So What If Black People Can Be Racist?
Recasting White people as victims doesn’t wash away White people’s sins.
Have you heard about reverse racism? If it’s actually a legitimate thing, we could call it a comeback of sorts. For Whites, it’s a phrase they invented as retaliation (and a defense ) against unforgiving Black people. For those unforgiving Blacks, it would be a response to an unjust world — or more specifically, the White folks who run so many aspects of it.
I’ve been hearing defensive White people fall back on “reverse racism” my entire life, insisting Black people are just as racist as White people, if not more so. They use the phrase as armor when Black people talk about White people in less-than-effusive terms — when Blacks bring up systemic racism, racial discrimination, White supremacy, White privilege, critical race theory, and all the ways in which Whites have collectively and perpetually undermined equality. Presumably, by accusing Blacks of reverse racism, those White people can hijack the narrative and deflect attention from the race-driven havoc White people have wrought both in the US and globally over the centuries.
(Note: This is not a story about how all White people are evil. That’s a tall tale I’ve never told. Some are perfectly lovely. I am basically underscoring the unalienable fact that…
