As always, while some universalists struggle to explain that all racisms are worth in horror, others struggle to prove that anti-white racism does not exist.

These others are the activists. According to their ideology, past colonization or slavery still has negative effects on the descendants of oppressed peoples. They call “racialized” (as opposed to white). Following this logic, they define racism as a system of domination that is part of history. Also, it inflicts concrete consequences on the racists who suffer it today (discrimination in housing or employment, police controls, etc.). This vision of racism as a system of domination is called “systemic racism” or “state racism.”

According to this definition, whites cannot be subjected to this type of systemic oppression today, because they have not historically been oppressed and colonized. On the contrary, they have historically been oppressors and settlers. Thus, the system of domination established in the days of colonization and slavery cannot be unfavorable to them today.

A racist definition of racism

The intellectual fraud of these activists goes even further, ignoring the very definition of racism, as it is widely accepted, and reinventing it to suit militant purposes.

Thus, racism is no longer defined by militants as the unfounded belief in the existence of human races and their hierarchy, but as a system of oppression resulting from a History, which has negative consequences for the racialized of today.

This redefinition of racism is carried out in such a way as to expressly exclude whites from it, by placing itself in the particular context of the West, and by obscuring historical facts that do not support this vision.

Facts ignored

For example, the fourteen centuries of the Arab-Muslim slave trade and the very high mortality rate during slave castrations are overlooked. (What Tidiane N’Diaye calls the “veiled genocide”). Also obscured the nine centuries of the intra-African slave trade.

These oppressions, although systemic, clearly do not interest activists. According to what logic would the Western slave trade generate a system of domination today, while the intra-African and Arab-Muslim slave trade would not? And what happens in the case of oppression between racialized people?

The colonization in Indochina, whose causes are supposed to be the same for oppressed peoples, but whose consequences in terms of discrimination seem very different, is also hidden. According to which logic do the same causes give different results?

As we can see, the allegedly historical approach of these activists takes a turn for the worse. But we think about all the historical facts that are deliberately ignored because they do not fit their theory.