XOJane's Shayla Pierce says that she needs to re-evaluate her approach to cultural conflicts with her white boyfriend.
I had a fight with my boyfriend this past weekend. Which isn't exactly headline news for most people, but we hardly ever fight. And when we do, it's usually over something so trivial it's embarrassing to think about once we've both calmed down. Is Lady Gaga a truly unique artist or is she completely overrated? Is "American Idol" a reliable source of finding legitimate talent?
Those types of debates are not about pop stars or televised talent competitions. What is usually at stake is our egos. We both hate to be proven wrong so much that it borders on pathology. But this latest argument was different.
We were in my car, talking about a little bit of everything when the topic turned to race. I'm black and he's white, so the subject comes up frequently. Ninety-nine point nine percent of the time it involves horrendously offensive jokes and hysterical laughter. This was the .01% when it did not.
The taboo topic du jour was whether or not something had to be intentionally malicious for it to be considered racist. I argued that of course it did not. I was operating off of a complex conceptualization that embodied both individual discrimination and systematic and institutional injustice. It was the “racism equals prejudice plus power” equation that is the corner stone of most sociological, psychological and academic anti-racist arenas. By that definition, only white people possess the ability to be racist because they are the ones that hold the power.
Read Shayla Pierce's entire piece at XOJane.
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