Webster Is A Weak Argument For Defining Racism

Usually when engaging in social media dialogue about racism, there is a common flaw in every single comeback: The dictionary. Good old Webster, Merriam, or whatever you use, is often sent to ensure that racism can happen to anyone. It’s used to say that black people and other POC (People of Color) are complaining about nothing at all, and need to be silenced because even we can be racist to white people. After all, racism can happen to anyone right? Well, not quite.

Racism is a social construct, that can only be defined best  by two groups: Sociologists, and “minority” communities who have experienced racism. Those communities have not given input when privileged white people were making their own dictionaries.

The sociologists definition of racism is a little more specific. According to sociology.about.com :

“Racism refers to a host of practices, beliefs, social relations and phenomena that work to reproduce a racial hierarchy and social structure that yields superiority and privilege for some, and discrimination and oppression for others. Racism takes representational, ideological, discursive, interactional, institutional, structural, and systemic forms. Despite its form, at its core, racism is constituted by essentialist racial categories that turn human subjects into stereotyped objects, and then uses those stereotypes to justify and reproduce a racial hierarchy and racially structured society that limits access to resources, rights, and privileges on the basis of race.”

This definition is more accurate and correlates with POC who live this on a daily basis. Racism takes many different forms that oppresses non-whites solely based on the fact that they are not white. White people collectively have power against POC, to effectively impact our lives.

Racism is publishing harmful stereotypes of POC in public and private school curriculums. Racism is punishing black girls for wearing their hair in braids, Afros, and locs; whether it’s suspending them from school, or firing them from their jobs. Racism is treating POC unfairly in the “justice” systems. Racism is more than racial slurs or the confederate flag. It’s deeply ingrained into our society, working to uphold a white supremacist ideology by any means necessary.

When you understand this, you understand why racism doesn’t go both ways. White people are not racially oppressed in a society built to destroy them and favor others on a plethora of levels. It doesn’t work that way.

You cannot pull up a 3 sentence rudimentary definition to counterattack a long lived, generational, and honestly traumatic, experience of racism. Can we stop assuming it’s accurate just because it’s Webster? How can you ever put an experience like racism in a small text, defined by those who have never fully grasped that concept themselves?.

Why not get a full understanding of racism by actual POC, if not the sociologists? Privileged white men defining what racism is, is like cisgender men telling us what labor pains are, defining it simply as “pain”. He would argue that anyone can experience pain, therefore anyone must get labor pains. That person did not consult anyone with experience of labor pains, not even his mother, who would probably know best what that is. That’s how ridiculous you sound. You need to go to the right sources, and the right people, if you are going to define something that only certain people can thoroughly understand by experience. You cannot put something so harsh and painful into a few sentences. Why would you ever prefer an inaccurate definition over the lives of millions of POC? ( to be continued….)