10 Famous Writers Who Came Up with Everyday Words
10 Unsolved Mysteries from the Cold War
10 Fictional Sports That Would Be Illegal in Real Life
10 Mind-Blowing Facts from History That Don’t Seem Real
10 Unconventional Ways Famous Actors Got into Character
10 Bizarre & Heartbreaking Stories Straight from the Restroom
10 Restaurants Busted for Selling Drugs
10 U.S. Policies That Were Passed Based on False Information
10 Ingenious Tech Experiments That Think Outside the Box
10 “Groundbreaking” Scientific Studies That Fooled the World
10 Famous Writers Who Came Up with Everyday Words
10 Unsolved Mysteries from the Cold War
Who's Behind Listverse?
Jamie Frater
Head Editor
Jamie founded Listverse due to an insatiable desire to share fascinating, obscure, and bizarre facts. He has been a guest speaker on numerous national radio and television stations and is a five time published author.
More About Us10 Fictional Sports That Would Be Illegal in Real Life
10 Mind-Blowing Facts from History That Don’t Seem Real
10 Unconventional Ways Famous Actors Got into Character
10 Bizarre & Heartbreaking Stories Straight from the Restroom
10 Restaurants Busted for Selling Drugs
10 U.S. Policies That Were Passed Based on False Information
10 Ingenious Tech Experiments That Think Outside the Box
Top 10 Ways Racism Affects White People
Racism is bad. If you are a racist, then probably you suck as a person. There, we said it. Call us radicals, but discriminating against people based on their race is just plain wrong. Even when the victim is white.
It might seem like an obvious thing to state, but so-called reverse racism doesn’t exist. It’s just racism. When people claim that you cannot be racist to a white person, this is a product of ideology, not reality.
When it is claimed that racism is in fact power plus privilege, what is being pushed is a fundamentally Marxist agenda. Based on the critical theory that underpins intersectionality, critical race theory has been utilised by ideologues and “social justice warriors” to reframe discussions about race to suit their agenda.
While racism is abhorrent and is rightly eschewed by decent people, the answer to problems of racism in society is not to enact racism against a group, and then deny that this group can even experience racism. Here are ten examples of what racism against white people looks like.
10Artist Commits ‘Genocide’ Through The Medium Of Paint
Earlier this month, Canadian artist Amanda PL was due to exhibit her paintings, inspired by the works of aboriginal artists and a result of her many years studying the indigenous cultures of Canada. The gallery caved to pressure and canceled the event. One of the people annoyed was Chippewa artist Jay Sproule, who said, “What she’s doing is cultural genocide because she’s taking [a native man’s] stories and retelling them, which bastardizes it down the road.[1] Other people will see her work and they’ll lose the connection between the real stories that are attached to it.” This argument, already dubious, becomes outright hypocritical when you learn that Sproule himself makes art out of other people’s culture, such as works incorporating movie posters like The Bride of Frankensioux and Bride of Dracula.
In reality, neither artist should be forbidden from being influenced by each other’s heritage. As PL said, “I think it’s a shame to say that an artist can’t create something because they’re not from that race. That’s like saying any other culture can’t touch something like abstract art unless you’re white, or you can’t touch cubism art.”
Without cultural exchange, Basquiat would never have given us Untitled (History of the Black People), which was directly influenced by Renaissance-era triptychs and the German neo-expressionist school. Our ability to learn and appreciate one another’s culture shouldn’t be restricted by ideologues. Artistic greatness abhors an intellectual vacuum. Racism adores one.
9The Baffling Messages Of Black Lives Matter
Can you answer this simple ‘yes or no’ question? Try it. Here goes. Have you stopped beating your wife? This is a trick question of course; both answers make you a wife-beater. In the same manner over the past few years, we have seen a similar conversation around police shootings and race relations in the USA and even farther afield. “Do Black Lives Matter to you?” is just as much a trick question as “have you stopped beating your wife.”
