It seems that calling someone a racist these days is one of the fastest ways to discredit that person’s opinions. That is why, for a lot of people, “playing the race card” is nothing but an ad hominem attack. It is the attempt to beat someone in a debate without actually having arguments. And indeed, there are people who use this strategy. Often it is used by political groups that explicitly label themselves as anti-racist or anti-fascist. These groups usually themselves follow a very much totalitarian ideology that is only on the surface different from fascism. They really have more in common with fascism than not. The hope seems to be that labeling oneself anti-fascist somehow will distract people from their totalitarian agenda and make them good people. Well, they are not good people, but their distraction strategy, at least in the past, seems to have worked better than one would have hoped. But is it fair to say that everyone labeling another person as racist is just playing dirty tricks or are there maybe some people who really deserve the label?
How unpopular the label racist is became clear to me when years ago I stumbled upon a propaganda video of the Ku Klux Klan. In the video a KKK member complained that the Klan was viciously slandered in the media as a racist organization. According to him, the Klan loves all races that god has created. But they should not live in America next to the white man.
This is hilarious I thought. The poster-child organization for white supremacy racism in the US rejects the label racist. This seems nonsensical. But in order to understand why this is indeed nonsense we need to have a closer look at what racism is all about.
What is racism?
Different people have different opinions on this. The so called left for example often uses the word to label any kind of attack on an ethnic minority group that they think is underprivileged. This idea of racism is not very coherent. It is hypocritical and really just a form of totalitarian special interest politics.
For a more systematic theory of racism we first need to clarify the meaning of the word at the heart of it, which is race. On the face of it, it seems to refer to distinct genetic differences in a group of people that result in distinctive physical characteristics. This is how a biologist would define the word. However, these days, the word ‘race’ in racism usually means something broader. It refers to differences in ethnic groups. It therefore has a lot to do with culture and not so much genetics.
This broader interpretation makes a lot of sense. The opposition to biological races and the opposition to culture really appears to be politically the same thing. Is white supremacism really different in principle from anti-semitism? I would doubt that people ever really were opposed to genetics. What people have always objected to is culture. Those savages were praying to the wrong god, had strange traditions, spoke strangely sounding languages and were eating the wrong food. The different looks of people were only used as a possible explanation and identification. And as we know today, non of the things people objected to really have a lot to do with genetics. They are cultural. If this is true then objecting to another person’s culture really is politically the same things as objecting to someone’s race.
Until this point, I am willing to go along with racism. I do believe that there are different cultures in the world. I do not believe that all of these cultures are equally good. I am not referring to trivial things like food. I am a libertarian. I believe that the best way for everyone to live anywhere on this planet is to live in liberty. A lot, in fact most if not all, political cultures that we find at the moment disagree with me on this. One could argue that makes me an extreme racist, as I am in conflict with all ethnic groups, including my own. Alternatively, one could argue that I am a consequent anti racist, as I am equally opposed to all of them.
More seriously though, simply acknowledging differences between cultures is not really a racist ideology. Maybe there are some extreme egalitarians who really believe, or want to believe, that there are absolutely no differences between peoples. But even when I talk to people on the so called left they seem to be very aware of such differences. After all, a lot of them are practicing their very own form of ‘non-racist’ racism, by constantly blaming the evils of white, male culture for everything.
However, traditional racism, as a political ideology, does more than just acknowledge differences. I would argue that at the heart of political racism is and has always been the thesis that certain cultures cannot live in the same society together as equals. If they do live together, there needs to be a clear domination of one over the other. This can take the form of one overwhelmingly outnumbering the others, a legal division into first and second class citizens or can even go as far as an outright master/slave relationship, as we have seen in US history. The other alternative is to physically separate cultures from each other, at best geographically if possible. Abraham Lincoln, who famously freed the slaves in the US with very questionable means, continued till his death to work on a plan to deport all blacks back to Africa. That is exactly what racism is all about. The idea that societies can only work if they are culturally homogenous.
