Spike Lee - "Black People Can't Be Racist - Discuss

[tishaLA]

50. I actually looked it up online

and it's a very clever definition that attempts, in one defintion, to be all things to all people. I admire its complexity, but I'm bothered by its prevarications:

A belief that one’s own racial or ethnic group is superior, or that other such groups represent a threat to one's cultural identity, racial integrity, or economic well-being; (also) a belief that the members of different racial or ethnic groups possess specific characteristics, abilities, or qualities, which can be compared and evaluated. Hence: prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against people of other racial or ethnic groups (or, more widely, of other nationalities), esp. based on such beliefs. Cf. racialism n.

So then I looked, as I do, at the OED's history of the word. Shockingly, the word first appeared, according to the ODD, only in 1903, so it's just over 100 years old and is even newer than the word "heterosexual," which first appeared in 1900 and, at the time, referred to non-procreative sex between people of the "opposite" sex.

But even more remarkable is that almost all the instances the OED itself provides with the definition are about institutional racism, starting with the first one (by a person who is, by the way, a terrible racist himself--against Native Americans). The only instance it didn't refer to institutional racism? A citation from Marxism Today .