I recently ran into an interesting misconception about racism

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I recently ran into an interesting misconception about racism.

Someone claimed to me that in all countries, the racism always flows from the racial majority against the minority. Whiteness is irrelevant.

That's… not even close to true.

In formerly colonized countries like India, Jamaica, and most of Latin America, whiteness is prized and nativeness is discriminated against.

White people, despite being a minority group, became dominant through colonization in non-white countries. Afterwards, those societies began to favor whiteness because whiteness had become synonymous with power. Being closer to white meant being more powerful, all else equal.

Despite the fact that white people make up a minority of the population, these societies practice “colorism,” where whiter = better. In India, people literally buy skin whitening creams and classify people for jobs and marriage based on their whiteness. Colorism is found in most societies that were at one time colonized by white people.

Non-white people in America whose families hail from formerly colonized countries also engage in colorism. Many, if not most, corners of Black America use “light-skinned” as synonymous with beauty. On the Netflix show Indian Matchmaking, at least one Indian American expressed a preference for a lighter skinned spouse.

Racism may or may not be a somewhat inborn trait. There’s certainly evidence for a biological preference for the in-group. There’s evidence that authoritarianism is a personality trait with a genetic component. And authoritarianism certainly predisposes a person to an extreme preference for the in-group.

But I think the evidence is thin that humans are “hardwired” to view people as in-group or out-group based on their race. “Race” was invented as a category very recently in human evolution.

But it may be that people are, to varying degrees, genetically predisposed to categorize other people as in-group and outgroup based on their skin color.

Even given all this, I think the extent to which skin color is associated with power is much more relevant to the question of how racism manifests in modern societies. There’s no evidence I’m aware of that would indicate a preference for lighter skin is innate in most humans. The evidence is much stronger, I think, that racism in most societies is far more power-based than in-group based. As far as I can tell, the majority has measurably, systemically favored whiteness in every society where white people have held the levers of power, regardless of what percentage of the population is white.

To deny this reality and try to remove whiteness and power from the equation of racism across cultures seems to me like an attempt to downplay the role of whiteness, power, and colonization in modern racism. The fact that most white people have only a cursory, whitewashed understanding of colonization and racism in colonized societies is itself a symptom of systemic racism.