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[ThurgreedMarshall]

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield

If you act differently around a black person than a white person is that racism? Of course the answer to that is, it depends.

Is the effect of acting differently around a black person perpetuating racism? Again, it depends.

If you act differently around women than men, are you sexist? It depends.

The existence of pervasive racism, and whether any individual white person is racist, are two different concepts. Racism is unquestionably pervasive and its impacts are often unnoticed, and a big part of it is unintentional acts by, as you note, white people who think they are woke.

Where things go off the rails a bit is when people argue that most or all whites are racist because they're born into a racist system and indoctrinated, even subconsciously, with racism. There is of course some truth to that. But as a simple matter of logic and statistical probability, it can never be the case that because whites are born into a racist society most or all of them to some extent racist.

Maybe that's not what's being asserted. Perhaps I have it wrong. But it seems to me that there's an emerging definition of racism asserting that because society is flooded with racism, anyone born into that society is to some extent racist. The idea sounds logical, except that it's not. It's arguing that the society into which you are born determines your thinking whether you like it or not. If that's true for racism, it's true for almost anything. People would be almost fractal mini-representations of the society into which they were born. That logic doesn't work for me.

This is not what is being asserted. What is being asserted is that when someone brings up the advantages white people have (because of how they have built this society), it is ignored unless someone can provide proof of specific, intentional racism that any one person has either exhibited or benefited from. And one of the ways white people do that is by asserting they aren't a bad person (as discussed to death above). Discussion over.

TM