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Understanding SJW language: "Racism" and "white supremacy"

One thing that the social justice ideology, often starting from university academia, is infamous for, it's taking existing words and changing their meaning. Most often these are words with extremely strong connotations and heavy meanings, and the changes are done to make them easier to throw around to accuse and insult people.

Currently there are perhaps no two terms that are more popular among the social justice ideologues than "racism" and "white supremacy". The meaning of these words has been fuzzied and mangled, and they have become extremely malleable and vague. In many situations it can be hard to understand what they mean by those terms, as they don't seem to apply at all.

In order to better understand what they are talking about, it helps to understand how they have redefined the words.

For many decades (and for a large part in dictionaries and encyclopedias) these two terms have had the following meanings:

"Racism": 1) Prejudice, discrimination, hostility, antipathy or violence towards a person because of that person's race, and/or 2) the belief that there are fundamental differences between races that make some races inferior to others in some way, or that affect eg. instinctive behavior (usually in a negative way) of people of those races.

"White supremacy": The belief or ideology that not only is the second definition above true, but moreover the white race in particular is inherently superior to other races, ie. all the other races are in some way inherently inferior (culturally, biologically, or both). Often this ideology is accompanied with the belief that this gives the white race the right to rule over other races (often justified by a completely distorted misunderstanding of Darwinism). Likewise quite often the belief that white people should not mix with other races, in order to preserve racial purity.

I think that most (non-social-justice) scholars and normal people would agree with those definitions. However, those are not the definitions that the social justice ideology uses. They may be included in their definition, but only as a non-mandatory part of it.

For starters, in social justice parlance "racism" and "white supremacy" have become completely synonymous with each other, and freely interchangeable. In their vocabulary there is no distinction between the two things. (This makes sentiments like "we oppose racism and white supremacy" contain redundancy, but they don't care. They only care about what that sentence sounds like, not what it actually means.)

Secondly, and most importantly, in social justice vocabulary "racism" (and thus also "white supremacy") is not necessarily thoughts or actions by people towards other people. There may not be a single racist (or white supremacist) person or entity in some community, not in thought, not in attitude, not in actions, yet there may still be "racism" there, according to them.

How so? That's because in social justice ideology "racism" is not really about thoughts and actions. "Racism" is a state of being, the way that things are in a particular place or society. Even if there isn't a single racist person in that place, there may still be "racism" there because of how things are.

For example, if in some country black people are on average poorer than white people, that means there's "racism" there. It doesn't matter if there isn't a single racist person (by any possible definition) in that country, there's still "racism" there if there's this kind of inequality. This is not just me saying this, or interpreting what they are saying, or "reading between the lines". This is directly what social justice ideologues are saying: They are explicitly and unambiguously saying that even if there are no racist people there can still be racism.

Likewise if there's for example a disproportionately low number of black people working for a company, there's "racism" in that company even if absolutely no discrimination of any kind has ever happened. It's not about what people in that company are doing. It's a state of being, it's how things are there.

And if there's "racism" there's automatically "white supremacy", because they are synonymous.

Understanding this helps understand what they mean when they say that something "perpetuates racism", or "perpetuates white supremacy". They are not talking about perpetuating people's thoughts, attitudes or actions. They are talking about perpetuating the current status quo, the way that things currently are in that society. That's why they say that inaction and silence "perpetuates racism": Because they think that inaction and silence perpetuate the way things currently are, rather than changing it. This has nothing to do with people's thoughts, attitudes, prejudices or actions.

Sometimes they use the word "inequality" to describe this same thing instead. That word is a lot more accurate (even though a complex discussion can be had what kind of "inequality" it is, and what and whether something should be done about it, but that's another topic). However, "inequality" does not have such a punch as "racism" and "white supremacy", so they prefer using those instead, even though all three terms mean, to them, pretty much the same thing.

Of course this is opportunistic and deceitful. They are hijacking words and terms because of the strong impression they give, and applying completely different unrelated meanings to them, while still pretending that the words have their original meaning and connotation.

When someone says "black people can be racist too", most social justice ideologues understand that that someone is using the original definition of that word I wrote above, but they don't care. They still insert their own new definition into it and retort "no, they can't, by definition black people can't be racists". Maybe by their definition. Not by the definition that this person used.

And of course one of the major problems with this kind of word redefinition is that their new definitions are vague, nebulous and malleable, and the goalposts can be moved at any moment as it best suits the current narrative and ideology. These words lose all their meaning when this meaning changes all the time and is utterly nebulous.

Comments

  1. there is a reality show called the challenge on the MTV i am watching it online and this week something strange happened. one of the player shared something in support of blm blackout and then she who is an Asian woman continued to share her own life related tweets after that people accused her using BLM in order to amplify her accounts power and to harness followers. She eventually said sorry but tbe strange thing is the TV show apologized for her twit and literally deleted her scenes from the show also promised she won't be on the next show. they are like Nazis rewriting history erasing her scenes from show not to provoke snow flakes. this ideology conquered all western institutes like a plague and will destroy them in the near future.

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