From the Toronto District School Board:
Racism:
"While people in different contexts can experience prejudice or discrimination, racism, in a North American context, is based on an ideology of the superiority of the white race over other racial groups....
Oh, yes. Seattle school district referred to it as "white privilege" and had a whole department of racial equity geared toward recognizing and removing white privilege. At least they did. I think that was an experiment that failed.
ReplyDeleteToronto is just a couple of years behind the times ...
It's a reverse definition. First, they started with the assumption that only whites can be racist. Then, they came up with a definition that matched their assumption.
ReplyDeleteThe statement is clearly overblown, but it does have some historic basis. The Dred Scott decision held that people of African descent were forever barred from begin United States citizens. The 13th, 14th and 15th amendements were supposed to fix that but they took over 100 years to really kick in. In North America, racism that is not either about white supremacist views or in reaction to them is probably something of a trace element. That is not to deny that ethnocentrism and xenophobia are probably universal human traits.
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