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Why Black People Can Actually Be Racist- And Everyone can

The illusory nature of power and hierarchy in biases

James Ssekamatte
11 min readJun 29, 2021
Photo by Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash

Rosemary Brown was one of the first Canadians to talk about intersectionality in which the theory states that different aspects of one's social identity(e.g race, gender, sexual orientation…) can combine to form unique forms of discrimination.

Gay black women for example would experience discrimination quite differently from straight black men. Take it one level deeper and have an African gay black woman having a lot more to deal with than the previous two groups.

Why Some Think Black People Cannot Be Racist

When people talk about racism, we often talk about the manifestations of the discriminatory tendencies of one group to another.

Some people who say black people can’t be racist go one step beyond all the discrimination and prejudice. They don’t speak to the ability or nature of black people to be racist, but they speak to the disposition of resources that black people don’t have which if they did would make them be able to be racist but since they don’t, therefore they cannot be racist.

By disposition of resources, I mean power structures and systems that favor them or treat all races equally. The…

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James Ssekamatte
James Ssekamatte

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