Demystifying Racism
- J Jones
- Mar 23
- 4 min read
For some reason there’s been an idea going around that White people aren’t racist if they stay out of the way of Black people and don’t weigh in in public conversations. I’m here to tell those people that they are kidding themselves. I’ve heard these same people refuse to say they aim to be anti-racist. Let me break down that statement using something we all consider an evil — bullying. Everyone who has a heart understands that bullying is wrong. Everyone advocates teaching about what it looks like in schools and how to make sure it doesn’t happen. Everyone is also taught to stick up for the bullied right? Wonder how anti-racism and bullying relate? Read on.
There isn’t just a bully and a victim. Every time there is a bully there is also a bully system. Let me show you what I mean. Bullies and victims don’t live in isolation. Wherever there is a bully and victim there are also the bully’s fan club, who watch and might even laugh or join in what the bully is doing. It doesn’t stop there. Along with that there is also the group of people that watch, feel bad but instead of joining in, just look away. Are you inclined to say those people have nothing to do with the bully? You’d be wrong. These are the people who, because they refuse to be a solution to the problem, become part of it. Let me say that again. Anyone who watches a bully pick on someone, and doesn’t step between the victim and the bully, are no better than the Crabbe and Goyle’s of the world. In order to stop bullying, one must have the gumption to step up and be counted for the victim. If you don’t, you are part of the problem.
Let me bring this back to anti-racism. What exactly is racism? It is the systematic minimizing of a people based on external factors. Why do these people get minimized and pushed to the periphery? It is because the bullies of the world are afraid that their resources and privileges will be taken by people they deem unworthy.
In pre-WWII Germany, Hitler, one of the most powerful bullies in history, felt that his resources (revenue from commerce) was being hoarded by the Jewish bankers and venture capitalists of his day. He began making speeches about how this branch of people should be curtailed for the good of the non-Jewish, White community, so they could take back that corner of the market he thought was rightfully theirs. He slammed his fist on the podium in speeches, shouted and made an enormous fuss about it year after year.
The people began to listen, and who would blame them? They’d just slumped home from a war that had been a black eye on the world, and every country called them dirty “Krauts” for being responsible for the biggest scale war in world history. Then this man comes along with a Charlie Chaplin mustache and he’s fun to listen to and makes them feel like they are somebody again. Trouble is, he says disparaging things about their own countrymen. But maybe they really could have been better off if the Jewish people weren’t so affluent? Maybe if they’d spread the wealth around more instead of doing business only with each other, maybe Germany wouldn’t be in such a bad place.
And so begins Hitler’s systematic disillusioning of his people toward an ethnicity. There are hundreds of books written about the German citizen who dared to hide Jewish and Christians, and anyone else whom the Third Reich was looking for. We like to tell ourselves that if we had lived in that time, we would have hid people too. We would have been Corrie Ten Boom. We would have been Viktor Frankl. The answer is a big fat, yeah right, if tomorrow we see someone from a marginalized population get picked on, and we look away. If we do not rise up in favor of giving the marginalized a leg up after so many institutions cut it out from under them, we are bullies. If we do not rise up in favor of a critical race theory that teaches the unvarnished truth about Sally Hemings and others enslaved like her, we are bullies. If we do not rise up in favor of next of kin rights for domestic partners in same sex relationships, we are bullies. We cannot look away from children put in cages for trekking outside of warzone countries hoping to find refuge here, and tell ourselves we are not bullies.
We must be actively against marginalization in laws, organizations and in public conversations if we hope to be on the right side of the bully system, and the right side of history. We must stand in-between the bullies of the world and their victims. That is what it means to be anti-racist.
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