Against Racism: Not a Moral Posture, a Project of Liberation

Racism is not a historical error we fixed, and it’s not a problem of manners. It’s a live system we still live inside.

The public script says racism is “mostly solved” because the law changed and the slurs got quieter. But systems don’t die when they become unpopular. They become polite. They become procedural. They become “risk assessment”, “border security”, and “crime stats”.

If your definition of anti-racism begins and ends with “don’t say slurs” or “be nice”, you’re not describing racism. You’re describing etiquette.

Racism is a structure. It is a technology of power. It is a way of making domination feel natural, permanent, and deserved.

It is how conquest becomes administration. How theft becomes property. How occupation becomes “security”. How exploitation becomes “the economy”. How borders become “common sense”. How violence becomes “law”.

Racism Is Not (Just) Hate. It’s a System for Organizing Power

Individuals can be cruel. Individuals can hold bias. Individuals can discriminate.

But racism is not merely the sum of those individual failures. Racism is what happens when prejudice is backed by institutions — by police, courts, property regimes, schools, labor markets, passports, welfare bureaucracies, and the manufactured narratives that justify them.

In other words: racism is not only something people believe. It’s something societies do.

It is reproduced through:

who gets stopped, searched, arrested, sentenced
who gets hired, promoted, paid, fired
whose neighborhoods are invested in vs. extracted from
who is seen as “normal” vs. “suspicious”
who is treated as disposable when the system needs a sacrifice

That’s why racism survives “good intentions”. Systems don’t require hatred to function. They require compliance.

The Historical Root: Colonialism, Slavery, and the Need to Justify Theft

Modern racism was engineered alongside empire.

Colonialism required ideology. You can’t conquer land, extract labor, and erase cultures indefinitely without a story that makes it feel necessary and righteous. “Race” became that story: a pseudo-biological framework used to justify hierarchy as nature, not violence.

Slavery needed the same machinery. It needed a category of people whose exploitation could be normalized across generations — not as a crime, but as an institution. Racist ideology did the work of converting brutality into “order”.

Imperialism continued it. Even after formal colonial administrations ended, the global system remained: extraction, debt, forced trade, military intervention, coups, and “development” programs that disciplined entire regions into serving capital and geopolitics.

If you want to understand racism, don’t start with insults. Start with ships, plantations, borders, police, and money.

Race-Making: How “Race” Becomes a Technology of Rule

Race isn’t just an identity people have. It’s a category states and empires use.

Racial categories are administrative instruments: they sort populations, assign risk, allocate rights, and justify unequal treatment while pretending it’s objective.

A key move in racial rule is naturalization: taking outcomes produced by policy and violence, and rebranding them as “culture”, “biology”, “crime”, “work ethic”, “IQ”, “integration”, “values”.

That is how hierarchy laundered itself into “common sense”.

And once “common sense” is built, it runs on autopilot.

Racism Is a Tool of Class Rule (and Not in the Simplistic “Class Explains Everything” Way)

Racism is not merely “a distraction” from class struggle, as if it’s superficial branding.

It is a weapon that reorganizes labor and solidarity.

It splits the exploited into ranked categories: differential wages, differential rights, differential vulnerability to violence. It produces a controlled underclass and then blames that underclass for the conditions imposed on it.

It makes poverty look like personal failure. It makes policing look like protection. It makes inequality look like merit.

And it fractures the one thing hierarchy fears most: people recognizing a common enemy and acting together.

The State Is Not the Cure. It Is a Major Delivery System

A liberal fantasy says racism is what happens when the state fails to be impartial.

A radical analysis says racism is one of the ways the state functions.

Policing, prisons, border regimes, “counter-terror” policy, welfare surveillance, gang databases, citizenship law — these are not neutral tools that accidentally land on the same groups. They are control systems that require a target population and a justification narrative.

Racial categories are useful to states because they allow:

differential enforcement without admitting political repression
managed scarcity (“these people are taking your jobs/housing/services”)
permanent internal enemies (“crime”, “terror”, “illegals”)
legitimized violence (“law and order”)

This is why “representation” often fails as a solution. You can diversify the personnel of a coercive system and still have the same coercion. A multi-ethnic border police is still a border police.

What About “Reverse Racism”?

Here’s the nuance people avoid because it forces them to define terms.

If you define racism as any interpersonal prejudice, then yes: anyone can be prejudiced against anyone.

But that definition is politically shallow. It collapses insult and structure into the same bucket. It treats a slur and a deportation regime as the same kind of thing, just different intensity.

A more accurate definition is:

Racism = racial hierarchy + institutional power.

