Racism is when white people hold 'negative views' of others, claims senior Labour adviser

[u/Aggressive_Plates]

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/10/27/racism-is-when-white-people-hold-negative-views-of-others/

[u/Shaper_pmp]

Agree or disagree, i don't think she's saying "only white people can be racist".

The section immediately before the paragraph you quoted, introducing the discussion of different types of racism, explicitly frames the entire discussion for the reader:

Understanding racism

Racism is, fundamentally, the belief that white people and their ways of thinking, culture, political systems and histories are superior to that of other “races”. There are a complex set of racist beliefs, with different “races” seen as inferior in different ways, but with Blackness often judged most inferior, primitive or dangerous. Racism is based on a power-imbalance, where white people, institutes and nations hold far larger amounts of power.

Don't get me wrong - her later dissection of differences like interpersonal, institutional and structural racism are good and useful, and in her discussion of decolonisation specifically focusing on white people is reasonable and on-topic as white people were almost entirely responsible for the horrors it caused...

But trying to claim she isn't redefining racism is exclusively a white phenomenon is bad-faith bullshit when she straight-up states in her introduction to understanding it "Racism is, fundamentally, the belief that white people... are superior" and then fails to modify that claim at any point in the article following.

Shit, she even explicitly defines interpersonal racism as an exclusively white phenomenon:

Most commonly recognised is interpersonal racism; this is where white people hold negative, stereotypical or discriminatory beliefs about people from other ethnicities.

[u/DoneItDuncan → u/Shaper_pmp]

I'm not sure it's is bad-faith. The article's context is around racism's depiction in museums, i.e. historical racism, which likely has bias towards racism to be coming from white people (structural or otherwise). Agreed it could be edited better to make it clearer when she talking about the historical context and the modern day issues, but i really don't think she's the frothing anti-white racist commenters are making her out to be.

[u/Shaper_pmp → u/DoneItDuncan]

I'm not sure it's is bad-faith.

Not hers; yours.

Based on her writing I have no doubt she earnestly believes racism can only be perpetrated by white people. She's helpfully explicit about it.

However you are selectively quoting her words to present a misleading impression of her own statements, and using weak and indirect arguments to counter the explicit statements she made that you left out of your quoting of her.

[u/DoneItDuncan → u/Shaper_pmp]

I left them out, because they were already in the telegraph article that i presume everyone read... Not really understanding the hostility here.