Racism has earned its reputation
It is no accident that this ideology has such a bad reputation. It has earned it throughout history. Wherever we see racist societies emerge, they come with a great deal of violence. It can go as far as an outright genocide like the Holocaust in Germany. This was another classic attempt to remove one ethnic group from a society. Of course not every racist society has ended in such an excess of violence. But violence is very much baked in the cake when it comes to racism. Given that racism cannot give everyone the same rights, there are groups of people that need to be suppressed. And suppression simply does not come peacefully. The preferred front line for racist violence in our time is the border of the nation state. Thousands of people die every year by trying to break the brutally enforced national segregation. Despite that you can still hear the racists scream that the state is not using enough force to keep the unwanted ethnic groups out.
Oh, but I hear the racists object. It is not racism that is causing the violence, it is multiculturalism. After all, good fences make good neighbours. This is of course nonsense. Good neighbours make good neighbours. You only need a good fence if you are living next to a socially incompetent asshole. The violence that racists predict from multiculturalism is a self fulfilling prophecy. If it wasn’t for racists disturbing the peace, there would be no problem with multiculturalism. So it is the racists that are the problem. And by racists I mean all of them. The Imam that preaches that western culture is evil and Muslims should fight it just as much as the members of the English Defence League.
Social incompetence seems to really be a problem of racists. Britain First is another one of those organizations that pretends to be only concerned citizens instead instead of racists. In this video you can see them systematically harassing and antagonizing people. Around 12.45min in the video they cause a confrontation with random people in the street. It almost ends in a fight. The spin that the Britain firsters have on the incident is that they are being threatened in their own country. But really what is going on is just a simple tit for tat strategy which is social skills 101. They antagonize people, so they get a hostile reaction. Their idea of a sociably acceptable behaviour seems to be that they have the right, as Englishmen in England, to not show any tolerance and don’t make any compromises when it comes to the lifestyle of the people around them. In return for this intolerance they expect a complete willingness to compromise and be tolerant from the other side. Of course that is causing trouble.
Political strategies of racists
Given my explanations, I think it is very fair to say that calling organizations like Britain First or the KKK racist organizations is not an ad hominem attack. However, that these organizations are uncomfortable with the label ‘racist’ shows that even hard core racists have realised that they cannot win political battles with it. That is why they are trying to make the word meaningless. The idea is to reverse the ad hominem attack. Anyone who labels anyone else as racist automatically disqualifies as an honest person who is seriously interested in a debate. That is because assumingly everyone knows that there could not possibly be such a thing as a racist movement in our times. Only some totalitarian left-wingers would call another person racist.
Of course this strategy can only work, if they manage to organize racist political ideas under a new, more acceptable label. The most popular label seems to be nationalism. Since most people still accept the idea of nation states, and also the rather strange underlying assumption that there is such a thing as a clearly identifiable nation, nationalism cannot be as easily discredited as racism. It seems perfectly acceptable to physically separate people according to nations. Every state on the planet has laws in place attempting to do just that. This reality seems to give the nationalist agenda a lot of legitimacy. The problem for the racists however is that, at least in the west, the central planning of migration increasingly does not serve to separate cultures from each other. It is just a more or less arbitrary bureaucratic machinery, which distributes visas to all kinds of people from all kinds of cultures. So it is not doing what the racists want it to do.
There are different attempts to deal with this. The most common one is to fight for the concept of the nation. Given visas to members of the wrong culture is simply a mistake. It is betraying the country and therefore treason. Another attempt however seems to be, to change the label again. Unfortunately, more and more of these people think that maybe libertarianism is a good alternative label. There are a number of reasons for that. Libertarianism is not in any form associated with the old racism. It is also anti-establishment. The establishment is perceived to be left wing. Therefore, although libertarianism really is neither left nor right, it can easily been portrayed as right wing. Libertarianism is all about individual, interpersonal liberty. And as it turns out, in order to have liberty, individuals need to have certain private property rights, that allow them to be left alone. To be left alone is nothing else but to be able to exclude people from your life. And here comes the wrong twist in this idea that suddenly makes libertarianism seem attractive to racists. Since individuals can exclude people, groups can do the same. In fact, so the claim of people like Hans Hermann Hoppe, not only can they, but they will. Naturally, so the argument, if you have private property, you will end up in some kind of voluntary segregationist society, in which every culture is living in their very own little harmonic and homogenous communities. And these communities will be big, even as big as a nation.
