Racism defined four different ways at KTTH Freedom Debate

It was a night of tension. Racism isn’t an easy topic to discuss. Especially for an NAACP director, conservative commenter, a columnist for a liberal publication, and a Republican contender for state representative.

How can America have a conversation about racism, when some of our best and brightest can’t even agree on its basic definition?

Radio host David Boze on AM 770 KTTH moderated the April 29 Freedom Series: Race in America at Seattle University, which brought together a panel of four diverse individuals to discuss the issue of race; a timely topic after a string of recent incidents involving police, race, and more have forced the issue into public conversation.

Joining Boze on stage was: Seattle-King County NAACP Development Director Dr. Sheley Secrest; Seattle’s The Stranger columnist Charles Mudede; conservative activist, entrepreneur and former candidate for state representative Monique Valenzuela Trudnowski; and AM 770 KTTH conservative radio host Ben Shapiro.

It was the first question that put on display just how differently people in American can view even the simple definition of racism.

“Chris Matthews said recently that racism is the belief that one race, whites, should rule over all others,” Boze said to the four-member panel. “Is he right? Is racism confined to whites?”

Each had a different take.

Dr. Sheley Secrest said:

I believe the definition has shifted over the years. A lot of it goes into the power dynamic. Can anyone be a racist if they don’t have the power that is associated with it? Usually they tie racism with white people because they have the power to keep other people oppressed. Most would argue that black people cannot be racist, because there is no power that can affect anyone else’s lives. That’s the dynamic where the color of one’s skin is tied to racism itself. “Why can’t black people be racist? Why can’t Latinos be racist?” It’s the power, the shift of the dynamic.

We’ve seen that change, though. Especially in recent times as we are starting to look at the dynamics of how we engage with one another when we are inside of a room. The conversation has changed from undoing the supremacy, the white supremacy, the institutional structures, and looking back at the differences of race and how we treat each other. Black and brown, the interactions between those two, Asian, all of those dynamics. Yes, I do agree with the initial definition, but I do recognize that it is changing.

Ben Shapiro:

I fundamentally disagree with the basic definition. I don’t think it has to do with power. Power is a capacity. Racism is about a set of beliefs. And power is about the ability to enact those beliefs. In other words, you can have a racist who doesn’t have the power to enact those beliefs and that would be a less threatening racist, presumably, than a racist that actually has the power to enact those beliefs.

If you look at Zimbabwe, where white farmers have been thrown off their land, that’s a pretty good example of black racism. There was a Rasmussen poll in 2013 asking Americans who they believe were racist. According to the black community, a plurality of backs felt that blacks were more racist than whites, according to the Rasmussen poll. Thirty-one percent of blacks said that blacks were more racist than whites, 24 percent said that whites were more racist than blacks. So whether the definition or not has changed, the definition of racism should be that you believe that one race, or any race because of its inherent skin color, or because of ethnicity or because of identity of birth, that you are privileged beyond other races in terms of superiority.

If you believe that under any circumstances, then that by my light, is the definition of racism. If you want to give black racism another name and say that it’s not racism, it’s just something else that is bad, then I suppose it’s some sort of linguistic difference. Bottom line, is it bad or is it good? For my money, we might as well label it all racism because it is not exclusive to white folks.

Charles Mudede:

As for racism, racism for me is always about advantage, purely. And I think that when there is no advantage at all, there’s going to be very little racism. Whenever you go to Africa, you will find that, actually, blacks come in a rainbow of colors themselves and that they can be equally as awful to each other as any white person can be to any black person. And so the question is then to say something like “what advantage is it when you hate another group of people?” Often there has to be an advantage or else you wouldn’t hate them.

Monique Valenzuela Trudnowski:

To me, the definition is not correct. What I’ve seen as racism, as I’ve experienced it, at one point it was an emotional experience. Racism has become a commodity. It’s business. It’s either one way for our political partisanship to pit one people against another, or it’s one way to lift up another people against another. It’s become a business. If we truly want to address racism, what would that be to some of the ne’er-do-wells that come into our communities? They would have no reason to pillage and to go into a CVS pharmacy and burn it down. So to me, racism is less about the emotional experience, in 2015, it’s become a business, and it’s become a commodity and it has become an excuse for intolerable behavior. The racism I’ve experienced was very much an emotion, but that is my definition of racism in 2015.

The evening was filled with a range of questions covering police interactions, crime, family dynamics, violence, how cops treat African Americans today vs. 50 years ago, generational differences, incoming inequality, and much more.

Listen to the full debate here.