The thing about “whiteness” is that it’s inherently a settler social construct that’s based on exclusion.
The USA is built on this foundation of racial hierarchy, where the “whites” are at the top and everyone else is beneath them. Anyone can be assimilated into this group as long as the settler class wills it, and you can see an example of this with working class German and Irish immigrants all of a sudden being “white” when they came over from Europe. Give them a few concessions and make them citizens and any potential unity between former Afrikan slaves and European immigrants would vanish (which is pretty much what happened).
So it’s more like anyone can be racist, but you can’t be racist towards white people because, like you said, they hold all of the power.
The thing about “whiteness” is that it’s inherently a settler social construct that’s based on exclusion.
The USA is built on this foundation of racial hierarchy, where the “whites” are at the top and everyone else is beneath them. Anyone can be assimilated into this group as long as the settler class wills it, and you can see an example of this with working class German and Irish immigrants all of a sudden being “white” when they came over from Europe. Give them a few concessions and make them citizens and any potential unity between former Afrikan slaves and European immigrants would vanish (which is pretty much what happened).
So it’s more like anyone can be racist, but you can’t be racist towards white people because, like you said, they hold all of the power.