Is it Possible for Persons of Color to be Bigoted?

Retch Limburger, on his radio bigot show, has claimed that African-American parents all teach their children to “hate America”. In response to this, one white man said to me, speaking as an individual, that he is not a bigot. Here is my reply:

Nonwhites can be angry, can castigate the white subspecies, but it is not possible for the objects of racism and bigotry to be racist and bigoted themselves. That is because bigotry can be defined in terms of a simple mathematical formula: prejudice + power = bigotry. Minorities do not have the power that is needed to be bigoted.

If one is white, one has never personally experienced bigotry. It is not possible for a white person to experience bigotry. I have experienced it "splashed" on me, when in the past I accompanied one or another black ladyfriend here and there in public and not just witnessed but felt viscerally how they were treated simply for being black. White people have not been rounded up in their homeland and exported by the millions fo work as slaves. White people have not seen their continent(s) forcibly subjugated and exploited and their people ravaged and exterminated. On the other hand, persons of color, worldwide, have memories; they know what was (and often still is) being done to their own people and their own homelands. They know that they are forced to speak Western languages and use Western money and articles to survive, and to worship the Western deity, and are put before Western-style justice if they are deemed to have infracted the rules. Knowing these things, they are very capable of cultural anger toward whites, but this is not bigotry, since as I say bigotry = prejudice + power.

It is easy for a white person to say, as an individual, “I am not bigoted.” And that statement is very often true. The problem is that white people, bigoted or not, enjoy the benefits of living in a land that was largely built on the backs of slaves – coolies who built the railroads, Native American slave-ironworkers who built the bridges and iron skeletons for skyscrapers, black slaves who farmed the farms and cleaned the public toilets. Still today it is migrant workers who do the hardest work on U.S. Farms, Latinas and Asians and African-Americans who serve as the nannies, the gardeners, and the cooks. As individuals, white people may not be prejudiced, but it is sad when they turn a blind eye to how their people – not necessarily their ancestors or relatives, but their people – raped other continents for slave labor and cheap raw materials, and built their vast and powerful economies on that base.

Retch Limburger has prejudice + power - and he holds the microphone of bigotry in his hands – his microphone is his power, and he uses it to spew bigotry. And when a white person replies, “Well, I’m not bigoted myself,” that white person ignores his or her failure to demand that Retch Limburger and his ilk SHUT UP.

He has a huge constituency, which is why he earns millions of dollars a year spewing his poison. And that constituency, need I note, is exclusively white. So it simply does not do for a white individual to say "I am not bigoted." Whites need to show some responsibility for standing together in opposition to bigotry from among their own people. The sad thing is, people of African, Native American, Latino, and Asian ancestry, gays and lesbians, Muslims and Jews, and others, DO stand together – but, when they stand together in opposition to bigotry emanating from the putrid mouths of people like Retch Limburger, white folks say they're being bigoted against whites. No, they’re being bigoted against bigots. White folks should learn from them the importance of standing together in opposition to bigotry. Instead, the growing solidarity of white people that I see, led by Retch Limburger and his ilk, is one of white folks standing together to spew the filth of their bigotry.