Racist Definition
rac-ist
noun: racist; plural noun: racists
A person who believes that a particular race is superior to another.
synonyms: racial bigot, racialist, xenophobe, chauvinist, supremacist.
My Definition
Its difficult for me to add my own accurate personal definition without appearing to be somewhat of a racist myself, that is, a racist toward my own race. Is that even possible? Reverse racism? I have some anger and resentment inside when I think about this issue because of what I have personally seen, heard and experienced when it comes to this controversial topic. But I will give you my personal definition of a racist, largely censored and edited. To me a racist is a bitter, scary white man who feels that they were left behind by economic and cultural change.
I grew up mostly in a small town, in a mostly white population. There were Hispanics. There were no African American people. But for a time, I lived in the rural south, in a small town in Louisiana. I went to a public school that was mostly African American. Most of the teachers, staff, faculty and student body were predominantly black people. Each morning all students stood for the pledge of allegiance and at lunch time our teacher led the whole class in prayer asking God to bless our meal and each other. Us young white students did not use the "N" word. Not because we were afraid of getting a beat down, which would have definitely happened, but because we genuinely "loved" our teachers. They loved us too!They were our mothers away from home. For some, they were more of a mother than our own. When we did wrong, they corrected us. Let me add here that if none of you have ever experienced being corrected by a southern black woman in Louisiana, you've really missed out on the art of correction LOL. We said "yes ma'am, no ma'am" too. Me and my brother turned out better men because of that experience. Later we moved to Oklahoma to a predominantly white school. What a huge difference in culture and way of thinking! And a huge difference in food but that's a different topic.
I never really saw racism during that period, which was High School, but it was there. Racism is evil and I don't know about you but I can just "feel" it. Its a like a living, breathing entity. Once I enlisted in the Army, I saw racism. You take young men from all over the nation of different races and throw them all into a barracks, a small confined space, for about 16 weeks or more, you can expect racism to show its ugly head. Every fight I got into was with a white recruit who thought his race was the best. The fight wasn't always about that fact either. I just cannot stand racists and during my younger days, if one was around me voicing his opinion on any topic I would usually pick a fight with him. Not because I'm some kind of tough guy, its because...well its because I'm Irish. Other Irish people will understand. After becoming a police officer, I saw racism in large scale. I'm not just talking about whites and blacks here either. I've seen people of various races do and say some pretty ugly things to each other.
There are some pretty scary people out there. I would think that most people would agree that any person who actually thought that their race was supreme over others, whose mind was so messed up to think in that manner, and on top of that they "hated" others who were of a different race...that's an unstable, scary person in my books. I'm not saying that I'm afraid of them, but I am afraid for all the children in our society who may at some point or time come into contact with these people.
Why would I choose to write about such a controversial topic? Its not that I think I can make a change in our society by merely writing about racism. I have a platform to speak about things that are important to me and hopefully, important to others as well. Regarding a broad subject as racism, I cannot make a significant change in the society in which I live. On the other hand, if more people would make a stand...then something could be done. I have family members who are of mixed races and I love them very much. I have one grand child at the moment but one day I will have a grand child who will be of a mixed race and believe me, when they are sitting in Grandpa's lap, the only race they will be is my Grand baby.
Where are racists?
Excerpted from “Angry White Men: American Masculinity at the End of an Era”
Geographically, they come from America’s heartland—small towns, rural cities, swelling suburban outside larger Sunbelt cities. These aren’t the prosperous towns, but the single-story working-class exurbs that stretch for what feels like forever in the corridor between Long Beach and San Diego (not the San Fernando Valley), or along the southern tier of Pennsylvania, or spread all through the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, across the vast high plains of eastern Washington and Oregon, through Idaho and Montana. There are plenty in the declining cities of the Rust Belt, in Dearborn and Flint, Buffalo and Milwaukee, in the bars that remain in the shadows of the hulking deserted factories that once were America’s manufacturing centers. And that doesn’t even touch the former states of the Confederacy, where flying the Confederate flag is a culturally approved symbol of “southern pride."
There’s a large rural component. Although “the spread of far-right groups over the last decade has not been limited to rural areas alone,” writes Osha Gray Davidson, “the social and economic unraveling of rural communities—especially in the midwest—has provided far-right groups with new audiences for their messages of hate. Some of these groups have enjoyed considerable success in their rural campaign.” For many farmers facing foreclosures, the Far Right promises to help them save their land have been appealing, offering farmers various schemes and legal maneuvers to help prevent foreclosures, blaming the farmers’ troubles on Jewish bankers and the one-world government. “As rural communities started to collapse,” Davidson writes, the Far Right “could be seen at farm auctions comforting families . . . confirming what rural people knew to be true: that their livelihoods, their families, their communities—their very lives—were falling apart.” In stark contrast to the government indifference encountered by rural Americans, a range of Far Right groups, most recently the militias, have seemingly provided support, community, and answers.
