shrekindaeyo:

one of my close friends had to deal with some ignorant person saying something racist and then having the Audacity of saying that it wasn’t so here’s a short lesson on what racism is by someone who actually studied it and has to deal with it since she was in kindergarten:

• racism is the product of social and historical relationships that created inequalities between social groups and its purpose is to justify those power dynamics
• the historical relationships being colonization and slavery so no, u can’t be racist against white people 🤡🤡 (and if u still haven’t understood that then please go refer to some history books thanks!!)
• racism isn’t merely a feeling of hatred against a specific group, it’s a whole system that was created in order to limit minorities’ access to things like housing, jobs, education, rights, etc, and this discrimination gives the dominant group privileges (like not being called a terrorist just bc someone of ur race is one but i could go on and on)
• (minority in the sociological way means a group with a distinctive feature whether it’s race, language or sexuality that is dominated by the majority,, it has nothing to do with demography so for example black people in south africa during the apartheid were in fact a minority)
• hey speaking of race, it’s a social construct!! it’s a classification of human beings in unequal groups which are given an identity that sets hereditary differences between them and those differences are therefore permanent in the mind of a racist (physical traits = moral traits, social groups = races)
• what I mean is that racism invented races : it’s not abt the color of ur skin, ur culture, ur pedigree, it’s abt white people deciding they were superior to others in order to justify their acts of violence 
• btw race is a political tool and not a scientific concept and there are no actual races in the human specie
• now let’s get more academic 🤠🤠 according to the sociologist Véronique de Rudder, racism consists of three things that play a role in power dynamics:
• 1. ideological aspects that are more or less explicit (ex: racist theory, scientific racism)
• 2. cognitive elements that are more or less conscious (ex: stereotypes, images we see in the media and art, dehumanization, fetishization)
• 3. social practices that can be ordinary or integrated in institutional norms (ex: avoidance, harassment, physical or verbal aggression, segregation, genocide)
• so what that means is that even things that u thought were harmless can actually be racist bc we live in a racist society that teaches us everyday to be racist —> saying smth racist doesn’t mean that ur evil or hate people, it means that u participate in actions that reinforce power dynamics between the “races” so go unlearn all that btch