Handy Examples of Famous Antiracists Saying or Implying All White People are Racist
Every now and then, an antiracist insists that antiracists don’t say all white people are racist. This is the quick guide for setting them straight:
The claim that all white people are racist is in the title of a book by the father of Critical Race Theory, Derrick Bell: Faces At The Bottom Of The Well: The Permanence Of Racism.
George H. Taylor provides relevant quotes from it:
[R]acism in America is not a curable aberration … .
[T]he sources of racial problems … grow more intractable with time.
Black people will never gain full equality in this country.
[R]acism is a permanent component of American life.
[R]acism is a permanent part of the American landscape.
[O]ppression on the basis of race returns time after time-in different guises, but it always returns.
[R]acism is permanent, the ultimate betrayal …
[R]acism lies at the center, not the periphery; in the permanent, not in the fleeting … .
White race reductionists are especially fond of making the claim:
“I believe that all people (white or of color) raised in a society where racism has been (and still is) so prevalent, will have internalized elements of racist thinking” — Tim Wise
“Yes, all white people are complicit with racism.” — Robin DiAngelo
“Racism comes out of our pores as white people. It’s the way that we are.” — Robin DiAngelo
“I don’t think in my lifetime I will be free of my racist conditioning.” — Robin DiAngelo
“When people say they’re not racist, they’re sharing the words that white supremacists use.” — Ibram X. Kendi
“Some White people do not identify as White for the same reason they identify as not-racist: to avoid reckoning with the ways that Whiteness — even as a construction and mirage — has informed their notions of America and identity…” — Ibram X. Kendi
Bonus examples:
“A RACIST: A racist is one who is both privileged and socialized on the basis of race by a white supremacist (racist) system. The term applies to all white people (i.e., people of European descent) living in the United States, regardless of class, gender, religion, culture or sexuality. By this definition, people of color cannot be racists, because as peoples within the U.S. system, they do not have the power to back up their prejudices, hostilities, or acts of discrimination. (This does not deny the existence of such prejudices, hostilities, acts of rage or discrimination.)” — Page 3, the University of Delaware Office of Residence Life Diversity Facilitation Training document
“Of course all white people are racist.” — Joseph Harker, The Guardian, 2002
“My dad the educator says “when you grow up in a racist society you are a racist” so yes I am a racist because I grew up in a racist society which means I have to work every day to be alert & to become better” —Kate Elliott, novelist, Twitter
PS. I added “or Implying” to the title to pacify the people who think implying all white people are racist does not count.
PS 2:
