NO, white people cannot, have not, will never experience racism!

In every single conversation about racism, inevitably white people will insist that they have experienced racism and that my discussion of racism, because it offends them, means that I’m racist.  White people cannot, have not, and will never experience racism.  

Racism is the intricate system of oppression, denigration, and devaluation that deems people of color as inherently inferior and that has existed for centuries.  It is not possible for white people to be born into a society where they are constantly told, in both overt and covert ways, that they are inferior merely because of the color of their skin.  White people are NEVER told that their hair, facial features, and body types are not considered the standard of beauty.  White people have never ever had legislators regulate their lives in a way in which they are left disadvantaged and substandard to people of color because legislators are always white, thus they have never lived in a society where their best interests are intentionally undermined.  

·         White people have never turned on a television and been faced with every face they see that looks nothing like them.

·         White people have never worshipped a God that looks unlike them.  They created God in their image, they have convinced the world that God is white and every image of a Judeo-Christian god (capitalization intentional) for thousands of years has been Caucasian. 

·         People of color have never colonized, controlled, and destroyed a nation and its population in Europe.

·         White people have never had their entire history, names, identities, art, culture, religion and history stolen from them.   Let that and the implications thereof sink in for a minute.

·         White people have never been told that the world’s greatest musicians, artists, philosophers, and scientists are people who look unlike them. 

·         White people are never told that their culture, music, speech patterns, and norms are abnormal.

·         White people NEVER have to fear that people of color are going to control and dictate their fate in a legal, medical, professional, or financial institution.

·         White people have never had people of color dictate their morality and/or social norms.

•             White people have never lived in a society where people of color have denied them rights as human beings nor have they ever been told that their attractiveness means they have to have facial features as close as possible to people of color.

Because white people have never experienced any of those things, they have never experienced racism. 

A white person who has grown up in a Black neighborhood has never experienced racism because racism is not bigotry.  Bigotry is someone not liking a person because of the color of their skin. Racism is a complex, intricate, multilayered system of oppression that informs everything about a person’s identity, both white and black.  Racism informs how parents raise their children, it’s how one is socialized, it is NOT being discriminated against once or twice because you are in an interracial relationship.  Racism is generational, it’s the very fallacious belief that allows whites to think that their ancestors kidnapping, raping, torturing, beating, colonizing, and murdering people of color makes them somehow inherently superior or that it’s a fact that can be ignored so they don’t feel uncomfortable.  Racism is the arrogance that white people inherent because they believe that they can have the last word on every conversation, that they know it all, that they have a right to silence anyone who disagrees with them.

I know, I know! Saying that a white person is racist is the single most offensive thing that a Black person can say.  According to white people, a white person has to be wearing a white sheet, burning a cross, and screaming, “I hate Niggers,” before they can be considered racist and even then, there will be white people insisting that they know them personally and they are a good person and not racist.  I’ve seen it.  

Aaaaand . . . queue the white person who is going to say that they practice Buddhism or some religion where their God isn’t white and thus they aren’t racist but again, racism is not dictated by one single action or experience.