In that sense, the contemporary militias and other white supremacist groups are following in the footsteps of the Ku Klux Klan, the Posse Comitatus, and other Far Right patriot groups who recruited members in rural America throughout the 1980s. They tap into a long history of racial and ethnic paranoia in rural America, as well as an equally long tradition of collective local action and vigilante justice. There remains a widespread notion that “Jews, African-Americans, and other minority-group members ‘do not entirely belong,’” which may, in part, “be responsible for rural people’s easy acceptance of the far right’s agenda of hate,” writes Matthew Snipp. “The far right didn’t create bigotry in the Midwest; it didn’t need to,” Davidson concludes. “It merely had to tap into the existing undercurrent of prejudice once this had been inflamed by widespread economic failure and social discontent.”
And many have moved from their deindustrializing cities, foreclosed suburban tracts, and wasted farmlands to smaller rural areas because they seek the companionship of like-minded fellows, in relatively remote areas far from large numbers of nonwhites and Jews and where they can organize, train, and build protective fortresses. Many groups have established refuge in rural communities, where they can practice military tactics, stockpile food and weapons, hone their survivalist skills, and become self-sufficient in preparation for Armageddon, the final race war, or whatever cataclysm they envision. Think of it as the twenty-first-century version of postwar suburban “white flight”—but on steroids.
They’re certainly Christian, but not just any Christian—they’re evangelical Protestant, Pentecostals, and members of radical sects that preach racial purity as the Word of Jesus. (Catholicism is certainly stocked with conservatives on social issues, but white supremacists tap into such a long and ignoble tradition of anti-Catholicism that they tend to have their own right-wing organizations, mostly fighting against women’s rights and gay rights.) Some belong to churches like the Christian Identity Church, which gained a foothold on the Far Right in the early 1980s. Christian Identity’s focus on racism and anti-Semitism provides the theological underpinnings to the shift from a more “traditional agrarian protest” to Para militarism. It is from the Christian Identity movement that the Far Right gets its theological claims that Adam is the ancestor of the Caucasian race, whereas non-whites are pre-Adamic “mud people,” without souls, and Jews are the children of Satan. According to this doctrine, Jesus was not Jewish and not from the Middle East; actually, he was northern European, his Second Coming is close at hand, and followers can hasten the apocalypse. It is the birthright of Anglo-Saxons to establish God’s kingdom on earth; America’s and Britain’s “birthright is to be the wealthiest, most powerful nations on earth . . . able, by divine right, to dominate and colonize the world.”
Perhaps what binds them all together, though, is class. Rural or small town, urban or suburban, the extreme Right is populated by downwardly mobile, lower-middle-class white men.
On the extreme Right, by contrast, race is a proxy for class. Among the white supremacists, when they speak of race consciousness, defending white people, protesting for equal rights for white people, they actually don’t mean all white people. They don’t mean Wall Street bankers and lawyers, though they are pretty much entirely white and male. They don’t mean white male doctors, or lawyers, or architects, or even engineers. They don’t mean the legions of young white hipster guys, or computer geeks flocking to the Silicon Valley, or the legions of white preppies in their boat shoes and seersucker jackets “interning” at white-shoe law firms in major cities. Not at all. They mean middle-and working-class white people. Race consciousness is actually class consciousness without actually having to “see” class. “Race blindness” leads working-class people to turn right; if they did see class, they’d turn left and make common cause with different races in the same economic class.
So, who are they really, these hundred thousand white supremacists? They’re every white guy who believed that this land was his land, was made for you and me. They’re America’s Everymen, whose pain at downward mobility and whose anger at what they see as an indifferent government have become twisted by a hate that tells them they are better than others, disfigured by a resentment so deep that there are no more bridges to be built, no more ladders of upward mobility to be climbed, a howl of pain mangled into the scream of a warrior. Their rage is as sad as it is frightening, as impotent as it is shrill.
They believe themselves to be the true heirs of the real America. They are the ones who are entitled to inherit the bounty of the American system. It’s their birthright—as native-born, white American men. As sociologist Lillian Rubin puts it, “It’s this confluence of forces—the racial and cultural diversity of our new immigrant population; the claims on the resources of the nation now being made by those minorities who, for generations, have called America their home; the failure of some of our basic institutions to serve the needs of our people; the contracting economy, which threatens the mobility aspirations of working class families—all these have come together to leave white workers feeling as if everyone else is getting a piece of the action while they get nothing.”