In principle, I don’t mind people preaching the virtues of private property. But there is a problem when you do that in order to support a false theory. The theory that private property will lead to some kind of culturally homogenous society seems false. Although it seems true on an individual micro level that birds of a feather flock together, all the evidence that we have suggests that this is not what is happening beyond the micro level. Whenever we see people being free to move where they want on the basis of private property they seem to mix up fairly quickly. There are huge economic benefits from doing that. That is why segregationist societies always had to be protected with the full power of the state. There goes the illusion that you can somehow have a harmonious racist paradise without the violence of suppression. And that is the problem with these racist allies of libertarianism. If you have a wrong theory about reality, you can either change the theory or try to change reality. The latter however is not very practical. And that is where the state comes in. The state pretends to be some higher being that can change reality according to an ideology. So the question is, will racists go along with liberty or try to use the state to make reality fit their wrong theories? I think the current migration ‘crisis’ has given us a good hint of what the answer is. Racists are very unreliable allies in the fight for liberty.
Libertarian Home 
Edit: Not “homogenous.” The word is “homogeneous.”
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Not sure about that!
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Per the on-line OED, “homogenous” once was synonymous with “homologous,” but that usage has disappeared. “Homogenous,” it says, is traditionally an erroneous spelling.
The misspelling, it does go on to say, has since 2000 become so common as to be elevated in the OED’s mind *g* to the status of a variant.
Errors in language proliferate and become the New Normal. This is inevitable, but then again so is death. So for reasons of clarity of thought, not to mention of communication, it’s advisable to stick to Standard English meanings, spellings, and punctuation.
Apologies for being so off-topic. But clarity of thought and communication are important in a serious weblog.
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This is precisely why ‘National Anarchism’ is such an oxymoron.
I would also like to add that progressive “minorities can’t be racist” attitudes are equally repugnant. If you view entire societies as a form of zero- sum competition for a fixed amount of wealth/ land/ influence ect. then you are bound to get some ugly results.
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The end of slavery in the United States was not “questionable” (slavery is a violation of natural justice – so one needs no special legal dance to end it). It was the start of slavery in areas of the United States that was questionable.
For example slavery in Georgia as not ancient – it started only a few years before the United States was formed. Corrupt court judgements (pushed by George Whitfield) overturned both natural justice (natural law) and the written instructions of the Founder of the Colony. Had Georgia gone the other way then a geographical “Slave Power” would not have formed in the first place.
As for modern “integration” – I wish that government efforts since World War II had succeeded (I really do). But the efforts that started with court cases as far back as the late 1940s (and later contained both court judgements and legislation) has failed.
Whites and blacks have not joined hands (as I wish they would) and become one community. On the contrary as the government has pushed “integration” (in housing and so on) so “white flight” from the cities has occurred.
Shows such as last night’s “Great Raliway….” with Michael Portillo last night do not help. Blaming the problems of American blacks in Baltimore and elsewhere on “slavery” (which ended in 1865) and “racism” and “white privilege” (in Baltimore – where the “racist police” have been largely black for many years, as has the Mayor and so on) is not helpful.
Nor does it explain such things as the collapse of the black family since the 1950s – or the collapse of the white family now.
As with Cato the Elder trying to “legislate morality” (in this case make the communities love each other) has not been successful.
