
For far too long, we have framed racism as being a problem for Black and Indigenous people to fix. This is a fallacy we must actively reject.
We must accept that racism is a white issue. A white problem and that it has always been.
White people should be responsible for dismantling racism and white superiority delusion. After all, this is a system you participate in, an advantage that you wield, and a system that serves you.
To undertake this task, there are three truths that white people must first acknowledge about racism.
1. Racism is a system and not an event.
This means that as a white person, you are not exempt from this system of racism.
Systemic racism is best understood as a collective racial prejudice backed by legal authority and institutional power. Meaning that white superiority is embedded into all of our institutions; our media, government, health, education, our economy and our legal system.
It ascribes to us what is valuable, beautiful, normal, and what is good. Racism is tightly embedded in our literature and language, our religions, into our history, and none are exempt.
And while we may often define racism as a racial slur on the bus (the event), it is systemic racism that is most destructive to the lives and prospects of Black and Indigenous people in Australia.
White people, it’s time to realise that racism is not the big bad shark; it is the ocean itself.
2. Our definition of racism is fundamentally flawed.
For too long, the dominant white narrative of what racism is has failed to equip white people with the tools required to examine and address it.
First, we simplistically define a racist as ‘an individual who consciously does not like people based on race and is intentionally mean to them’. The significance of this is that we wrongly focus on racism being about the ‘individual’ and minimises racism to a moral slight or a form of bullying.
This simplifies the racism symposium to a ‘good, and bad’ moral indictment, focused on intention and not impact.
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