Quote from: Beth Andrea on December 04, 2013, 02:28:33 PM
With all due respect, racism is a multifaceted issue...structural power is something that is being worked on currently, but if someone is beaten or killed because of their race, that is not a "structural power" event...that is simple violence, which is one of the hallmarks of racism.
It doesn't matter in terms of such violence if one is living in a Apartheid-style power structure or on based on pure equality...if person A kills person B because of nothing more than their perceived race...that *is* racism, pure and simple.
To excuse or justify racist actions because the victim is a member of the perceived "in-power group" is disingenuous at best, imho.
i don't really think it's appropriate to recentre the topic by talking specifically about violence against members of an in-power group. there's no such thing as a "structural power event" because everything that happens in a society exists in an environment of structural power, so i don't think it's possible to decontextualize anything—violence included—without misrepresenting the way that racism in language, violence, and social structures plays out.
a lot of people attempting to boil down a LOT of race theory into a pithy little sentence come up with the statement "racism = prejudice + power". i don't think that's entirely accurate either, and it has some issues as things get messier, but i think it's a good jumping-off point with regard to talking about race. to put it another way, nobody's saying that someone who exclusively goes out and is violent with white people is a GOOD PERSON, just that what they are doing is not an act of racism. this is not an excuse or a justification because at the end of the day something not being racist does not mean that it's not
wrong.
to bring this back to the discussion in question, words like "cracker" are not racist slurs because in a racist society where white people are the group with power, a word like that has no structural power. using that word or a word like that are not a reflection of racial hatred, but a place of challenge and resistance; those using it consciously parallel the use of racial slurs against them, which
are used to create/perpetuate oppression and marginalization.
this is getting kind of off-topc, sorry about that. feel free to split this off into another thread if it's disrupting this current one, but i do feel it's important that this is said.
