( Twenty five minute read)

Most recently, reverse racism has gotten media attention.

Whites, who have been historically privileged, feel left out when society is trying to level the field for minority groups. However, many social activists challenge this notion because cultural bias prevents us from seeing other people’s humanity.

It doesn’t matter which colour does the hating.

Prejudice is based on assuming that every one that is part of a group will behave according to stereotypical behaviour.

We evaluate people for the race or group they belong, not for who they are seeing others through our cultural preferences.

Intolerance is natural, rejecting the unknown is part of a self-mechanism.

However, considering the limitless access to education and information, it’s hard to believe that racism continues to be so prominent. It’s unacceptable that, in the 21st-century leaders continue to manipulate people by turning a (racial) group into a common enemy — they’ve turned intolerance into an art.

Rather than taking people for who they are; we are told to judge them by the group they belong to.

Movies, magazines, the news, to name a few, feed our mind with distorted symbols that shape our definition of race.

The paradox of racism is that people are more prejudicial than they want to admit. The worst part is that putting all the responsibility on the unconscious bias removes ownership. People can assume it’s not their fault that they being blinded by the colour of someone else’s skin —the Implicit Bias should be blamed for it.

The problem is that rather than celebrating our differences we are forcing people to fit in, which drives misunderstanding and prejudice creating a racial hierarchy when all humans are closely related. 

We all have the same collection of genes, but slightly different versions of some of them.

Race is a social concept; it’s not part of our DNA, we learn it as we grow up.

Our mind is race agnostic until society teaches us that not all skin colours are equal.

There are several manifestations of racism.

Internalized racism refers to the feelings of self-hatred among oppressed groups. Their traits have been devalued in Western societies.

Colourism is discrimination based on skin colour — darker-skinned groups are treated worse than lighter skin ones by whites or even members of their own race.

Subtle racism is described as a person who has implicit racial or other negative attitudes towards another group. It doesn’t always include acts of bigotry; it also involves everyday behaviours such as ignoring, ridiculing or treating people as less worthy of respect because of their race.

Today there is a refusal to know or see, or to listen or hear, or to validate that we are all complicit in society’s institutional racism.

Day after day on Social Media we witness the inability of white people to tolerate racial stress. This creates a climate where the suggestion or accusation of racism causes more outrage among white people than the racism itself.

Its a favourite topic for standup comedians, politicians, all contributing to a polarised society. It seems we are forever talking about race. Or talking about why we can’t talk about race.

Racism is a system rather than just a slur; it is prejudice plus power.

And in Britain and the US at least, it is designed to benefit and privilege whiteness by every economic and social measure. One has only to look at Donald Dump and the false claims about immigrants during the English referendum.

However  “reverse racism”  a form of discrimination does not come with systemic privilege and so is not racism as per the modern definition.

Why not just say racism is racism?

Reverse suggests it is going in the wrong direction. People who complain about reverse racism never seem to complain about racism otherwise. These are not racial justice advocates.

Whiteness is considered the norm for humanity, it’s default setting.

Culture becomes something discussed only in reference to people of colour so we grant white people the individuality that we don’t afford people of colour.

Racism is a white problem. It was constructed and created by white people and the ultimate responsibility lies with white people.

 Why is colour such a powerful force in our lives when we all bleed red?

We should be more aware of the psychological effects of colour and embrace uniqueness.

Modern science has debunked the myth that certain races have more gifted brains than others. However, many people still take that belief as true.

Our society is still paying a high price for it.

When you understand that the colour of the skin is not correlated to anything else, it’s easier to realize that the world does not revolve around you.

It’s not that white people are not superior, no one else is.

We all know that colour predigests of skin tone to the extent that race is a strong modulator of social cognition and its underlying neural processes.

We have online abuse, prejudice, bias, polarisation, fake news, all disconnected to what is happing.

It’s not only organised racist groups that take advantage of online communication; unaffiliated individuals do it too. Racist groups manipulate information and use clever rhetoric to help build a sense of a broader “white” identity, which often goes beyond national borders. They argue that conflict between different ethnicities is unavoidable and that what most would view as racism is, in fact, a natural response to the “oppression of white people”.

These individuals use online channels to validate their beliefs and achieve a sense of belonging in virtual spaces where racist hosts provide an uncontested and hate-supporting community. Resulting in several examples of violent acts perpetrated offline by isolated individuals who radicalise into white supremacist movements.

This is why some advocate for political education that addresses both personal and structural prejudice more directly, as well as political action and intervention in media systems.

With this complex view in mind, we can see that any attempts to redress or ameliorate racism or any other intolerance must include not only education, or even merely a wide array of communicative responses (media and face-to-face), but also efforts at addressing social inequalities at the structural and policy levels.

One area of particular interest is whether the skin colour issue of whether factors such as skin colour will have have an effect on body-ownership.

Understanding if and how multisensory processing can alter self-representations across the boundaries of racial groups will present itself with the first black robot. It will change in body-awareness as a result of multisensory stimulation and go beyond one’s own skin colour.

A hand of a different skin colour performing an action compared to a hand of their own colour.

The colour of our skin says a lot about our minds.

I choose to keep mine open. The brain is a flexible muscle, don’t let stereotypes rigidify your thoughts.

All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.