Cracker Barrel’s CEO faces an uphill battle to revive the restaurant chain after a blunt admission sent stock prices plummeting 20 per cent.
Cracker Barrel’s CEO faces an uphill battle to revive the restaurant chain after a blunt admission sent stock prices plummeting 20 per cent.
It’s a reminder that those you oppress see you as less than human too, but they have a reason to. It’s never just a word, it’s the weight behind it
Idk about less than human; moreso, we just see them/each other through a racial lens - one rooted in our respective culture(s) and understanding of history (which is itself usually heavily-written/influenced by earlier European culture/historians).
That said, most Americans tend to use racism as a synonym for prejudice (as opposed to the academic definition of racism; i.e. an “organized system of race-based” prejudice). To probe this line of thought, I’ve recently started asking people whether they would consider a black American (wo)man growing up in 1845 (pre-Civil war) or in ~1930 (peak KKK membership; ~5 million Americans) racist for their likely negative views of the average white American. I’ve yet to get an answer, which is a bit of a bummer. Personally, I think most people realize it would be silly to call a black American slave racist for being prejudiced of their fellow white American citizens who they know only as brutal slave owners/traders. (Did y’all know pirates would use African slaves to launder money since they had a stable monetary value?)
Sorry, if it’s a bit of a tangent. I find this stuff super interesting. Highly recommend “Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?” by Beverly Tatum and the doc “Exterminate All the Brutes” on HBO to anyone interested. Then come and chat with me about your thoughts! No one I know cares about this kind of stuff. It’s all rap battles and dumb culture war crap, but I digress (further)
Thank you for the insight, and I suppose I may have spoken carelessly.
And yeah as a white American I’ve absolutely noticed a tendency to view racism as you describe and I really appreciate your examples and hope to remember them next time I’m in that argument
But we’re not saying racial prejudice is a good thing just because it doesn’t fit the academic definition of racism, right? Like, if a white child grows up in a predominantly black area and is picked on for being different, it’s still terrible if they grow up loathing black people. Even though it’s not an example of systemic or
instructionalinstitutional racism and just plain old boring racial prejudice.Edit: autocorrect
But prejudice has always been bad. It’s just that racism, especially the racism that resulted from centuries of chattel slavery, is worse. It’s a lot worse. It’s something that can be studied through multiple lenses/fields, politics (colonization, authoritarianism), psychology (identity formation, PTSD), law (red-lining, jim crow, mass incarceration) economics (no business loans from banks, racist hiring practices), philosophy (justice, freedom, epistemology), sociology, anthropology, etc.
People don’t really fear being called a slur on the street as much as they fear being seen as less than human by our society and shared institutions.