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I mean, the kind of white kids who lived in my neighborhood didn’t have a lot of economic privilege, our friends were white, black, Filipino, Native American, and Asian. It never would have occurred to us to pick on somebody because of their race. It wouldn’t have made any sense.

So the first time most of my white friends really encountered racial bias, if we’re calling it that, was when they got bullied by black kids in junior high because they were white. (And I certainly recognize the late date of that encounter in itself as a kind of privilege.) And since even after that they didn’t go around consciously discriminating against black people, maybe the next time they encountered race in a way that meant something to them was when they, or someone they knew, missed out on an opportunity (or appeared to) because of affirmative action.

So how do you you talk to someone like that about privilege and the supposed difference between “racism” and “racial bias” in a way that will make sense to them? Because they’ll be the first to say that discriminating against people based on race is racism, and it’s wrong, and it’s bad. And what will you say to them when they ask you why affirmative action isn’t racism too?

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“Those black kids weren’t being racist when they bullied you because you’re white, they just hated white kids.”

I remember being bullied by an older white kid because I had a black friend. Instead of directly bullying my friend who was sitting next to me on the bus, the guy would bully me instead. Is it “racism” when a white person bullies another white person for his association with blackness? I agree that vernacularly it’s probably easier to apply “racism” to the whole gamut of race-based discrimination regardless of who is bullying whom, but if you don’t make the historical distinctions in some fashion, then very quickly something like “affirmative action” gets thought about as “racist.”

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But my point is that if we try to draw the distinction too sharply, we end up telling people like my friends, for example, “Those black kids weren’t being racist when they bullied you because you’re white, they just hated white kids.” And I think that will just sound stupid to most people.

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It seems to me that the very lack of racial privilege can actually make people more racially conscious (out of necessity), which can lead to some fairly overt racism among people of color.

Racism can be thought of as the way people treat people directly as individuals, or it can thought of as also including questions of institutional power that are often indirect. In the end, whites have more power to abuse, and thus I would argue more chance to be “racist.” People of color, I would argue, would exhibit “racial bias.”

If you compare this to sexism, and ask, “Can women be sexist?” the answer is similar. Certainly, plenty of women are misandrist (exhibit prejudice against males), but I would argue this is “gender bias” as opposed to “sexism.”

The reason I make these distinctions is because if racism or sexism or whatever-ism get equally applied to everyone (everyone can be equally racist/sexist, etc), then it strips away the historical undercurrent of certain groups actually having power over others, and we’d have to come up with new terms to explain that reality.

Edit: That said, “racial bias” is also very harmful, and if a person of color says to another person of color that something they did or said was “racist” — I’m not gonna intrude and say, “Actually, it’s racial bias, because otherwise, I’m not included in the picture as a white person.” =p That would be whitesplaining.

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If you’re white, you have privilege, and are more likely to act racist.

I’m not sure that isn’t an oversimplification. I think people with racial privilege are more likely to do or say racist things unconsciously, i.e., do or say racist things that they don’t understand are racist. We’re also likely, of course, to simply roll with our privilege even when we’re aware of it.

Obviously, power, privilege, and institutions affect how racism can be expressed, so I’m not at all trying to play the “poor white me” card beloved of the American right, but I’m not at all sure that people of non-privileged “races” are in general actually less racist. It seems to me that the very lack of racial privilege can actually make people more racially conscious (out of necessity), which can lead to some fairly overt racism among people of color.

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If BKP isn’t racist but only, occasionally, spouts racist remarks speaking, not as a man, but as a mouthpiece for the LDS church, it places the church in a tricky position.

That’s essentially the point I was trying to make with the video I posted @53. Whether BKP personally is a racist deep in his heart or not is not really the problem. The problem is that the words coming out of his mouth (as a mouthpiece for the LDS church) have real consequences for interracial families, interracial kids, and for people’s attitudes towards people who are superficially different than themselves.

It makes the church seem to privilege and uphold power structures (Mexicans marry Mexicans, Chinese marry Chinese, etc) that were man-made in the first instance. Who drew the borders for countries? Who made up cultural norms for a region or a tribe?

Exactly. That was my other question. So “Mexican” is a race and so is “Caucasian”? (see comment @31) What about “Brazilian”? Is that a race that BKP thinks should only marry amongst themselves? What about “Canadian”? Or does he divide the Canadians into racial sub-categories the way he (apparently) does for the Americans…?

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It makes the church seem to privilege and uphold power structures (Mexicans marry Mexicans, Chinese marry Chinese, etc) that were man-made in the first instance. Who drew the borders for countries? Who made up cultural norms for a region or a tribe?

As for BKP advising the Genesis Group, well that’s a group created by Mormons, isn’t it? What is the Genesis Group gonna do, kick his ass to the kerb, especially being a GA? Maybe they think they’ve got a better chance of having him calm down his rhetoric if he’s on-side rather than going head-to-head with him.

Now, if BKP was asked to advise the NAACP or the ACLU, then, I think he might have a bit more credibility as a voice of reason when speaking on race issues. Seriously, he otherwise comes across as a man out of touch.

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