system
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human
CMV: while white racism upholds power structures, saying only white people can be racist absolves other races from accountability

For context: I’m South Asian, and I have lived in Europe for more than three years. 

I recently read Reni Eddo-Lodge’s book ‘why I no longer talk (to white people) about race’ and I mostly agree with her. 

Except one point: that only white people can be racist, and all other groups are prejudiced. 

I agree with the argument that white racism upholds power structures at the disadvantage of marginalised groups. 

What I do not agree with is that other groups cannot be racist - only prejudiced. I don’t see a point of calking actions that are the result of bias against a skin colour ’prejudiced’ instead of ‘racist’. 

I have seen members of my own diaspora community both complain about the racism they face as well as making incredibly racist remarks about Black/Chinese people. Do these uphold power structures? No. Are these racist? Yes. Are these racist interactions hurtful for those affected? Yes. 

I had a black colleague who would be incredibly racist towards me and other Asians: behaviour she would never display towards white colleagues. We’re her actions upholding a power structure? I’d say yes. 

I believe that to truly dismantle racism we need to talk not only about white power structures but also how other groups uphold these structures by being racist towards each other. 

So, change my view...
gpt
So we should note here that all of sociology is an approximation. Humans and human societies are infinitely complex. We can't fit it all into words. What we can do is create models that reflect how we think societies work, while recognizing that these models are only ever a partial description of what's really going on. There is no model which is perfect, and which model we use is a choice. 

So with that in mind, people like Reni Eddo-Lodge who focus on a structural reading of racism have intentionally moved away from the conception of racism at the psychological/interpersonal level and instead focus on racism as a product of larger social structures. The "Capital R" Racism that matters, as far as these people are concerned, doesn't have much to do with individuals making racist remarks against other individuals. It has almost everything to do with political and social structures that go beyond individuals.

This is a conscious choice to re-focus attention on a different kind of racism. The problem with the model of racism as an interaction between individuals is that people tend to focus on the *symbolic* rather than the material. So, you'll have people arguing that George Floyd for example didn't die because of racism because none of the cops who killed him seem like racists. They didn't target him because they personally hate black people, so that's not racism, right? Conceiving of racism as typified by prejudiced remarks leads people to excuse and ignore materially racist social structures because nobody said the n-word while they were enacting structural racism. Moreover, this conception of racism leads people to think that racism is just unavoidable and the natural product of people of different races interacting - see *Crash*, 2004 for one of the most egregious examples - which is not really helpful at all. If you think of racism primarily as when a person of a certain race says a naughty word at a person of a different race, then you will never be able to actually change any of the material effects of structural racism, because it will be invisible to you. 

So the "Racism = prejudice + power" model of racism attempts to rectify this misunderstanding of racism by focusing on the institutional and the systematic rather than the individual. Structural racism can exist even when none of the individuals involved are overtly racist. That's the issue that needs more focus. Of course, this model is only a model. We can't account for all the infinitely reconfigurable scenarios of human existence with a model. The central story of the model is one of white people holding control of political and social structures that are systemically racist, so that's where the focus is.