It isn’t difficult to be accused of being a racist these days. Fall just marginally foul of political correctness and you can be sure that the wilfully ignorant will use name-calling and slurs to shut you down rather than having to relate to your arguments. But, actually, we must be more precise: it isn’t difficult to be accused of being a racist these days if you are white. If you are a person of colour, according to many on the left you cannot be racist, because to be so you must combine your dislike of someone’s race with a position of power over them.
Prejudice plus power as a definition of racism was first proposed by Patricia Bidol, semi-obscure social scientist, in 1970. According to her definition, not only are you required to be racially prejudiced to be racist, you must have the social power to codify this prejudice and enforce it on society. To the SJWs, it is a convenient definition, as it can be used to imply that only white people can be racist, though, if taken at face value, it ostensibly would exonerate a poor white man from any accusations of racism if his prejudice is directed towards, say, a black government minister. That, of course, is not something the SJWs would concede; they would claim that there are systematic disadvantages for people of colour built in to the fabric of our laws and institutions, which individual circumstance does nothing to negate, and hence, in the west only white people can be racist. It is a typical collectivist line of thought, treating people as members of a group rather than as individuals.
Now, while it is indeed very true that some white people did fit the definition of being prejudicial and institutionally powerful in, say, apartheid South Africa or the US before the Civil Rights Act, it is a ludicrous postulation that it is the case in Europe or the US in 2018 – in fact, today, state power is more likely to be actively used to promote blacks or other minorities in preference to whites.
But the shortcomings of this re-definition of the word is really secondary to the fact that it is, quite simply, not what the vast majority of people mean when they say someone is “racist”. “Racism” is a word with a defined meaning: I am racist if I am prejudiced and discriminate against others, based on race. Otherwise I am not. Some SJWs even claim that “all white people are racist”, dispensing with the requirement for prejudice all together. The left is on a crusade to allow the “victim” in any relationship to define whether they experience oppression: “rape is rape” if the victim thinks so, and racism is conjured into existence by a person of colour claiming to experience it.
The problem with the left’s insistence on re-defining the meaning of words is that it has genuine consequences for society if we accept it: a wrong appears where none were before, simply because we have redefined the word. And of course, political action must be taken to right a wrong, meaning laws can be made to advance an agenda if enough “facts” can be invented to support its necessity. It is an Orwellian technique used to manipulate language for political ends.
In the western world, the left has gradually lost its original purpose – the traditional class war – over the past decades, as the “economically oppressed” simply ceased to exist, eradicated by rising living standards. Unable to mobilise a broad popular movement based on class, the left has transposed the “oppressor vs. oppressed” narrative onto social issues, such as gender, sexuality and race. The unions and popular workers movements are shadows of their former selves, but in their place, we find powerful social justice groups composed not of disgruntled workers but of elitist campaigners and academics with a thirst for imposing their warped world view on the rest of us. Social justice is the new war. The left’s abuse of language is a battle in that war; a battle they must not win. There are very few racists or white supremacists anywhere in the world today, and no one should be allowed to imply their existence by redefining what the words mean.