In any discussion of racism and it’s alleged reverse, it’s crucial to start by defining prejudice and discrimination, racism and institutional racism. There’s a reason these different terms exist, and a very good reason not to conflate them.
Prejudice is an irrational feeling of dislike for a person or group of persons, usually based on stereotype or on a generalization based on personal experience or perception. Virtually everyone feels some sort of prejudice, whether it’s for an ethnic group, or for a religious group, or for a type of person (like blondes, or fat people, or tall people, or that guy who looks like your evil Uncle Howard). The important thing is they just don’t like them. Prejudice is a feeling, a belief. You can be prejudiced, but still be a fair person if you’re careful not to act on your irrational dislike.
Discrimination takes place the moment a person acts on prejudice. This describes those moments when one individual decides not to give another individual a job because of, say, their race or their religious orientation. Or because of their looks, birthplace, accent, sexuality, etc. You can discriminate, individually, against any person or group, if you’re in a position of power over those you want to discriminate against. White people can discriminate against Black people, and Black people can discriminate against white people if, for example, one is the job interviewer and the other is the person being interviewed.
Racism is the belief that one race is inherently superior to another. People who believe this are called racists. They approve of and support systems that enforce their prejudices, and that allow them to discriminate. Acts that reflect an unconscious or conscious belief in racial superiority are also called racist (for example, when a white person automatically assumes that the Black person who entered their hospital room is an orderly, not a doctor). When people who are prejudiced and discriminatory enforce inequality in a society where all the institutions are designed to normalize prejudice and discrimination in one direction, this is a racist system: racism has been institutionalized. For example, a Black person in the U.S. might believe in Black supremacy, and might think Black people are better than white people, but society’s institutions don’t reflect their racist beliefs. A white person in the U.S. who believes in white supremacy already has the weight of the state and virtually every other institution in society behind them up if they discriminate against a Black person. This is why individual racism and racism as an ideology are not the same thing as a racist society.
Institutional racism (often simply called “racism”) describes patterns of discrimination that are institutionalized as “normal” throughout an entire culture. At this point it’s not just one person discriminating at a time, but a whole social structure that evolved to enforce discrimination. A racist system makes it difficult for a person not to discriminate, no matter how well-meaning they are.
A clear cut example is a slave-holding culture: people are born into a society where one sort of person is “naturally” a master, and another sort of person is “naturally” a slave (and usually not considered a person at all, but a beast of burden). In that culture, discrimination is built into the social, economic and political fabric, and individuals — even “free” individuals of the “superior” race — don’t really have a choice about whether they discriminate or not because even if they don’t believe in slavery, they interact every day with slaves and benefit from the laws and rules that keep slaves bound.
In a racist society, the penalty for slaves who challenge the system is extreme. But even for white people, it takes courage and willingness to subject oneself to scandal or danger to step outside that system and become an abolitionist. It’s not the “fault” of every member of the master class that slavery exists, and some might wish it was gone. But the fact is that every white person benefited from the unpaid labor of slaves at every level of society because they consumed the products that enslaved people produced, or used the infrastructure that was built with slave labor. Unless white people rise up and oppose the system and try to overthrow it (abolitionists, for example), they’re forced to be complicit in the slave system even if they hate that system. And the system is set up to emphatically discourage those kinds of challenges, just as it is set up to ensure that slaves who revolt will be brutally suppressed.
And even when members of the master class do oppose systems of oppression, as the abolitionists did, this doesn’t eradicate their racism. In a racist society, even opposition to slavery is tainted by a dense and interconnected network of unconscious and conscious racist beliefs and assumptions, so that many abolitionists reinforced existing prejudices against Black people even as they sought to end chattel slavery.
The above is an extreme, clear example, which I use to make it easier to see the fuzzier, more complex situations we’re in today. Despite the fact that slaves were freed by the Emancipation Proclamation, and that the 14th Amendment gave Black Americans voting rights, the institutional structures of racism were not all overturned. Even after the 14th Amendment was passed, white people still had the power to prevent Black people from voting by instituting the poll tax, the grandfather clause, and the “understanding” clause, which required Black people to recite any segment of the Constitution the white registrar wanted them to recite. (A test almost all white people would have failed, had it been applied to them.) In the Sixties, the Civil Rights Voting Acts were passed, which were intended to knock down those obstacles to voting. But Black Americans still do not have political power in proportion to their presence in the population (even though we had a Black President), and are often denied the vote, as the 2018 Georgia and Florida elections so graphically demonstrated. The right wing’s focus on alleged “voter fraud” and suppression is just another way to keep these barriers in place.
If you look at important voting bodies like Congress, the State Senates and Representatives, or at the Federal and State Supreme Courts, or at the CEO list of major corporations, or at any other body that wields substantial power in the U.S., you will count only a few Black faces (and in some cases, none). Of the Black faces you count, some will not be representing the views of most Black people in this country, but the views of the white majority who selected and promoted them. (Republicans are particularly interested in supporting the campaigns of Black politicians who do not represent the views of Black constituencies.) But if you count the Black people in poverty, and in prisons, or the number who are unemployed or lack health care, you will find Black people represented out of proportion to their numbers in the larger society.
Unless you are going to argue that Black Americans are “naturally” inferior to whites (which is an outright racist position), you have to admit that there is a set of mechanisms that limit Black opportunity. That’s institutional racism: the interacting social, political, and economic rule systems that all discriminate, either overtly (racial profiling, for example) or covertly as when white majority governments gerrymander to split Black majority areas so they don’t have the electoral power to vote in Black candidates, or when white-run banks use zip codes as a criteria for excluding people who apply for loans, and just “happen” to exclude all the majority Black neighborhoods in a city, an illegal practice called “red-lining” that somehow keeps happening. One could go on for hours about these various mechanisms, and I’m sure you can think of plenty on your own which discriminate against Blacks, Hispanics, Native Americans and other deemed “nonwhite” by the white majority.
Finally, we get to “Reverse Racism.” It’s crucial to maintain the distinction between the above three terms, because otherwise it’s too easy to confuse prejudice and discrimination with racism. Those who insist “reverse racism” exists are confusing discrimination and the ineffectual racist ideology of a small number of Black individuals with institutional racism. It’s like a magic trick: the prestidigitation is designed to confuse us into thinking they’re all the same thing. But Black Americans have far less opportunity to discriminate against whites than whites have to discriminate against them; and Black Americans lack a system of institutionalized support that protects them when they discriminate against whites.
Reverse racism is the term racists use to express their fear of a power structure turned upside down, in which they’d suddenly occupy the bottom slot. That has not happened in the U.S., however much white right wing ideologues want to complain that they’re victimized by the few established programs designed to promote equality. White people who complain about reverse racism are actually complaining about being denied privileges, rather than being denied rights. They feel entitled to be hired first and fired last. If, in a rare instance, a Black employer discriminates against a white job applicant, that’s not “reverse” anything — it’s discrimination. Discrimination should be condemned on principle, but it’s not evidence of some systematic program that deprives whites of their rights.
And if the whole system did turn upside down, and suddenly enforced Black supremacy instead of white, it still wouldn’t be “reverse racism.” It would just be… racism.
The right wing popularized the term reverse racism because they were really angry at having their white privilege challenged. Anyone who uses that phrase, whether they are right wing or not, furthers the right wing’s cause. This is what I tell Democrats and progressives who I hear using the term: not only are they being inaccurate, but they’re helping out their opponents.
The above arguments can be applied to any institutionalized structure of oppression, affecting any race, ethnic or religious group, and can be used to oppose similar claims of “Reverse Sexism” too.
