There’s a certain kind of rhetorical grenade people like to lob when their sense of ownership feels wobbly. You’ve heard it. You’ve maybe had it lobbed in your general direction.
“Go back to Africa.”
— some white dude
It’s not an argument, of course. It’s a spell. A warding charm. The linguistic equivalent of hissing at a stray cat in the garden. The phrase carries the weight of assumed belonging: we are naturally here, you are obviously not. The incantation is meant to banish you with a puff of words.
The other day, I watched a black activist absorb this spell and toss it back with deadpan precision:
“Why don’t you go back to Europe?”
— some black cat
Cue awkward silence. The symmetry was perfect. Suddenly, the verbal hex had reversed polarity, exposing the hypocrisy built into the original curse. The power of the spell depends entirely on who gets to cast it. When it comes from the wrong mouth, the whole structure of “common sense” collapses into farce.
Another example: a Greek immigrant in my orbit, accent still clinging to every consonant, grumbling about a black family that had moved into his neighbourhood. Why didn’t they “go back to Africa”? This from a man who himself had gone “back” from nowhere, except a homeland he happily abandoned for better wages and better weather. Colonialism is apparently a one-way ticket: Europeans roam the globe and call it destiny, but when others move into their postcode, it’s treated like an invasion.
“Why don’t you speak English?”
– me, circa 1980 Japan
I confess, I once flirted with the same nonsense. Years ago in Japan, in my more callow phase, I asked – half in jest, wholly in arrogance – why these people didn’t have the decency to speak my language. The difference, such as it is, lay in my awareness that I was being ridiculous. My Greek neighbour, my activist’s heckler—no irony there. They were dead serious.
That’s the grotesque comedy of racism: its logic isn’t logic at all. It’s ritual. A mantra recited to reassure oneself of belonging by denying it to others. It dresses itself in the robes of rationality – “go back where you came from” sounds like geography, after all – but it’s closer to medieval exorcism than reasoned debate.
And when the cursed simply whispers the incantation back? The spell collapses. The supposed “truth” reveals itself for what it always was: a desperate attempt to maintain the fiction that one kind of stranger is native and another will always be alien.
Every empire tells its children they were born at home, and tells everyone else they were born trespassing.
“What is up with us white people?” asks John Biewen in his TEDx talk The Lie That Invented Racism. It’s the sort of line that makes a roomful of middle-class liberals laugh nervously, because it’s the kind of question we’d rather leave to other people – preferably the ones already burdened with the consequences of our civilisational mess. But Biewen’s point, following Ibram X. Kendi, is that race is not some primordial fact, a tragic misunderstanding of melanin levels. It was invented, quite literally, by a Portuguese royal propagandist in the fifteenth century, and it has been paying dividends to “us” ever since.
Video: TEDx Talk with John Biewen
Yes, invented. Not discovered like a continent, not unearthed like a fossil, not deduced like a law of motion. Fabricated. Gomes de Zurara, a court chronicler under King Afonso V, was tasked with writing a stirring tale to justify Portugal’s shiny new business model: kidnapping Africans and selling them like cattle. Zurara obligingly lumped every tribe and tongue south of the Sahara into a single category – “the Blacks,” beastly and conveniently inferior – and thus performed the intellectual sleight of hand that would metastasise into centuries of racial taxonomy. It wasn’t science. It wasn’t reason. It was marketing.
And here lies the exquisite irony: this happened at the dawn of Modernity, that self-anointed Age of Reason. The Enlightenment’s sales pitch was universality – “all men are created equal,” etc. – but tucked in the fine print was the little caveat that “man” actually meant white, European, propertied man. Everyone else? Barbaric, uncivilised, or in need of civilising at the end of a whip. Modernity congratulated itself on escaping medieval superstition while simultaneously cooking up the most profitable superstition of all: that human worth can be ranked by pigmentation.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast discusses this topic.
