Member-only story
Diversity | Representation
Racism: Not by Intention, but by Default
It’s not just what you do, but what you refuse to see — and what you won’t do.
A friend of a friend, arguing against dragging racism into a discussion about healthy eating guidelines, wrote, “By definition, racism is where you do something against someone specifically because of their race and nothing else.”
I can see the confusion, and I think it’s a common misunderstanding among white people who believe and swear they “aren’t racist” and who have never been on the downside of racial discrimination, themselves. The inability to see racism perpetuates it.
Racism is also where the “default race” is white, and everything of benefit is geared towards the default race, even if that includes harm to others. That ultimate harm may be intentional or incidental; the perpetuation of it, I think, can be negligent or simply neglectful.
A similar discussion, on Twitter, gave me pause: Do white writers ever mention skin tone for characters who are white? Or is “white person” so much the default that we only describe skin tone when the character is BIPOC? It may not seem racist, but consider this: For many years, there were no people of color in TV shows or leading roles in popular movies…
