Ah, reverse-racism. If you’ve been alive at any point in the last 50 years, or have been following the recent story of Laquisha Jonz – the alterego comedian Charlie Hides uses to continue the tradition of laughing at poor, black women – then you might have given some thought to this term. Despite all the writing, comedy (Aamer Rahman’s infamous video on the topic got over two million hits), films and scholarship devoted to the notion that racism cannot be reversed without a reversal of power structures, Charlie Hides and friends still believe that Chardine Taylor-Stone, the activist who campaigned against his act, is guilty of being reverse-racist to white gay men.
People still believe racism is simply the act of being mean to someone who has a different skin colour to you. It is not. It is a system for maintaining the financial, social and spiritual impoverishment of people with one skin colour so that others may profit. When someone is racist, they are using this system to maintain their dominance. If you’d like to know why a black person cannot be reverse-racist to a white person, then try to think of a country on earth in which black people dominate and white people are oppressed by them – you know, enslaved, colonised, dispossessed.