This is why racism has proved so stubborn. If it were merely a misunderstanding, like thinking the Earth is flat, we’d have grown out of it. But racism was never about confusion; it was about utility. A well-tuned lie, weaponised to justify land theft, slavery, and empire, then codified into law, census, and property rights. As Kendi and others point out, race became the scaffolding for a political economy that had to square Christian salvation with chains and sugar plantations. Voilà: whiteness – not as an identity, but as a racket.
And yet, “good white people” (Dow’s term, delivered with that Minnesota-nice grimace) still act as though racism is a tragic but external drama: Black people versus hood-wearing villains, while we clap politely from the sidelines. But there are no sidelines. Whiteness was built to privilege us; neutrality is just complicity in better shoes. As historian Nell Irvin Painter reminds us, the Greeks thought they were superior, yes – but on cultural, not chromatic grounds. Race, as a concept, is a modern fix, not a timeless truth.
So what’s the moral? Stop romanticising the Enlightenment as though it were some grand emancipation. It was also a bureaucracy for inequality, a rationalisation engine that could make even human trafficking sound like a noble project. To dismantle racism is not to cleanse an ancient superstition but to tear out one of Modernity’s central operating systems.
The uncomfortable fact – the one Dow leaves hanging like smoke after the torch march – is this: if whiteness was invented for profit, then dismantling it is not philanthropy. It is debt repayment. And debt, as any bank will tell you, compounds with interest.
Why must I always worry about the voiceless and underdogs, and who cares anyway?
Podcast: Audio rendition of this page content
This White Feminism video was circulating on my professional social network, and it is relevant, but it also misses a major point. The point is entirely valid that feminism that considers all females to somehow be a monolithic cohort is bound to fail, simply because they aren’t. Not any more than all males are some united front. Of course, you could abstract some attributes to such an extent that one could argue that the vast majority of females have two feet. Of course, that’s ableist at the start and we’ve accidentally included men. Besides, now you’re being silly, you tell me, we are talking about attitudes and behaviours, not physical attributes. That’s another arena.
So what’s the deal? The problem is that even this frame is too narrow. Adding colour to the mix improves the intersectionality, but it goes nowhere near far enough. Am I allowed to say “near far”? Moving on.
These authors are focused on the experience of women of colour through a predominately American lens. More on this in a moment. Their point is that women of colour have different problems than so-called white women. And this is true. But gay women have problems unique to them, and trans-women have problems unique to them, and Latinas have problems unique to them. But there’s more.
Here’s another problem, these authors are all affluent, educated women, who view the world through this lens. Paternalism is a problematic perspective, but some parallel maternalism isn’t a step in the right direction.
And there’s a larger problem. Most so-called feminists tend to privilege Western women over non-Western women, in practice invalidating the lived experience of a majority of women in the world. They presume that the poor rural woman in Afghanistan has more in common with them than a vagina. And this is true, but it’s a privileged perspective to presume that your New York City or Islamabad perspective is even halfway valid is unadulterated hubris.
I suggest becoming familiar with Chandra Mohanty’s “Under Western Eyes” and Sunera Thobani’s “White Wars: Western feminisms and the ‘War on Terror’.” These women do hail from the educated class, but they approach the situation with broader compassion and so are more inclusive of the diversity. Moreover, the referenced works are free essays that make their point. Meantime, David Guignion shares a short primer for these two. “Oh my God,” you say, You want me to listen to an educated Canadian white man school me on the plight of non-Western women? Why, yes I do. Of course, you can also read the source material on your own.
So, “why should I listen to some educated white bloke with a blog?” you ask yourself. You don’t need to. That’s on you. I’m just the messenger. Feel free to think that everything is male and female, black and white, or some admixture. Feel free to leave a comment.
I am a racist. Well, to the extent that there is only one extant human race but some choose to construct races out of ethnicities, skin colour, and other allele expressions, I am a racist. It’s difficult to escape the distinction that the perpetrators and targets or victims of these fabricated races.
