“Learning to Read” excerpt from The Autobiography of Malcolm X

Then you shouldn't comment on a subject that you know nothing about. Read his book, listen to his speeches, watch the movie, study the civil rights movements and then comment on what you feel is "iffy".

Except... he split from the Nation after making a pilgrimage to Mecca and seeing people of all races getting along, helping each other and united in a single purpose. That fundamentally changed his views on race (and his religion -- from what the Nation taught, to more orthodox Islam). It is absolutely no coincidence that he was assassinated by members of the Nation shortly afterward.

If you learn about Korean Comfort Women from Japanese text books... do you really have enough information to form an opinion ? I mean... shouldn't you ask ... say ... some of the actual Korean Women about their experiences ???

I'm not sure why you gave the crazy details of the NOI story and the weirdly detached and vague paraphrase version of the OT one.

That is essentially what X did. King offered unity, healing and a better future.

A speech calling for violence in the time of newspapers and television is surely more damaging than that same speech given in an auditorium in the early 1800s to a select group..

I am not attempting to put a 'value' on the whole of slave trade, that's impossible. I'd merely like to point out the 'apples vs. oranges' nature of your comparison.

That theory can be dense, and this is by far the best description I've seen which is simultaneously accessible to someone unfamiliar with the literature, and also doesn't compromise on correctness.

It comes down to whether you consider not compromising on correctness important. Unfortunately, the norm in journalism is to tell the most neutered version of the story possible, correctness be damned. You can see this in most science journalism. So when someone puts the effort into a piece like this -- which explains ideas in lay terms but does not throw out correctness to the point of rendering the description of the work meaningless -- it mostly passes unnoticed as "a bit too dense" or "not TEDy enough".

You seem to think it's important to believe there is a caste system, which is moving close to Abrahamic Religion territory - you have to believe because (sometimes irrational) faith becomes the very bedrock of your belief system.

You you don't believe, you are part of the problem, right?

  In fact, the caste system of racism is maintained by all
  of us, in the same way the rest of the status quo is 
  maintained. Mostly just by people being comfortable 
  enough with the status quo that they don't try very hard 
  to change it

This finally "clicked" for me a few years ago when somebody explained it to me like this:

Murder is problem, right? And each of us knows that we have to go beyond simply not murdering people. We instinctively understand that if we witness an attempted murder in progress, we must do something: help, or call for help. We know that we need to punish murderers, maintain a police force to catch murderers, and hopefully defuse situations before they get to the point of people murdering each other.

Problems like racism are similar in one way: it's not enough for each of us to simply "not be racist."

(It's not an exact analogy, I know: racism is institutional whereas murder often isn't. However, it got me to think about racism differently...)

There isn't any institionalized discrimination in the USA any longer. There's a perception of it, but that's largely self reinforced. It's easier on my ego to tell myself I didn't get a job because of my race, rather than because another applicant was more qualified. Yes, there are individual prejudiced/racist people of all races and there always will be. But the institutionalized discrimination is gone.

You say that "people see me and think all sorts of things about me because of things beyond my control." This is just reality. People judge others based on looks, whether they are obese, skinny, muscular, how they dress, whether they have facial hair or wear glasses, whether they are naturally or deliberately bald, how they carry themselves, how they execute a handshake, and any number of other things.

Do you really give an automatic free pass to people who are involved with or support any idiology as long as it's in the cause of self-liberation? One of the other flaws of humans is that they are easily swayed by charasmatic leaders promising freedom from oppression. This often ends up badly for the supporters themselves when their leader turns out to be a tyrant, or for the people the leader set up to be the scapegoats.

You and the poster seem to misunderstand what racism is. Racism is a type of discrimination. The term discrimination covers a wide range of things, it doesn't only deal with race. You are free to disagree with the actual definition of racism, but you don't get to reinvent the english language. Whether or not something is racist has absolutely nothing to do with power.

Its as if you and the other poster read the definition of racism and decided that the words used to describe it weren't horrifying enough, and so you made up a definition that better represents how you feel about it.

The idea of "racism" as requiring a position of power comes most directly as a reaction to the "reverse racism" bullshit from racist apologists who want to roll back affirmative action and various other programs. The reaction comes from sympathetic academics and writers who would rather focus on words and philosophy, and are better at that, than practical issues "on the ground" so to speak. And yet, AA is an example of something which is known to be imperfect, but is needed in some practical sense -- much like the tracking of race or gender ratios in various careers. I think it's a huge mistake to attempt to redefine words in terms of power, because it plays into the corrupting idea of power as the ultimate goal of human endeavor.

The reverse racism shit is really dumb, but the proper response is that there is no such thing as reverse racism, just racism, and that racism is borne from improper over-generalization and a unwillingness to examine ones own prejudices about the world. It is not borne from attempting to correct for those things in other people (e.g. AA, etc.).

Racist views may be understandable as a reaction to oppression by the oppressed, and you make allowances for human frailty -- it is still not generally acceptable. Redefining the word "racist", or any negative epithet, such that it can never be used against your particular group, whoever they are, is just an invitation to corruption.