racism = prejudice + power
The formula first appeared in 1970 in Developing New Perspectives on Race by Pat Bidol and was popularized by Judith H. Katz in White Awareness: Handbook for Anti-Racism Training. Mary Anne Mohanraj explains it:
...there’s an alternate and widely-used definition of racism that goes like this: We’re all prejudiced, because we grow up in a racist culture and we inherit those prejudices. But racism is a system of institutional, systemic oppression, and in order to be racist, you need both the prejudice + the power to affect people. By that definition, which a lot of progressives share, PoC (people of color) can’t be racist, because they don’t have any reinforcement from that institutionalized power. We may hold individual racist ideas and thoughts, but we only have the power to do damage with our actions in the rare, brief contexts where our other privileges temporarily override color privilege. A relative of mine may say racist things about black or white people in her own home, but when she engages with the wider world, as she must do daily, she’s just another brown girl, and is therefore at risk.
There’s a definite utility and sense to that definition, but it isn’t the one I normally use.
The problem with the theory is Condi Rice and Oprah Winfrey have far more power than any white homeless guy living under a bridge or almost everyone else in the USA, regardless of hue.
Greyorm suggested, "The equation SHOULD rightly read: "privilege = prejudice + power" (which actually makes sense)."
Ron Kozar noted that by the CRT definition, “American Nazis aren't racists, since they have no power."
An anonymous commenter at a conservative site said, "I thought a racist was any conservative who was winning an argument with a liberal."
The more precise definition, of course, is to a Critical Race Theorist, a racist is anyone who disagrees with the idea that racism equals power plus prejudice.
In "An Examination of Anti-Racist and Anti-Oppressive Theory and Practice in Social Work Education", Marie Macey and Eileen Moxon wrote:
...an edifice of theory and action has been constructed on the simplistic 'explanation' of racism as being the outcome of power plus prejudice. Not only does this inaccurately assume a single cause and type of racism but it dangerously implies that there is a single solution to the phenomenon (Gilroy 1990; Husband, 1987; Miles, 1989).
The view that racism is an attribute of the monolithic category of people termed 'white' who hold all the power in society is equally confused and confusing. At one level of abstraction, it is true that a certain sector of the (white, male) population holds much of the economic and decision-making power in Briitish society. It is also true that some members of this group are statistically likely to be racially prejudiced. However, though this knowledge should inform social work education, it has limited utility at the operational level of social work or, often, in the everyday lives of black and white service workers.
Furthermore, if a Pakistai Muslim male refuses to have an African-Caribbean or Indian Hindu female social worker for reasons which, if articulated by a white Christain would be condemned as racist, one has to ask what the point is of denying that this refusal stems from racist (or sexist or sectarian) motivations? Similarly, if one compares the structural position of a white, working class, homeless male with that of a black barrister, would the statement that 'only whites have power' make sense or be acceptable to either of them?
…the approaches [of anti-racism theory] are theoretical and thus closed to the canons of scientific evaluation and because the discourse itself prohibits the open, rigorous and critical interrogation which is essential to theoretical, professional and personal development.
Modern anti-racism is a commercial movement driven by graduates of the most expensive private colleges and universities in the US. The most prominent of them are white:
Judith Katz is the Executive Vice President and “Client Brand Lead” of the Kaleel Jamison Consulting Group, a business that profits by teaching anti-racism.
Peggy McIntosh, author of “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack”, is the associate director of the Wellesley Centers for Women at Wellesley College, one of the fifty most expensive colleges in the US.
Tim Wise, a graduate of Tulane, has lectured about anti-racism at “over 400 college campuses, including Harvard, Stanford, and the Law Schools at Yale, Columbia, and Vanderbilt.” I watched part of one of his youtube videos, then quit when he said he was doing what black speakers could not. Black speakers have been popular at universities since at least the early 1960s. The idea that people like Ralph Abernathy, Martin Luther King, Fannie Lou Hamer, or Malcolm X could not speak at a college campus today is as silly as the title of one of Wise's books, Speaking Treason Fluently. When polls show most Americans support racial diversity, a better title would be Speaking Truisms Profitably.
Anti-racists like Wise, Katz, and McIntosh undoubtedly mean well, but they content themselves with a superficial understanding of injustice. My favorite Upton Sinclair quote applies: “It's difficult to get a man to understand something if his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
Recommended: The Man Who Changed Middle-Class Feminism, or Derrick Bell and Critical Race Theory, Where Racism and Anti-Racism Intersect
Recommended: The Man Who Changed Middle-Class Feminism, or Derrick Bell and Critical Race Theory, Where Racism and Anti-Racism Intersect