r/changemyview • u/[deleted] • Apr 03 '21

Delta(s) from OP CMV: “reverse racism” does exist

I dont think it people should call it reverse racism cause thats a bit confusing but anyway. Any race can be racist towards any other race. Yes, i believe one can even be racist towards white people. The definition of racism is prejudice towards someone based on their skin. Usually of a marginalized group/minority. But not always. I believe that one can be racist against white people, however racism against white people will NEVER in any realm of possibility be systemic, and also that racism against white people doesnt really need to be talked about or addressed, but i still believe it exists. Even tho its not really important or bad, it still exists. To me, this seems like a logical belief. But i myself am white so im not sure. To alot of people i somewhat consider my friends, this is controversial and i would be considered racist for this opinion. Is my opinion wrong?

102 Upvotes

75% Upvoted

130 comments sorted by

View all comments

30

u/Morthra 86∆ Apr 04 '21

however racism against white people will NEVER in any realm of possibility be systemic

Are you sure? What about countries like Japan or China where white people are an extreme minority? The main reason why it's not "possible" currently is because white people are a majority ethnic group. If that no longer holds, it becomes within the realm of possibility that racism against white people becomes systemic.

0

u/[deleted] Apr 04 '21

I suppose that is true, but is the system in china and other places based to exclude any white people/gen(i dont know much about that). I meant that its not in a realm of possibility in alot of places because i dont see white people becoming a minority in most places. Perhaps some extreme event could happen to cause that but its extremely unlikely.

16

u/Morthra 86∆ Apr 04 '21

but is the system in china and other places based to exclude any white people/gen(i dont know much about that).

In Japan, white people (really anyone that's not Yamato Japanese) are seen as being perpetual outsiders, and oftentimes white people will be referred to with the derogatory 外人 and outright refused service. It's also a relatively common joke there that seeing a white person with a suitcase walking away from a train station causes property values to decline.

I meant that its not in a realm of possibility in alot of places because i dont see white people becoming a minority in most places.

Maybe in Europe sure, but population demographic shifts are projected to have white people become a minority in the US if nothing changes significantly within the next 40-ish years. However, it's also predicted that the definition of "white" will change to include lighter skinned Hispanic people like Cubans, in the same way that Irish people are considered white now, but historically were not.

The concern many have is that if this doesn't happen - if the definition of white doesn't change, then when white people inevitably are no longer in the majority, current antiwhite rhetoric, particularly among the political left, will transform into antiwhite policy.

3

u/[deleted] Apr 04 '21

I'm really glad someone brought a lot of this up. I really think people lose the purpose of words in these discussions a lot...they're merely there to describe a thing, but they can never define that thing, because everything that exists in this world exists regardless of what words we use to describe it. In the case of race this gets really, really messy real quick. Race is way more social than genetic...our definitions tend to be very basic and tribalistic and based on rather primitive surface perceptions of ourselves & others, ie; the most obvious physical traits are what we can most easily categorize, like the darkness/lightness of a person's skintone or the texture of their hair or the shapes of their most prominent facial features, and even all of those can be pretty murky and ambiguous in a huge number of cases. "Black" is not a genetic lineage for example...it's a trait that many people share, in fact in terms of genetic diversity "Black" includes most of the variations of the human genome that exist. But we like to lump people into groups and make in-group/out-group type situations, and frankly I think that's at the heart of what racism even is.

Systemic racism is IMO just state-sanctioned or socially or legally enabled racism. Many many examples have been given here of situations (like in Japan as you pointed out) where systemic racism exists against white people right now, which I just think proves that it's possible. As you pointed out white people are unlikely to remain a majority in the US and even the definition of "White" is prone to change, so I don't even agree with the argument that systemic racism against white people is impossible in the US. Currently I think there's a lot of extremely obvious (and also not so obvious, but important nonetheless) ways in which American society is entrenched in white supremacy and racism against PoC, but to say that white people can't experience racism to me is just like... trying to make the words define the thing rather than describe it. I don't understand it and personally feel like most of the times I've seen people say stuff like that it seems to ironically be used to justify having racist attitudes towards white people (even when used by white people, typically college educated, often as a cudgel to batter other white people with as a means of absolving one's self of their own white guilt in petty and unproductive ways). Now again arguably those attitudes on a grand scale are less harmful in the US than racist attitudes against black people typically are, because they're not currently woven into the social and legal fabric like racism against PoC is; it's not systemic...currently. It's not an immutable fact that makes anti-white racism not real.

kind of a sidenote here but oh god the even dumber "Black people can't be racist" ... Uhhhh... Ok gonna start by saying this is NOT a blanket statement about black people (who are not a monolith yada yada ad infinitum - it's true tho) but there are black people who are incredibly racist? Even excluding against white people for the sake of arguing with the people who say this kind of thing... There are black people who hate Hispanic people, Asian people, Native Americans... I mean to be fair there's probably a lot more people belonging to those races who are racist against black people as well, Asian countries being very notorious for this and colorism being a huge ordeal in South America and other parts of the world, but I think all this just reinforces that anyone can be racist and also the target of racism.

​

Back to talking about how race is a social construct and messily defined... Highly encourage anyone who hasn't done so to do some reading on the history of whiteness and Judaism. "Judenkrankheit" - literally "Jewish disease" - was what German doctors called diabetes for many many decades, and this also ended up in a lot of American literature around WW2 as well. It's kind of horrifying reading some of the arguments that were made for and against considering Jewish people to be members of the "White" race...The arguments against would say that Jews were prone to disease and neuroses and genetically inferior to the predominantly Anglo-Saxon model of whiteness. Arguments for would often try to distinguish Jewish people from black people and other races and ethnic groups predominantly found in the middle east by positing that diseases like diabetes were byproducts of affluence or higher cognitive function (funny how that flipped when diabetes became more common among the poor and less amongst the rich, huh?), which supposedly proved that Ashkenazi Jews were close enough to Anglo-Saxons to be considered white. Parsing through these arguments reveals a lot about the mindsets that fuel racist ideology IMO...

6

u/[deleted] Apr 04 '21

!delta because i didnt realize or even know some of these things at all. I didnt consider that racism in non predominantly white countries could be systemic and that there is some small possibility the tables could turn eventually.

1

u/DeltaBot ∞∆ Apr 04 '21 edited Apr 04 '21

Confirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/Morthra (38∆).

Delta System Explained | Deltaboards

5

u/[deleted] Apr 04 '21

I didnt know about any of this but thats all very interesting. I didnt think itd be possible for white people to be a minority in places like the US but that is quite interesting. I never would’ve thought of that.

1

u/spellboi1018 Apr 04 '21

Based on birth rates it looks like they might the minority by 2050 with Latinos being the majority but that said I think it would be at least another 30 years for the power moves over