In fact despite the evidence that shows that black people in the United States are actually killed by police at a lower rate than should be expected. Why? Because in violent/aggressive crimes, blacks commit them at a rate many times higher than their representative population, while whites tend to commit them at a rate markedly lower than their representative population. Now, we’re not suggesting this situation arises because black people are black. That’s a stupid and racist position. There are cultural and economic factors at play, but the data is indisputable.
What is Black Lives Matter’s response? To ban white people from meetings entirely. We can all agree that when people die without justification at the hands of police, it’s a tragedy. To BLM, it’s a symptom of “virulent anti-Black racism in the country.” Reading the aims of BLM is to read the aims of a racial conspiracy cult, with bold claims about black genocide and mixes in intersectional feminist jargon with loose words about illegal immigration, prostitution during war time and ‘state violence’. It’s unsurprising to hear rhetoric like this from the disciples of a cop-killing terrorist who is in exile in Cuba.[2]
What is surprising is that not only is (BLM founder) Alex Garza unchallenged when she says “hetero-patriarchy and anti-Black racism is real and felt. It’s killing us and it’s killing our potential to build power for transformative social change” but no evidence is ever required to back any of these extraordinary claims.
Despite all evidence to the contrary, BLM lays the responsibility for all the ills of black people at the feet of whites. This is racist.
8#OscarsSoWhite
The 2016 Oscars were lumbered with the #OscarsSoWhite hashtag and a spate of the richest people on Earth saying they wouldn’t attend. The claim was that black people are disproportionately underrepresented in the Oscars. Yet when The Economist crunched the numbers, they found that blacks won a disproportionately high share of Oscars, both in terms of their percentage of the national population and their share of top acting roles.[3]
The year following that controversy, of course, a huge proportion of the nominees were black. Everyone is fine with this, we guess, because either it’s a meritocracy, in which case the best actors win, or, as the instigator of the #OscarsSoWhite predictably stated, “One year of films reflecting the Black experience doesn’t make up for 80 yrs of underrepresentation of ALL groups.”
We are still waiting on the hashtag campaigns for #NBASoBlack, #LadyGagaConcertsSoGay, and #AnimeSoJapanese to really kick off, but we’re sure true equality is around the corner.
7Demands For Reparations Are Racist
The idea that white people owe money to black people is to assume guilt by association of race. Because Person A is white, they by default owe reparations, though they committed no crime and though their ancestors likely never owned slaves.
By this same logic, Spain could demand reparations from the entire Islamic world for the 500-year occupation of the peninsula and the countless slaves (who were white) taken and sold by the Moors. We don’t do that though because for some reason it’s taken as a given that we do not judge people today by the actions of their forefathers—except when we’re discussing race in America. According to records, only 400,000 of over 10 million slaves shipped to the new world landed in North America.[4] Brazil doesn’t seem to be wracked with the same material obsession over how much white people owe blacks.
The argument about reparations simultaneously disparages white people for being white and encourages a victim mentality among blacks.
6Meritocracy Only Counts If White People Aren’t Winning
In 2016, BBC radio presenter Jon Holmes alleged that he was sacked from his show and being replaced by “more women and diversity.” If the BBC had told a black presenter that he was being replaced for being too “ethnic,” there would be hell to pay, and rightly so. Because that’s racism.
Of course, there’s good reason for broadcasters to enforce diversity. British industry regulator Ofcom has warned of dire penalties for failing to sack enough white people. And Star Wars actor Riz Ahmed has warned of dire consequences, in the form of Muslim kids joining ISIS, if more white people are not sacked.[5] Besides placing fault at the hands of white people, this shows low regard for people of the Muslim faith, that they will happily run off to join a Jihadi death cult if they don’t see Muslims on TV.
5You Can Write Whatever You Like About White People
On blogs and progressive newspapers, it is fine to write the following: “I blame white people. Specifically, I blame the room full of white writers, producers, directors, and executives who greenlit this doomed disappointment from the start. And this isn’t the first time a room full of white people has let me down. Need I remind you of purple ketchup? The Spider-Man musical released on Broadway? George Zimmerman’s acquittal by jury? The Holocaust?”
