people of color as having the same capacity for racism as white people is kind of a whataboutism that is intended to distract you long enough to keep you from pressing white people on their complicit or explicit perpetuation of white supremacy.

Press them anyway, fellow white people. Ask them to interrogate why they are afraid of having to participate in collective responsibility for white supremacy.

(Realizing I’ve used white supremacy and racism interchangeably in this thread. Racism is a more vague term than white supremacy, but for me they’re the exact same thing, because white people are the only ones who benefit from racism.

Saying “white supremacy” makes it specific and systemic, and makes it much harder to avoid endless arguments about how “I don’t have a racist bone in my body” because we aren’t talking about you and how you feel, we’re talking about how systems work.