The Kyle Phoenix Blog: Kyle Phoenix Answers: Do you think it’s true that all white people in the U.S. are racist? I know of a professor who teaches that and I can’t understand lumping all people of any characteristic together.

Monday, July 2, 2018

Kyle Phoenix Answers: Do you think it’s true that all white people in the U.S. are racist? I know of a professor who teaches that and I can’t understand lumping all people of any characteristic together.

Yes, but I take it a step further, all people are racist. That's the point of a race based socially constructed system. We have all been taught to identify people in a race classification system. To top it off we have all been taught which of those classification systems is preferable. Then we were all taught which was least preferable or inferior.

Sit with that.
Do you know these things?

You’re Racist, then.

Now we were then taught the final component of that: how to unite and deliver the above on a mass level as individuals, to add a racist penny to the pot if you will.

What is adjustable, what we must practice as long as society exists is identifying when our training is kicking in, those thoughts and countermanding them if they are executionally biased or discriminatory.

That mental/emotional skill is what we lack en masse and have yet to identify and distribute a direct system to assist and reinforce the countermand.

Americans identify race in a bifurcated way: legally and socially, which sums to systematically or institutionally.

Whites see it as a matter of character with a legalistic morality attachment. To be racist is character based and means one is a bad person, bad coming from the social structure of racism being illegal. Its why White Privilege is invisible to White people, they have not directly committed a crime or are not criminals/bad people so they dismiss the racist labeling. Not able to identify the"crime" (their ontological view of racializing) they shutdown at what must feel like a massive wave of accusations. Not understanding that it is mistrust at someone you have been taught to perceive a certain way is what prevents you from seeing what you are inadvertently doing. People of color don't realize that racial training for us included a foundational trust in White people that we then dismantle in our private cultural spaces. We then go back into White/mixed spaces with a mask on, a duplicity of identity and alignment. White people sense this duplicity but assume it's antagonistic based when in fact its confusion, cognitive dissonance based.

White people assume it's antagonistic based because historically that's what White people were in masked duplicity to people of color.

I would think it would be like a German visiting Israel. Nervous. Nerve wracking. Frightened. The beneficiaries of historical oppression must feel surrounded and threatened by the relatives of those historically oppressed.

Socially White Americans are rarely dependent and surrounded by people of color. For us though, it is a mutual and natural state. But we were socially reinforced racially as a foundational element incorporated to trust, to treat Whites preferentially. People of color to survive, physically and psychically all do this. We know White people, White people rarely know us as a group nor as individuals.

People who are not White identify racism as feelings based or action based by a more action to action, intent based measurement. It's why we can be in interracial relationships and still have racist and racism within that intimate context. But we don't see it as a permanent"crime" unless its institutions. We see racism along a continuum with multiple classifications.

The irony of racism flattening people to a group classification is that we've flattened White people to just White people. No matter age, culture, ethnicity----White people, even as we've expanded the categorizations of people of color (assistive in this is the trans gender, sexual, racial, etc movement because it makes identity no longer society's ability to designate but the individuals ability and legal right to define.)

So, yes, we're all racist and are manifesting the engrained training along a continuum of multiple categories.

The faster we all embrace being racists, the faster we can individually dismantle personal racism biases and therefore mass, institutional discrimination.