Whether Americans and Latin Americans are more successful in forming one community in the United States remains to be seen. However, government efforts to “help” (for example by pushing the Spanish language – which actually encourages division) are not helpful.
There is no reason why an hispanic can not be a loyal American – but they must wish to be. Which means that such things as believing the wrong side won the wars of 1836 and 1848 are not helpful.
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Nico, you say that where people are allowed to freely move about on the basis of private property they mix together. But earlier in the post you bring up the “central planning” of immigration and in fact you wrote a post a little while ago arguing that the “immigration ‘crisis'” is really a “central planning” crisis. So how the world looks now immigration-wise is not the result of people moving freely about on the basis of private property, and it’s illegitimate to draw conclusions about where people would live in a free society from where they actually do live now. (This is a parallel mistake to the one the left-libertarians accuse “vulgar libertarians” of making: Conflating actually existing capitalism with “the free market” when it suits them – although, oddly, left-libertarians don’t apply their critique to immigration.) Having said that, if anything, given ‘mixing together’ appears to exist to its greatest extent in big cities, which are naturally more state dominated than other places, it might be nearer the truth to say that a large degree of ‘mixing together’ is more likely to be the result of statism than it is freedom.
And this stuff about segregationist societies always needing the iron fist of the state to accomplish their goal is wrong. To give an interesting contemporary example: the Amish. Anarcho-leftists might begrudge them the honorific “anarchist” (for good reason, I think), but the Amish would surely qualify as being anarchists for anarcho-capitalists at least. Now the Amish, who are a genetically distinct group, a distinct race (takimag.com/article/race_of_the_amish_steve_sailer/print#axzz3ym8di0OY) are segregationist if anyone is, but they don’t use government at all to resolve their disputes or enforce their (voluntarily accepted) rules, nor do they use government to enforce their borders, (daviddfriedman.blogspot.co.ke/2011/10/are-amish-anarchists.html?m=1) and Amish who aren’t happy with the lifestyle are free to leave whenever they wish. And indeed from what I understand about primitive societies – genuine real-world anarchist societies, that is – they are/were always ethnically homogenous. (Incidentally, the Bushmen [!Kung San], who have a special place in anarchist anthropology, are apparently incredibly genetically distinct from other humans.) Intentional and Utopian communities (eg the Israeli kibbutzim) by their very nature are mono-cultural, their survival depending on only letting the ‘right’ people in (and kicking out wrong ‘uns).
On a more general note, the post has an air of nostalgia about it, like it’s a decade or two out of date. The KKK are a joke among serious White Nationalists, as is the term “white supremacist” – generally what WN’s want is a “nice white country” not dominance over Blacks in a shared country. In my experience neither are WN’s and race realists typically bothered in the least by accusations of racism nowadays; they couldn’t care less (see the Cuckservative meme, Gas The Kikes Race War Now! etc and, somewhat milder, the running joke among American WN’s about how “Liberals are the *real* racists”) – and not a few of them revel in their racism (see in particular http://www.dailystormer.com, perhaps not coincidentally the most popular White Nationalist internet site). And the stuff about how ‘racists’ are trying to coopt libertarianism appears to be backwards: outside of long-term nationalists the alt-right is to a fairly large degree composed of ex-libertarians who got sick of lying to themselves about immigration etc (notably therightstuff.biz, Greg Johnson, editor of http://www.counter-currents.com, and, I believe, Andrew Anglin, who runs The Daily Stormer, used to be something of a libertarian).
And we most certainly do not “know today [that] none of the things people objected to really have a lot to do with genetics. They are cultural”. Thanks to advances in genetics, The Human Genome Project, and the field of Behavioural Genetics, we know the exact opposite: behavioural traits are highly heritable. (https://jaymans.wordpress.com/2012/12/31/all-human-behavioral-traits-are-heritable/ blogs, discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2012/06/heritability-of-behavioral-traits/#.VsXGczMRfTA, https://hbdchick.wordpress.com/2014/01/31/its-not-nature-and-nurture/).
