Loud & Proud

In dreams, we live in a world entirely our own: I'm racist against people who post their drawings to tumblr, but can't draw for shit. And they are so unorigional they...

alexandraerin:

sarahxhockey:

rac·ism/ˈrāˌsizəm/

Noun:
The belief that all members of each race possess characteristics or abilities specific to that race, esp. so as to distinguish it as…

Prejudice or discrimination directed against someone of a different race based on such a belief.

Fucking educate yourself before you start spewing the shit that is coming out of your ‘holier-than-thou’ mouth

You’re obviously getting ready to go to college, what with that 4.5 GPA you’re so proud of, so let me do you a huge favor… one I wish someone would have done for me before I went from being a senior in high school who knew everything to a freshman in college who knew nothing.

Forget that definition. Quoting the dictionary is an impressive trick when you’re in the fifth grade. By the time you hit the double digits you should be over it. You know how often dictionaries get updated? The Oxford English Dictionary is widely considered (by the people at Oxford, anyway) to be the gold standard of the English language. It has had only two full editions come out in the past hundred and twenty years and number three is expected to come out sometime in the 2030s.

That definition you’re quoting? It’s old. It’s irrelevant. Nobody who works in academia, nobody who works in anti-racist organizations, nobody who has anything to do with racism except perpetuating it has any use for that definition. People who are perpetuating racism, people who are protecting their own position and privilege, they love it. They love it because it lets us pretend that everyone is on equal footing, it lets them pretend that they’re good or everyone is just as bad, it lets them pretend that their hurt feelings and being told to check their privilege is the same as living in a world that will shoot you in the back and then lie to say you deserved it because of the color of your skin.

Say that dislike of white people is racism. What’s the consequence of that? We’re still institutionally protected. We’re still institutionally powerful. What happens to us if somebody says “kill whitey”? Here’s a hint: we don’t die. And in the bizarre off chance that somebody does kill us in a racially motivated murder… they will not just throw the book at the killer, they will make up new books out of thin air to throw at them. The law will come down so hard on the person who kills a white person as a “hate crime”, and on anybody who might have been involved.

Whereas if somebody kills a Black person because of the color of their skin, we have to look at it seventy-six different ways and come up with a hundred reasons why It Wasn’t Actually Racism, You Guys.

This is why your definition is obsolete: it makes no distinction between meaningless and meaningful. A definition without meaning is a contradiction in terms. A word that doesn’t make any useful distinctions fails at being a word. People who actually deal with racism have adopted a more useful definition, one you will be exposed to in college if you pursue any actual education that is relevant to this area. The sooner you stop clinging to the definition that makes you feel safe and fluffy about yourself, the easier a time you’re going to have.

Don’t waste an entire semester wasting the time of your professor and the rest of the class trying to convince them that the bad feeling you get when you’re told that we don’t suffer racism is the same as the actual consequences that people suffer from racism.Don’t be that person.

You can thank me for this later.

*makes grabby hands* want. You are a beautiful being. Just. All of the yes and respect.