Can You Be a Little Racist?

As Americans, we do not have to reach far back in our collective memories to recall incidents of racism. There’s the TikTok video on how to make a n****r produced by high school seniors that went viral across social media platforms, the white supremacist rally with tiki-torch carrying protestors in Charlottesville, and the President intentionally calling Covid19 the Chinese virus, a covert form of racism that incited discrimination against Asian Americans. Racism is alive and thriving in the USA. That’s the bad news.

The good news is that the majority of us are collectively horrified by any hint of racism that propels us back to pre-civil rights era when racist films were considered entertainment, the KKK was considered a necessary vigilante organization to maintain the dominance of whites, and it didn’t matter if your words threatened the quality of lives of people of color because their physical and psychological safety were not important.

More good news — being called a racist remains a terrible, non-desirable label. Even racists recoil at being call racists…but that brings me back to the bad news. Without a shared understanding of what characterizes a racist or an understanding of the many contemporary forms of racism (refer to the isms matrix), most people think that the racist label doesn’t apply to them. If they haven’t made a racist TikTok video or carried a…