One last point. “If it wasn’t for racists disturbing the peace, there would be no problem with multiculturalism. So it is the racists that are the problem.” This can be reversed: If it wasn’t for multiculturalists disturbing the peace, there would be no problem with racism. So it is the multiculturalists that are the problem.
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Central migration planning only exists in the form of restricting access to a country. They cannot force people to move here. Therefore, it is adventurous to say we now have more immigration than we would otherwise have. The vast majority of domestic property is owned privately today. That is true for all western countries that I know, certainly the US. And it is easy to keep people out of your property. Anti discrimination laws may play a role when it comes to hiring someone in a big company. But when it comes to controlling who lives in your house they are very easy to get around and people do that all the time. The reality however is that a lot of people do not have a problem, selling their property to a foreigner. And there are many people who do not have a problem renting out to them.
I don’t know of any segregationist society that was not enforced by the law. Yes the Amish are homogenous. But they are a small community. I never said that on a small scale (a micro level) you cannot have some exclusive clubs. You almost certainly will have them. But not on a larger scale. And people pay the price for their isolation. The reason why the Amish can do it is, because they are self sufficient on a very primitive level. They are resisting the economic incentives to take part in a modern society. Modern places, with an advances economy and a high standard of living are not naturally homogenous. They attract people from all over the world and the locals have a big incentive to do business with them and let them move in. That explains why cities are more multicultural than the country side. That is where most opportunities are. If you go to some small village in the English countryside, you will still find a very white English population in most places. That alone shows you that the thesis of massive forced integration is not correct. Why is this forced integration not happening just as much in the countryside?
Yes there are people calling themselves racists. But they are isolated small groups. No one, who wants to be taken seriously in politics puts that label on himself. That is not for legal reasons. In the US for example there are no legal restrictions for this. The label is simply very negatively connotated to most people. But I am of course not against them calling themselves racists. That is what they are and they should be labelled that way. The reason why they want a ‘nice white country’ and not domination is, because you cannot argue for the latter these days. Suppressing people is seen as wrong. South Africa tried it and had to stop it. But originally it was of course white supremacists who imported most of the blacks like cattle. It was ok in their opinion to do that, as long as it was clear that they were slaves. And today a lot of people who are in favour of immigration restrictions hire illegal immigrants. They like it that way. As long as they are illegal, they have a certain amount of power over them.
“This can be reversed: If it wasn’t for multiculturalists disturbing the peace, there would be no problem with racism. So it is the multiculturalists that are the problem.”
Disturbing which peace? If I am renting my house out to someone from India, I am not disturbing the peace. That is a perfectly peaceful think to do. Harassing my new tenant or worst, using violence to prevent me from renting out my house is disturbing the peace. To say that multiculturalists are disturbing the peace assumes some kind of ownership on a culture or even a whole country. But such ownership does not exist.
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“But one area in which every state I know of still prefers economic central planning is the movement of people over state borders. Of course there are other aspects to migration than economics, but economics is usually one of the main arguments in favour of this policy. Migration control really is classic central planning and we are seeing all the problems we would expect from such a system.”
That’s you (my emphasis), in this post on the immigration crisis: libertarianhome.co.uk/2015/09/soviet-migration-chaos/
In any case, it’s not true that “central migration planning only exists in the form of restricting access to a country”. Governments plan where they’re going to settle immigrants, how much free stuff to give them, how much training to give them, etc etc etc.
>They cannot force people to move here.
No. But they can influence them to leave and to come. Market libertarians know that governments interfere in our lives in myriad ways – if this isn’t a big deal, why be a libertarian? It’d be very strange if immigrants weren’t influenced by government behaviour just like natives are.
But fine. Let’s assume that because the “vast majority of domestic property [my emphasis] is owned privately today” government action doesn’t make all that much of a difference to where people live.
