There's no such thing as "reverse racism."

I can't handle it. Motherfuckers, it doesn't exist. Yes, there can be prejudice harbored by a person of color and directed towards a white person, but prejudice is different from racism. Racism involves both prejudice and power. It's a systematic privileging of some and disadvantaging of others. I like the way that Beverly Tatum explains it in her first chapter of Why are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? She uses this anecdote:

"I once asked a White teacher what it would mean to her if a student or a parent of color accused her of being racist. She said she would feel as though she had been punched in the stomach or called a "low-life scum." She is not alone in this feeling. The word racist holds a lot of emotional power. For many White people, to be called racist is the ultimate insult. The idea that this term might only be applied to Whites becomes highly problematic for after all, can't people of color be "low-life scum" too?

Then she goes on to discuss the problems that come with throwing around the word racist to mean all sorts of things other than what it is, which is systematic "prejudice plus power."

I know lots of white people -- and not-white people actually, not to say it's White and Other -- who equate racism with "mean," and so are sure that they're not racist. They're good people. But they are racist. If you participate, whether actively or complacently, in a system that advantages some and disadvantages others based on their perceived races, then you're racist. If you actively work against that system, then you're anti-racist. There's no neutral. That doesn't mean that all racists are jerks, but it does mean that we're dealing with a lot more racists than we want to acknowledge.

Like this schumck, responsible for a lot of McCain's campaign ads:

Good advertising men are almost always mischiefmakers at heart, the sort who don't mind a little confrontation and who revel in a bit of controversy. And so Davis is wistful at the missed opportunities of the McCain campaign. "I made a list once, which no one will ever see, of all the reasons that my hands were tied on this campaign," he says. "And I've never had a list this long." One of his biggest struggles, Davis says, was to come up with negative spots against a historic, groundbreaking candidate without stepping on taboos. "One of the big hands that I felt was tied behind my back was [that] so many things — like [Obama's record on] crime — you would logically do were perceived as 'Oh, we can't do that. That was playing the race card,' " he says, adding that the campaign created a whole series of crime attacks against Obama that were never aired. "Reverend Wright? 'Oh, can't do that; they'll say we are playing the race card.' [William] Ayers? For the longest time, 'Oh, can't do that. We're playing the race card.' "

Davis says that concern about race played a major role in the entire aesthetic of McCain's ads. The photographs of Obama that the ads used, for instance, which often showed Obama elongated and smiling, were carefully selected, he recalls. "We chose them with only one thing in mind, and that is to not make them bad pictures because bad pictures would be seen as racist," Davis says. "How many shots in their ads did they use a John McCain [photo] looking decent and smiling?" He says the campaign also agonized over the music in the ads, paying special care not to play drum-heavy tracks that could be seen as an African tribal reference. "We were held to a totally different standard," he says.

Geez, excuse Barack Obama for having dark skin!? God forbid we have to give attention to whether or not we're indulging in the stereotypes that contribute to the socially unjust achievement gap in our public schools, to the disproportionate number of black and Latino men in our prisons, to the despicable degree of correlation between race and income levels in our country. I mean, if Obama could have just been white then Fred Davis, could have chosen from all of the cool drum music that that beautiful "country" of Africa has to offer! It would have been so much more convenient! Give me a fucking break.

It's like he wants to say, "We couldn't even talk about how a black President would let all those black people commit all the crimes they're predisposed to do with impunity! Unfair! We have to act like that's not true, but he's black!"

I do realize that jumping to that conclusion is probably just as problematic as the racial stereotypes that I'm guessing he'd like to trade on. (And I could probably come up with some more problematic assumptions about what's on that lengthy list of his.) That said, I really wish that our racists could own their racism, know that we're not calling them "low-life scum," and move into some productive, action-oriented learning about how people of color are treated by our world and how we can create a world that serves all of us more fairly. Like, immediately I'd like that to happen. I'm not known for patience.