So, according to the Huffington Post, it is fine to say that white people, as a group, let down a millennial black writer in 2017 by allowing the Holocaust. Thanks, white people. Incidentally, the above quote is from a Black Lives Matter organizer who also wrote about how useless white women in particular are.
Whether it’s a professor who says “To be equal, to be liberated, some white people might have to die” or Buzzfeed making the exact opposite point by showcasing university students smiling in front of projectors with literal hate speech on them, it’s totally fine.[6]
4White Victims Of Violence Get No Media Coverage
A man confronts a youth he suspects of criminal behavior in his neighborhood. A fight breaks out, and the man shoots the youth, killing him. At trial, the man is acquitted by virtue of the Stand Your Ground Law.
You might think we’re talking about George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin. held up by many in the liberal media as being an example of dreaded institutional racism. You’d be wrong. In 2010, a black man, Roderick Scott, shot and killed 17-year-old Christopher Cervini, who was white.[7]
If institutional racism is real, being an institution of racism, Scott should be as famous as OJ Simpson.
The problem comes from Critical Race Theory. Camara Phyllis Jones defines CRT thusly: “[T]he structures, policies, practices, and norms resulting in differential access to the goods, services, and opportunities of society by race . . . It is structural, having been absorbed into our institutions of custom, practice and law, so there need not be an identifiable offender.” In short, in Critical Race Theory, you don’t need to identify evidence.
The realness of institutional racism is so real, no evidence is required or asked for. Your subjective opinion is enough; which is fine if you are discussing the meaning of camel-related clouds in contemporary urban basketweaving, but not so much if you use this technique to attack white people as a group. It’s a racist school of philosophy that, because the subject of critique is white people, cannot be contradicted without first jumping through hoops to show how not racist you are.
3White Privilege Is Code For Racism
Have you ever checked your privilege? Has anyone demanded you check your privilege? Are you white? Congratulations, you have been a victim of racism.
The issue arises from a collectivized allocation of attributes to a race—in this case, privilege to whites.[8] That line of thinking assumes that because you share a race with and “resemble the people who dominate the powerful positions in our institutions” your life is automatically better than those who do not. To check one’s privilege is, therefore, a demand from those who have assigned this privilege to you to recognize and apologize for it, and to step out of their way or to assist them in their endeavors. Based on your skin color. Racism!
2Racism Is Not Power Plus Privilege
In 1978, Judith Katz wrote, “It is important to push for the understanding that racism is prejudice plus power and that, therefore, Third World people cannot be racist against Whites in the United States. Third World people can be prejudiced against Whites, but clearly, they do not have the power to enforce that prejudice.”[9] Though the author was trying to elucidate a point about a hypothetical idealized scenario in the future, the unforeseen consequence of the boom in critical theory-based study in the 1980s produced an industry of diversity that demanded its implementation.
Now, it’s like anyone can look at another person, judge them for their race, and then not be the literal embodiment of racist thought—so long as the person doing the judging is lower on the oppressive stack than the judged.
1White People Are Forbidden From Heritage
Black Pride is cool. Gay Pride is cool. Asian Pride is cool. Hispanic Pride is cool. Trans Pride is cool. White Pride is racist.
There are of course some problems with advocating for a white pride movement, being that there is a white pride movement already, and it’s pretty racist. However, to tar all aspects of the identity of white people as race supremacy is, dare we say it, problematic.
White, as a race, is an ethnically diverse identity. Thanks to the racialization of the slave trade in the 17th century, the concept of a “white race” was implemented.[10] Well done, “white” people, you played yourselves. Four centuries later, the multitudes of different ethnicities in Europe and America find it difficult to establish their own heritage, let alone take pride in their ethnicity as other humans do. An amorphous white diaspora of mayonnaise people, beset by actual, literal racists on the one side, and race-baiting Marxist theorists on the other.
Why can’t we all just get along?