Thoughts about personal and structural racism, and the impossibility of neutrality on a moving train

I am a racist. You are too. If you're uncomfortable with that, if I'm uncomfortable with that – good! The fact that we don't want to be racist is a good thing. But not wanting to be racist, and not trying to be racist doesn't change the fact that we are members of a society. There's no neutral. Anything we do that isn't an active effort to dismantle racism likely perpetuates it. And because our efforts often fail, many things we do that *are* an active effort to dismantle racism still likely perpetuate it.

I help perpetuate a system that treats people with white skin as somehow more human than those with dark skin. I help perpetuate that system because it's the same system that we get our food from, and we get a place to live, and we go to school, and we communicate with our friends, and we are entertained and we do our work. I'm a racist because I'm a contributing member of society, and our society is built on a deeply racist foundation. When I do my job, when I stop at a red light, when I feed my children dinner – in all these things, I help our society continue. And our society is racist, so in all these things, I perpetuate racism. I am complicit.

Racism isn't what makes me stop at red lights. Racism isn't why I feed my children. Racism isn't why I go to work. But every apparently-socially-responsible thing I do that allows our society to continue continues not only the good and admirable parts of our civilization, and there are many, but also the evil, destructive, exploitative parts.

White supremacism is woven deep into the structures of our society. Laws, customs, music, culture, and the economic arrangements that generate them all have deep roots in a system that was designed to privilege white people over black people. That is certainly not all there is to our society; if it were nothing but racism, it would be easy to throw it out and walk away. There is much that is good and noble and desirable about our social structures. And there is evil embedded in it, and one of those key evils embedded in the very structure of our economic base and social superstructure is racism.

This racism is inherent in the system itself. Whether or not we have racist intent, by participating in our economy and culture, we perpetuate a system that includes structures of white supremacism, which means that regardless of our intent, we are complicit in perpetuating white supremacism.

People can actively choose to promote racism, and some do. People can choose not to think about racism, but the default is to act within a racist system in ways that perpetuate the system. This is original sin: without choosing to engage in racism, we nonetheless act to perpetuate it. Without choosing to do evil, we are guilty of being complicit therein. Our very existence in a racist structure inevitably collaborates with racism.

The alternative is to acknowledge that we are formed by a racist culture and participate in a racist economy: to acknowledge that we are complicit in perpetuating racism. I am racist and you are racist and he is racist and she is racist and they are racist because we are all the product of a racist culture and participants in a racist economy. Then we look for how we can actively participate in dismantling it. We are all complicit; the question is how to become less complicit. We are all caught up in the mechanism of racism; the question is how to become less racist.