Under that definition, the so called “reverse racism” (as in “Black-on-white racism” in a society structured around white supremacy) is not the same phenomenon.

A marginalized person can dislike you, distrust you, insult you, even act unfairly toward you. That can be wrong. It can be bigoted. It can harm you.

But it is not backed by the same machinery:

it doesn’t set the policing agenda
it doesn’t define whose neighborhood gets redlined
it doesn’t determine who gets believed by courts
it doesn’t control borders, housing markets, or mass media narratives

And there’s another layer people pretend not to understand: mistrust is not symmetrical either.

When a racialized person mistrusts “the white man”, that mistrust is not floating in a vacuum. It is an adaptive response to lived history and present conditions: colonization, segregation, surveillance, stop-and-frisk, workplace exclusion, medical neglect, and a thousand small humiliations that teach a consistent lesson about who is protected and who is disposable.

If you want to call that “intolerance”, you also have to admit the context: it is often the psychological and social residue of being targeted by a hierarchy that is still active.

Demanding trust from people you are structurally positioned above is not “anti-racist”. It is entitlement dressed as moral superiority.

So what’s happening when people say “reverse racism”?

Often it’s an attempt to drag the conversation away from power and back into personal feelings — a demand that we treat structural domination and interpersonal conflict as morally symmetrical so the dominant group doesn’t have to confront its position.

If the frame makes colonialism and a mean comment look like two sides of the same coin, the frame is broken.

”Colorblindness” Is Not Neutral. It’s a Way to Preserve the Default

“Don’t see race” sounds like peace. In practice it often means: don’t name the hierarchy.

Colorblind ideology pretends the playing field is level, then treats unequal outcomes as deserved. It turns the consequences of history into “culture” or “personal responsibility”. It refuses repair while calling repair “division.”

If you won’t name power, you can’t dismantle it.

Black Anarchism: Freedom Without the State, Freedom Without White Supremacy

Any serious anti-racist politics has to contend with a simple fact: the modern state was built alongside racial rule.

Black anarchism (and related currents in Black radical thought) matters here because it refuses the usual trap: the idea that liberation means becoming fully included in the institutions that were designed to dominate you.

It rejects the bargain:

“become legible, become respectable, become governable — and maybe you’ll be protected.”

Instead it asks harder questions:

What if the police are not broken, but functioning?
What if prisons are not failing, but doing exactly what they were built to do?
What if citizenship is not a path to freedom, but a technology of exclusion?
What if “rights” are conditional permissions issued by an authority that can always revoke them?

Black anarchism emphasizes self-organization, mutual aid, and community defense — not as aesthetic “radicalism”, but as practical responses to the reality that the state’s protection is often selective, conditional, or violent.

It also forces anarchism itself to become honest: anti-statism that refuses to confront white supremacy becomes a dead ideology. If your anarchism can’t see racial rule as central, it will reproduce it.

Racism Is Maintained by Normal Life, Not Only Extremists

A lot of people want racism to look like a monster: explicit, hateful, cartoonish. That makes it easy to condemn without changing anything.

But racism is also maintained by “normal” decisions:

who you believe when there’s conflict
whose anger you interpret as “threat”
what neighborhoods you avoid and why
what history you learned and what was deleted
how you talk about poverty, “crime”, “immigration”, “welfare”

The point isn’t to perform purity. The point is to see how the system reproduces itself through everyday habits — and interrupt it.

Not with guilt. With clarity.

How Racism Hides in “Common Sense”

If you want to catch racism where it actually lives, listen for the phrases that sound neutral, rational, and “just practical”.

They often work like this:

name a social problem
attach it to a targeted group
treat the group as the cause
prescribe control (policing, borders, surveillance, exclusion)

Here are a few common carriers:

“Good neighborhood.” Often means “protected by property value, policing, and racial sorting”.
“Illegal immigrant.” Turns a person into a crime category and pre-justifies punishment.
“Integration.” Often means “be less visible, less loud, less yourself; become legible to us”.
“Culture.” A convenient replacement for biology: “it’s not race, it’s their culture” (as if culture is genetic destiny).
“Gang.” A label that expands police discretion and collapses social networks into criminal conspiracies.
“Welfare dependency.” Blames people for coping with engineered scarcity and frames aid as moral failure.
“High-crime areas.” Sometimes means “over-policed areas”, where enforcement intensity manufactures crime statistics.
“They don’t share our values.” An identity border masquerading as ethics.
“I’m not racist, but…” A ritual that tries to launder what follows.

These phrases don’t need explicit hatred to function. They produce permission. Permission for control. Permission for distance. Permission for violence with a clean conscience.

