One man's insult is another's oppression: A dissenting view on 'race' and 'racism'

The concepts of prejudice are basically ones of insult, and so the idea of racism (etc.) intrinsically combines the notion of insulting or being insulted with that of "oppressing" or being oppressed. In fact, this is a way that social oppression, which is normally impersonal in both its causation and how it is experienced (this is a feature of capitalist modernity that Marxism understood but most liberal leftisms did not), is personalized. 

James Baldwin is quoted in the recent Raul Peck film "I am not your negro," as saying that white people hate black people out of fear (of violent crime), and black people hate white people out of rage (against oppression). In this way, Baldwin and Peck add their voices to the common notion that black people are oppressed by white people--and maybe should hate (and so want to hurt or kill) them (us).

They must be right to, we must deserve it, or at least, it is "understandable" and we must empathize. That means that what someone else does that is blatantly wrong, is something you could imagine yourself wanting to do if you were in their situation; in other words, in order to not be a hypocrite, following the Christian gospel in judging no one and nothing, starting with yourself. Whatever people do must have some causal explanation, and that must justify it. 

This is why reverse racism is no joke. If racism is race hatred, who hates most often and most violently? I have met white liberal from suburban environments who have hardly even seen a black person, and they are indignant about every immoral prejudice; and indeed they have few. Only one people are allowed by most everyone to go around talking about the other race and in explicitly hating terms. Even black liberals talk freely about "white people," and want to complain about them. And yet "we" are not the people most prone to ethnic or racial hatreds. Maybe it is because we are less oppressed. But who says being oppressed justifies anything and everything?

Some people say that you must empathize with the experience and even imaginary fears of other people, usually of people in greater positions of power. It must be a similar vein that Hegelians will say that "if you don't 'recognize' someone, they may kill you." But no one has a duty to be polite to anyone. As for your oppression legitimating anything you do, that notion makes you more oppression-worthy by implying that you are not responsible for your actions. Whoever is but victims; so then, empowerment is victimizing someone by claiming that they are victimizing you. Many Nazi concentration camp guards participating willfully in that violence understood themselves as having been oppressed (and perhaps they were), and guess what, they thought their own victims, Jews and many others, were their "oppressors." 

That reverse racism exists and is pervasive and deadly (and a dead-end for those seduced by five decades of bad leaders into engaging in it) is true whatever you think about segregated housing, unequal school funding, mass incarceration, and runaway violence by police (armed to the teeth and instructed to protect only themselves while functioning like a foreign occupying army treating everyone they encounter as a likely enemy combatant).

The black liberation movement in this country simply failed because angry leaders convinced most of their people that "white people" are the cause of their suffering, and specifically their attitudes. This makes every imagined or real insult fighting words. Every liberal white person knows that racism is a big no-no, and most believe that the society is ok but for people with bad attitudes. This motivates and justifies the policing of attitudes. Corporate offices like that and so do the universities that feed them. It is a form of policing or social control generally. Do you think your people benefit from it? But I bet you they don't.