The haters need to create a target group to feel superior over. The do-gooders need to be able to identify groups who have been harmed or historically underserved. Of course, there is a right way and then there’s this wrong way. In a manner of speaking, it’s an easier effort to broad-brush people into race categories. No mind that they have no basis in biology or in science more broadly. These people have issues with science, mainly because they don’t feel fully included in their designation as soft scient and social science. They get pretty defensive when they get called out as pseudoscience, but if the shoe fits. Playing these race games only underscores the pseudoscience charge.
All of this said—or by this tepid definition—, I am a racist. Here’s why.
I am a racist
When I see a person from a designated group, I consciously reflect: that’s a human who’s been identified as an other—sort of like an endangered species, they need to be protected. Sure they can protect themselves, but they need assistance. Besides, they deserve extra attention because of so many centuries of not only neglect but of malice. Perhaps not that person in particular, but since we’re broad-brushing.
Where my racism comes into play is that I’ll smile and nod; I’ll engage in phatic exchange; I’ll hold a door; I’ll recognise them as a person—as a human; I’ll feel a slight boost of empathy and compassion. I’ll see this person as different, whereas without this constructed designation, I’d only see another person. But I’ve been instructed to see them as different.
Growing up around Boston in the 1970s, a time of desegregation and forced bussing, my best friend was a negro. That’s how we labelled blacks or African-Americans or whatever the latest label is. He was very aware of his colour. We’d joke about it as kids tend to do. He was coloured. I was a cracker. To us, his colour (or race, if you prefer) meant nothing to us.
My family were racist, though they’d deny it. To them, Lenny, my friend, wasn’t an individual. He was a part of that larger race construct. Sure, he was an individual, too. He was my friend who played baseball with me and shot hoops in the driveway. But to me as a child, race didn’t yet exist. I hadn’t yet been indoctrinated into the race nonsense. Lenny may have experienced things differently.
Don’t get me wrong, looking back, Lenny did conform to racial stereotypes. His dad was an absent parent, an alcoholic shipworker, who spent more time at the shipyard and in bars. I barely even saw him. His mum was a large woman, who was very nice to me but was frustrated with her lot in life and the lack of emotional support from her husband.
Lenny was the youngest of three brothers, but he had a younger sister, Karen. His brothers were high school basketball stars, as it were, in a suburb. Tookey was the oldest and tallest. His given name was Raymond, but only his parents called him Ray. Steve* was also a football star, who went on to play at Boston University during the Doug Flutie years.
It wasn’t until I joined the military that I learned about race. This was mainly about the people of colour who had joined the military owning to economic necessity and the promise of a better life. This outlook was not unique to what we now refer to as BIPOC. The majority of enlisted personnel were victims of the system they at least tacitly believed in. If I were to be so bold, I’d say there were two flavours, the bitter and the hopeful. I won’t elaborate further.
Eventually, I moved to Los Angeles and was steeped in Hispanic/Latino culture—primarily from Mexico and Central America. Again, I was an observer. I participated with people connected to this culture. I don’t particularly abide by any culture. I don’t view it as important, but this also means that I have no culture to defend either. Maybe that’s a significant difference. If I’ve got no cultural ego to defend, then I am not threatened by other cultures that I might feel as encroaching.
Don’t get me wrong. Whilst I tolerate cultural expression and say ‘to each their own‘, I do find traditional clothing and rituals to be silly or quaint. But so do I find some of this silly in what would be said to be my cultural heritage, whether ethnically to Norway or nationally to the United States. I’ll spare the commentary.
I picked up enough conversational Spanish to get by—mostly phatic speech and politesse—, so if I am interacting with a Spanish speaker, I will use what words I know: gracias, de nada, compromiso, desculpa, por favor, and even pendejo doesn’t go to waste. I’ve also been known to utter merci, danke, spasibo, xièxiè nǐ, or domo arrigato (mister roboto, cuz let’s be honest here).
