“What people mean when they say all white people are racist”
Cosmetics giant L’Oreal recently fired Munroe Bergdorf for her comments regarding the white supremacist terror acts in Charlottesville. Bergdorf, a black transgender model hired as the face of the company’s diversity campaign, wrote on Facebook:
Honestly I don’t have energy to talk about the racial violence of white people any more. Yes ALL white people.
Because most of ya’ll don’t even realise or refuse to acknowledge that your existence, privilege and success as a race is built on the backs, blood and death of people of colour. Your entire existence is drenched in racism. From micro-aggressions to terrorism, you guys built the blueprint for this s***.
In a piece for Quartz, Aamna Mohdin explains what people mean when they say all white people are racist; it involves institutional/systemic racism vs. individual racism (the media tells us much more about the latter than the former) and who holds the power in American society.
It’s complicated. In a follow-up statement, Bergdorf said she was addressing society as a whole and a system “rooted in white supremacy-designed to benefit, prioritize and protect white people before anyone of any other race.” She argues that white people are socialized to be racist, just as men are socialized to be sexist. The onus is on each person to “unlearn” that socialization, she adds.
What Bergdorf appeared to be talking about is systemic racism — the kind based in historical inequities that has ongoing wide-reaching effects, from economic marginalization to daily microaggressions to unequal treatment in the criminal justice system — as distinct from individual racism.
Stay Connected