Where do people live? Pakistanis, for instance. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ethnic_Pakistanis_in_Britain.png You’ll notice that Pakistanis are concentrated, not spread out. What about non-Whites in general? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Non-white_in_the_2011_census.png Again, concentrations. How about in London, “one of the world’s most diverse cities”? blogs.lshtm.ac.uk/news/files/2013/12/ethnic_density.jpg Again, concentrations. The top picture here http://www.getmemedia.com/DB/audience-insight/ethnic-and-diversity-marketing.html is of minorities in the UK as a whole. You’ll notice concentrations. The bottom picture is just London. Pretty diverse. But if we look here http://www.theguardian.com/graphic/0,5812,1395103,00.html where the ethnic minorities are broken down, we see very clearly, once again, concentrations.
So: we live in an almost free market country, and in that almost free market country ethnic and racial groups more or less stick to their own. If you look at the UK as a whole, sure you can say “Look at all these blacks we have! Everybody mixing together like a big Benetton advert. Isn’t it wonderful?” But break the numbers down and there is barely any mixing. Thus, it seems far from “adventurous” to say there would be less immigration in a society that had a fully free market.
> I don’t know of any segregationist society that was not enforced by the law.
Yes you do. I just told you one. The Amish.
The Amish are not a “club”. That strikes me as a very disrespectful thing to say. Racist, too, bro. The Amish are a fully functioning society, and an at least quasi-anarchist society. Who cares what “scale” their society is?
>Modern places, with an advanced economy and a high standard of living are not naturally homogenous. They attract people from all over the world and the locals have a big incentive to do business with them and let them move in.
Why do they attract people from all over the world? Why do people want to move to England, say? Because there are more economic opportunities here. But why are there lots of economic opportunities in those countries they’re coming from? If we disallow genetic explanations (because those are racist and racism is bad, ‘mmmkay?) presumably because of rapacious governments. If those governments were more hands off, then economic opportunities would abound over there, too. So (again, disallowing genetics) it really is true that government is the *real* problem when it comes to immigration: Government is the “push” as well as the “pull”.
As for the reversing thing. If you had a nice White country then obviously multiculturalists agitating for change would be the ones stirring up trouble. Sweden, for example, used to be a nice White country. But then they started letting boatloads of Arabs and Africans in, and now Sweden is the gang rape capital of the West. Germany is going the same way, of course.
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For anyone reflexively thinking “he can’t say that”:
Wikipedia
However it still seems likely that the majority of immigrants are not rapists.
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“That’s you (my emphasis), in this post on the immigration crisis: libertarianhome.co.uk/2015/09/soviet-migration-chaos/“
Yes, and I absolutely think it is central planning. But the planning consists of restricting access.
“In any case, it’s not true that “central migration planning only exists in the form of restricting access to a country”. Governments plan where they’re going to settle immigrants, how much free stuff to give them, how much training to give them, etc etc etc.”
True, they do that with refugees not immigrants. But then again it is the restriction of access. They are not allowed to settle freely. They are not forcing anyone to stay in the country.
“No. But they can influence them to leave and to come. Market libertarians know that governments interfere in our lives in myriad ways – if this isn’t a big deal, why be a libertarian? It’d be very strange if immigrants weren’t influenced by government behaviour just like natives are.”
Who says that it is not a big deal? I never defended the welfare state. But if the welfare state is a problem then you need to get rid of the welfare state and not try to regulate the situation even more via immigration controls. The solution for over regulation is not more regulations.
“So: we live in an almost free market country, and in that almost free market country ethnic and racial groups more or less stick to their own. If you look at the UK as a whole, sure you can say “Look at all these blacks we have! Everybody mixing together like a big Benetton advert. Isn’t it wonderful?” But break the numbers down and there is barely any mixing. Thus, it seems far from “adventurous” to say there would be less immigration in a society that had a fully free market.”
