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human
CMV: I think that redefining 'racism' as 'prejudice plus power' is damaging to society

So recently I've seen bloggers and activists use the argument that racism is prejudice+power in order to dismiss accusations of racism against whites, since under such definition one cannot be racist against white people.

I think that's incredibly stupid. Not only is this definition not at all the standard definition of the term (for crying out loud, most people, including the dictionary, just define it as prejudice against a person or group because of their race), but it's an academic definition pulled straight from sociology textbooks on institutional racism.

To me, this just seems idiotic- I really don't see what benefit at all there could be in changing the definition of 'racism' so that one cannot be racist against white people. Of course other races suffer vastly more from racial discrimination (particularly in America), but that doesn't mean someone can't be racist against white people.

To me, if you hate white people because they are white, you are a racist.

To be honest, 'prejudice plus power' is indeed a powerful and harmful force in society, but it should have its own word. Institutional/structural racism? Something like that. Completely redefining 'racism' to mean something the vast majority of the population doesn't use it to mean seems completely idiotic, since people are going to get angry at each other because they're speaking completely different languages.

So CMV- is there anything good about this at all?
gpt
You have to be careful about dictionary definitions. Words have definitions, but they also develop *connotations*. By a strict reading of the dictionary, you might be correct in your assertion

> To me, if you hate white people because they are white, you are a racist.

But without context, this is an extremely unhelpful statement. (By the way, *is* there a specific person/situation you're referring to?). If you have a poor black person who has in his life been ignored or treated like crap by literally every white person he's met, he's probably going to have some pretty distorted views about white people. Then maybe you have an otherwise well educated white guy who thinks that black people are an inferior race and aren't good for anything but manual labor. Maybe you think both of these people fit the strict definition of "racist". But when you call them racist, you're evoking very specific ideas that are not contained within that strict definition, and its these ideas that *tend* to not make any sense when applied to the minorities being prejudiced against the majority. So if you use a word that while arguably technically correct by the dictionary definition, but has centuries of baggage and associations that don't really apply to your use case, are you really using language in a constructive way, assuming that the purpose of language is to clearly communicate an idea?

The effort to "redefine" racism like you're talking about is just an attempt to describe the situations where the usage of the word and the connotations that the word has developed have a reasonable amount of overlap.