The “I Have Black Friends” Test: Liberal Identity vs. Material Belief

Here’s a pattern worth naming because it’s everywhere:

People will say “I have Black friends” (or “I’m not racist”) while repeating a racial state narrative like:

“Immigrants are committing crimes at a far greater scale.”

This isn’t a contradiction by accident. It’s how racial ideology survives modern social norms.

Because “racism” has been reduced to a personal identity (“bad person”) instead of a structure (“system of rule”), people learn to do a simple trick:

perform innocence (“I’m not racist, I know minorities”)
repeat the hierarchy (“those people are dangerous / don’t belong / are a burden”)
feel morally clean anyway

Friendships don’t cancel ideology. Social proximity doesn’t erase structural position. You can share a beer with someone and still support the institutions that cage them.

If you want a real self-check, don’t ask: “do I have diverse friends?”

Ask:

When I hear “crime”, which bodies appear in my imagination?
Which groups do I think deserve surveillance “for safety”?
Whose suffering feels normal to me?
Which borders do I think are legitimate?
What kind of violence do I call “order”?
When someone says they don’t feel safe around police, do I believe them — or do I defend the police?
When I hear a claim like “immigrants commit more crime”, do I ask who is counted, who is policed, who is reported, who is convicted — or do I treat it as an essence claim about a people?

This isn’t about self-hatred. It’s about whether your beliefs reproduce hierarchy even when your self-image doesn’t.

What Anti-Racism Actually Requires (From an Anarchic Perspective)

If racism is structural, the response can’t be a brand, a slogan, or a corporate training.

An anarchic anti-racism is not about begging the state to be kinder. It’s about dismantling the mechanisms that produce racial domination and building alternatives that don’t require it.

That means:

opposing police and prison expansion (including “reform” that expands budgets)
opposing border regimes and the criminalization of migration
building labor solidarity that refuses differential vulnerability
supporting mutual aid networks that bypass gatekeeping institutions
defending communities from fascist and state violence
returning land/resources where possible and supporting repair materially, not symbolically
telling the truth about empire, not laundering it into “national pride”

And it also means taking seriously that people harmed by racism are not “issues” or “lessons”. They’re the ones paying the cost of a system others get to call “politics”.

Objections (And Why They Fail)

Objection 1: “Calling Everything Racist Makes the Word Meaningless.”

Racism isn’t “everything”. It’s a specific structure: racial hierarchy reproduced through institutions, economy, and violence.

If you only call racism “real” when someone confesses hatred, you don’t have a high standard. You have a standard designed to protect the system from being named.

Objection 2: “It’s Not Racism, It’s Just Facts. Immigrants Commit More Crime.”

Even if a statistic were true in some narrow dataset, the leap people make is ideological:

from correlation to essence (“they are like that”)
from conditions to character (“it’s their culture”)
from policy failure to collective blame (“they don’t belong”)

Crime is shaped by material conditions, policing intensity, reporting practices, and who gets targeted. The state can manufacture “crime problems” by deciding where to patrol and whom to arrest.

If your conclusion is “therefore they deserve surveillance, exclusion, deportation, or policing”, you’re not doing analysis. You’re doing racial governance.

Objection 3: “So You’re Saying Minorities Can’t Be Racist?”

Anyone can be prejudiced.

But racism, as a structure, is not just prejudice; it’s prejudice with institutional backing.

And marginalized mistrust of dominant groups is often not irrational hatred — it’s a survival response to repeated exposure to domination. You don’t get to demand trust from below while refusing to dismantle what makes mistrust reasonable.

Objection 4: “If We Just Treat Everyone the Same, Racism Will Go Away.”

Treating people “the same” in an unequal world preserves inequality.

Neutrality is not innocence when the baseline is already stacked.

If you refuse repair because you prefer abstract sameness, you’re choosing stability of hierarchy over freedom.

Objection 5: “This Is Divisive. We Need Unity.”

Unity without truth is just obedience.

If your unity requires the harmed to stay quiet so the comfortable can feel peaceful, it’s not unity. It’s suppression.

Real solidarity is built by confronting the hierarchy that is already dividing people.

Against Racism Means Against Hierarchy

Racism is a hierarchy-making machine.

It turns conquest into common sense and inequality into a moral story. It is reproduced through institutions, enforced through violence, and justified through myth.

So being against racism is not a posture. It is a commitment to dismantling the machinery — and to building a world where people can associate freely without being ranked, managed, or caged.

Freedom is not compatible with racial rule.

So yes: against racism means against the state forms and economic forms that need racism to function.

All power to all the people.

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