This is my racism or my sensitivity to culture. To be honest—and why not be honest, am I right?—, this has not always been without controversy. Arbitrarily, I might spam gracias, merci, or domo to a whitebread American. In most instances, they’ll nod and acknowledge the intent and accept it or respond with no problem, you’re welcome, or even de nada or de rien. I’ve even gotten a German bitte in response to a domo, so I suppose I am not alone.
I think it’s safe to say that most Americans know what grazie or merci mean. Perhaps not domo. In one encounter, I said domo to a non-Japanese Asian and was immediately derided with an I’m not Japanese. From her perspective, she may have felt that she had been homogenised into being Asian and she wanted to be identified as whatever her heritage was. She never shared this information with me. Perhaps she was Korean or Cambodian, Vietnamese or Laotian, Chinese or whatever. But she did communicate that she wasn’t Japanese. She might have been under the impression that from my perspective, I saw that all Asians look alike.
From my perspective, I could have as alternatively exchanged a merci. This would not have likely triggered the same emotional response—I’m not French. On the one hand, I felt bad for triggering her—despite that not having been my intent. On the other hand, I didn’t feel I needed to engage her free-floating rage. So I’m a racist.
In my own defence, studies show that people are more able to discern people within their own ethnicity. I’ve shared this story before. When I lived in Tokyo, I was dating a woman whose dad was Japanese and her mum was Chinese. I had met her once, and I was to meet her at a train station. I’d be lying if I told you I had no trepidation about not being able to recognise her in a crowd. My, perhaps narcissistic, consolation was that she’d recognise me being taller and ‘Caucasian’. I can’t really say ‘whiter’ because although I was brought up to identify Asians as yellow (and Indigenous Americans as red), most Japanese were a lighter shade of pale than I (or most so-called ‘white’ Americans) were. I’ve always been suspicious of these colour attributes, but I won’t go even further down this rabbit hole.
In the end, I see colour. I see the history.
In the end, I see colour. I see the history. Even though my family didn’t even move to the United States until World War II, somewhat exempting me from culpability, I still recognise the injustice that still prevails. With empathy, I want things to be better—to be more inclusive—, but cultural homogenisation is not the approach I support. I support tolerance.
If I feel that a certain costume is silly, so be it. I don’t have to wear it. When I was growing up in the 1970s, I felt that my own clothing options were silly—polyester and bellbottoms? No thank you. This is just a preference thing. I don’t like to wear headcovers—hats or caps. Do I care if you wear a headcover? No. Might I think you look silly? Sometimes. Do you want to know what else I think looks silly? Beards? What’s even worse? Moustaches—or as I am more apt to call them, pornstaches. Am I going to judge you are being less of a person because of any of these? No. I could go on and on about my reaction to certain accoutrements, but I’ll let you in on a secret: I have worked and interacted with people who prefer to present themselves in these ways, and these people have risen to the occasion and disappointed in the same ratio as people who dressed like me or looked more like me, so clearly it’s not a factor.
In summary—and despite the fact that there is only one human race—, I admit to being a racist. I do recognise that negative and positive stereotypes exist, as well as I know that these are vague generalisations. I know white people who can dance and Asians who suck at maths. I know Mexicans who aren’t gardeners and Italians who couldn’t cook to save their lives. I even know black people who can swim—but not my friend Lenny; he can’t swim. Sometimes stereotypes happen to encapture a person.
* As I was writing this, I decided to perform a Google search for Lenny. We lost contact decades ago because he adopted Jehova’s Witness religious beliefs that didn’t allow him to socialise with persons outside of his religion, so we parted ways. But I did locate Steve. I reached out to Steve on LinkedIn. Unless I’m mistaken, we probably haven’t communicated with each other since 1978—that’s 44 years— when he went off to college. I always admired Steve, the way we sometimes admire our big brothers. Steve was Lenny’s big brother, and Lenny looked up to both of his big brothers.
Steve responded on LinkedIn. We exchanged best wishes. Maybe one day I’ll ask him about his experience with race. It doesn’t seem to be a topic one can engage in because of the lack of shared perspective and the hot button triggers just waiting to be tripped.
Philosophics 