Ok, so you agree that the whole force integration argument is not valid, as there is not much integration in your view. I actually see people mixing up. Not because the government tells them to, but because they don”t have a problem with it. That is certainly true for the part of London that I am living in where all kinds of ethnic groups are living in the same neighbourhood. But whatever people do with their liberty, I do not care. If they voluntarily live in gates communities, fine. I just don’t want the government to force people apart via policies like immigration control.
“The Amish are not a “club”. That strikes me as a very disrespectful thing to say. Racist, too, bro. The Amish are a fully functioning society, and an at least quasi-anarchist society. Who cares what “scale” their society is?”
Advocates of immigration control care. They want the whole country to be a homogenous community. And they are justifying this as being libertarian, because that would be the market result. Well, it would not be. On the market you only get some small homogenous communities, like the Amish.
“Why do they attract people from all over the world? Why do people want to move to England, say? Because there are more economic opportunities here. But why are there lots of economic opportunities in those countries they’re coming from? If we disallow genetic explanations (because those are racist and racism is bad, ‘mmmkay?) presumably because of rapacious governments. If those governments were more hands off, then economic opportunities would abound over there, too. So (again, disallowing genetics) it really is true that government is the *real* problem when it comes to immigration: Government is the “push” as well as the “pull”.”
Absolutely, governments are the problem. That is why we need to get the government out of our lives, including immigration controls. It is not me who is arguing for the governement, but advocates of immigration controls.
“As for the reversing thing. If you had a nice White country then obviously multiculturalists agitating for change would be the ones stirring up trouble.”
How? By associating themselves with non whites? Are you not in favour of free association?
“Sweden, for example, used to be a nice White country. But then they started letting boatloads of Arabs and Africans in, and now Sweden is the gang rape capital of the West. Germany is going the same way, of course.”
Most of these immigrants are not rapists. To close the borders to all of them is simply collective punishment. Not just for the immigrants, but also for the people who want to associate themselves with these foreigners. That is unacceptable. The solution is less government. Sweden is also one of the countries in which guns and self defence is systematically criminalised. I would start to advocate to reverse that and not to ask the government to do even more harm, but violating people’s rights with immigration controls.
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Test comment
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I liked this post. I did have an issue with the definitions however. I’ve always interpreted “racism” as inclusive of “institutionalized racism” which is predominantly directed towards minority groups. The definition above does not cover racism adequately. Even if sufficient to advance the argument, it doesn’t not cover the real problematic forms of racism. A more comprehensive definition of racism would address that if minorities don’t control any significant parts of the criminal justice, employment, housing, health care, political power and education institutions they are incapable of exercising institutional racism (the only one that matters). Using a limited definition of racism its understandable that one might think that all minorities want is for people to stop yelling nasty words for all to be set to rights. But as American rap artists have demonstrated, its not the freedom of speech that is racist it’s the lack of access to opportunity. So yes, minorities can use nasty words and think nasty thoughts but what they can’t do is is systematically disenfranchise other groups based on ethnicity.
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There is a difference between what racism is and what racist strategies are. There might be some institutionalised racism in the US. On the other hand there is also some institutionalised anti-racism in the US.
I haven’t really given a definition of racism, but rather a theory. As such it is up for testing. I don’t think minorities have anything to do with racism. That does not seem to be plausible. Sure, if you want to control people, it is easier to do that if they are in the minority. But this is pure strategy and has little to do with racism as a political ideology. If minorities were a part of a theory of racism, it would mean that minorities cannot be racist. That seem false. For example, no one doubts that the apartheid regime in South Africa was racist. But it was a minority of whites ruling over a majority of blacks. Same is true for pretty much an colonialist racism. There are also some minority racist groups in the US, like the Black Panthers.
In addition to that, there are examples of minorities being oppressed that are not an ethnic group. For example, people who produce a lot of wealth are in the minority. Because of that, they are heavily exploited by the majority with all kinds of taxes. But no one would say that entrepreneurs are an ethnic group. That means that majorities can rule over minorities seems to be an inherent flaw in our political system, especially democracies.
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