Racism
What you hear
Hating people because of their race. Slurs, the Klan, the obviously evil. A charge about what is in a person's heart.
The common meaning. This is the cover the redefinition travels under.
What they mean by it
In this literature racism is not an attitude but an arrangement. Five claims carry the doctrine, each in their own words.
Racism is prejudice plus institutional power.
White racial and cultural prejudice and discrimination, supported intentionally or unintentionally by institutional power and authority
Özlem Sensoy, Is Everyone Really Equal? An Introduction to Key Concepts in Social Justice Education, Teachers College Press, 2nd edition, 2017, Chapter 8, "What Is Racism?", the definition sentence
It runs one way only: from White people to everyone else.
Critical scholars define racism as a systemic relationship of unequal power between White people and peoples of Color.
Özlem Sensoy, Is Everyone Really Equal? An Introduction to Key Concepts in Social Justice Education, Teachers College Press, 2nd edition, 2017, Chapter 9, "What Is Whiteness?"
At its hardest, racism is whatever makes some groups die sooner.
Racism, specifically, is the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death.
Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California, University of California Press, 2007, Chapter 1, p. 28
It is built into capitalism itself.
racialism would inevitably permeate the social structures emergent from capitalism
Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, University of North Carolina Press, first published 1983; revised and updated 3rd edition, 2020, Introduction, p. 2, on racialism permeating capitalism
So the remedy is destroying capitalism.
the liberation of all oppressed peoples necessitates the destruction of the political-economic systems of capitalism and imperialism as well as patriarchy
Combahee River Collective, A Black Feminist Statement, dated April 1977; first collected in Eisenstein, ed., Capitalist Patriarchy (1978), as quoted in Bohrer, Marxism and Intersectionality (2019), p. 73
The plain lines are the archive’s. The words under each are theirs, read in the edition named.
Documented
In plain English
A property of the system, not the person. This definition needs no slur, no act and no intent. Only the dominant group can be racist, because racism is prejudice plus institutional power. The remedy is not a change of heart but the remaking of institutions. Those institutions include the economy, so the fight against racism becomes, by definition, a fight against capitalism.
The archive’s reading. The definition above is the citable one.
Assessed
Why it works
You do not want to be a racist, and the word still sounds like it means hating people, so when someone asks you to oppose racism you agree. But the racism you have agreed to oppose is, under their definition, the system itself: the institutions, the outcomes, and in the fullest version capitalism. Your decency is the engine. Every step you take to avoid being a racist in grandma's sense is a step in their program in theirs.
Assessed
The claims ledger
The citable statements behind this term, each tied to the movement source filed in the Vault.
The standard social-justice education text by Sensoy and DiAngelo defines racism in the United States and Canada as White racial and cultural prejudice and discrimination, supported intentionally or unintentionally by institutional power and authority, to the advantage of Whites.
- Is Everyone Really Equal? An Introduction to Key Concepts in Social Justice EducationTeachers College Press, New York
{"offset":369883}
Sensoy and DiAngelo define racism as White racial and cultural prejudice and discrimination supported by institutional power and authority.
- Is Everyone Really Equal? An Introduction to Key Concepts in Social Justice EducationTeachers College Press, New York
{"offset":369883}
Sensoy and DiAngelo report that critical scholars define racism as a systemic relationship of unequal power between White people and peoples of Color.
- Is Everyone Really Equal? An Introduction to Key Concepts in Social Justice EducationTeachers College Press, New York
{"offset":419639}
In Golden Gulag, Ruth Wilson Gilmore defines racism as the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death.
- Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing CaliforniaUniversity of California Press, Berkeley
Chapter 1, p. 28
Robinson holds that racialism would inevitably permeate the social structures emerging from capitalism.
- Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical TraditionUniversity of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill
{"offset":160349}
The Combahee River Collective statement of 1977 holds that the liberation of all oppressed peoples necessitates the destruction of capitalism and imperialism as well as patriarchy.
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Plain English for “Racism”: A property of the system, not the person. This definition needs no slur, no act and no int...
- Is Everyone Really Equal? An Introduction to Key Concepts in Social Justice EducationTeachers College Press, New York
{"offset":369883}
The Race Traitor editorial, as taught in the 2015 sixth edition of McLaren's Life in Schools, holds that so long as the white race exists all movements against racism are doomed to fail.
- Life in Schools: An Introduction to Critical Pedagogy in the Foundations of Education (sixth edition, 2015)The 2015 Paradigm Publishers sixth edition. A separate work from the first edition of 1989, which is source 65.Paradigm Publishers, Boulder
Part V, p. 216, quoting the Race Traitor editorial
The evidence file
Corroboration beyond the ledger. Each passage was read in the edition named, not in a search result.
What the definition is for
so long as the white race exists, all movements against racism are doomed to fail
Source: Peter McLaren, Life in Schools: An Introduction to Critical Pedagogy in the Foundations of Education, Paradigm Publishers, 6th edition, 2015, Part V, p. 216, quoting the Race Traitor editorial
Read the clause carefully. It rules out in advance every remedy short of abolishing the category, which is what a definition placed at the level of structure rather than conduct is built to do.