And many have moved from their deindustrializing cities, foreclosed suburban tracts, and wasted farmlands to smaller rural areas because they seek the companionship of like-minded fellows, in relatively remote areas far from large numbers of nonwhites and Jews and where they can organize, train, and build protective fortresses. Many groups have established refuge in rural communities, where they can practice military tactics, stockpile food and weapons, hone their survivalist skills, and become self-sufficient in preparation for Armageddon, the final race war, or whatever cataclysm they envision. Think of it as the twenty-first-century version of postwar suburban “white flight”—but on steroids.
They’re certainly Christian, but not just any Christian—they’re evangelical Protestant, Pentecostals, and members of radical sects that preach racial purity as the Word of Jesus. (Catholicism is certainly stocked with conservatives on social issues, but white supremacists tap into such a long and ignoble tradition of anti-Catholicism that they tend to have their own right-wing organizations, mostly fighting against women’s rights and gay rights.) Some belong to churches like the Christian Identity Church, which gained a foothold on the Far Right in the early 1980s. Christian Identity’s focus on racism and anti-Semitism provides the theological underpinnings to the shift from a more “traditional agrarian protest” to Para militarism. It is from the Christian Identity movement that the Far Right gets its theological claims that Adam is the ancestor of the Caucasian race, whereas non-whites are pre-Adamic “mud people,” without souls, and Jews are the children of Satan. According to this doctrine, Jesus was not Jewish and not from the Middle East; actually, he was northern European, his Second Coming is close at hand, and followers can hasten the apocalypse. It is the birthright of Anglo-Saxons to establish God’s kingdom on earth; America’s and Britain’s “birthright is to be the wealthiest, most powerful nations on earth . . . able, by divine right, to dominate and colonize the world.”
Perhaps what binds them all together, though, is class. Rural or small town, urban or suburban, the extreme Right is populated by downwardly mobile, lower-middle-class white men.
On the extreme Right, by contrast, race is a proxy for class. Among the white supremacists, when they speak of race consciousness, defending white people, protesting for equal rights for white people, they actually don’t mean all white people. They don’t mean Wall Street bankers and lawyers, though they are pretty much entirely white and male. They don’t mean white male doctors, or lawyers, or architects, or even engineers. They don’t mean the legions of young white hipster guys, or computer geeks flocking to the Silicon Valley, or the legions of white preppies in their boat shoes and seersucker jackets “interning” at white-shoe law firms in major cities. Not at all. They mean middle-and working-class white people. Race consciousness is actually class consciousness without actually having to “see” class. “Race blindness” leads working-class people to turn right; if they did see class, they’d turn left and make common cause with different races in the same economic class.
So, who are they really, these hundred thousand white supremacists? They’re every white guy who believed that this land was his land, was made for you and me. They’re America’s Everymen, whose pain at downward mobility and whose anger at what they see as an indifferent government have become twisted by a hate that tells them they are better than others, disfigured by a resentment so deep that there are no more bridges to be built, no more ladders of upward mobility to be climbed, a howl of pain mangled into the scream of a warrior. Their rage is as sad as it is frightening, as impotent as it is shrill.
They believe themselves to be the true heirs of the real America. They are the ones who are entitled to inherit the bounty of the American system. It’s their birthright—as native-born, white American men. As sociologist Lillian Rubin puts it, “It’s this confluence of forces—the racial and cultural diversity of our new immigrant population; the claims on the resources of the nation now being made by those minorities who, for generations, have called America their home; the failure of some of our basic institutions to serve the needs of our people; the contracting economy, which threatens the mobility aspirations of working class families—all these have come together to leave white workers feeling as if everyone else is getting a piece of the action while they get nothing.”
Racism starts at home. Babies aren't born a racist. They are born "human." It takes another human to teach them to hate others. I don't understand how you can teach a child that their skin color is supreme over another skin color. How do you explain that? Children also learn this type of ugliness at school too. Parents certainly need to get involved with what their children are learning and guard their minds. Look for signs of racism. Be prepared to explain it. Teach them that its evil. Search your community for programs that could allow your children to interact with children of different races and ethnic backgrounds. Allow them to come to the realization that skin color is not an issue at all.
There are so many quoting of “hot button topic” meant to solicit knee jerk reactions. My perception of America is much different. I have a white brother handcuffed on the ground with 6 police officers on him and one standing with a boot on his neck.I have dated black men, Hispanic and white men. I have beautiful multiple biracial great grandchildren. I experienced racism at an all black school. It can happen every day to anyone. Quoting these inciting statements does nothing to eradicate or understand the situation. It needs to stop. It indoctrinated more hate red. It is meant to elicit a knee jerk reaction. I look at each individual made in the image and likeness of God Almighty and find the references to different religions rather insulting. Instead of judging based on the “terminology of Christianity “ let’s look at the character of individuals and stop this divisive madness.
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