maybe we should stop saying racism=privilege+prejudice

Most importantly, the problem with the formulation is that it misconstrues the nature of power. In a capitalist system viewed as a whole, almost all power is economic. Political power, institutional power, police power, military power, all of these are a function of capital and its uses and the extent to which an entity possesses power in a capitalist system is inextricably linked to its ability to manipulate capital. The notion of power that the Racism Formula uses is somewhat different. It asserts power as being a sort of social mechanism that the dominant social group, in this case whites, wield exclusively. Put another way, the Racism Formula assumes that if one is not white one has no access to power because power is monolithic. This is a necessary corollary to the definition’s sole purpose for existing, ie, to excuse blacks of racism.

That power is not exclusively social and is not monolithic is demonstrated quite easily. In a fair fight between two equally matched men each man has a fifty fifty chance of victory assuming a stalemate is impossible. Give one man a weapon and he has more power over the other man because all else being equal, the advantage of the weapon assures the victory of the armed man. The unarmend man must do as the armed man says or die. Call this the fundamental principle of power and it is a model of how all power works. In a capitalist system, all power therefore becomes economic because a man can leverage his economic resources to give him the advantage in any such contest, and as a result assure his victory.

It would seem then that this bears out the Racism Formula since whites, as a group, have greater access to capital than all other minority groups combined. The problem is of course that people rarely act as a group and in the vast majority of contests, it is individuals pitted against individuals. As such, there are circumstances where an individual member of a minority group does in fact have much more power than a member of another group, or even many such members. Oprah Winfrey, for example, is the wealthiest black woman in America, possibly in the world. She wields a tremendous amount of power as a result. In most contests, were Oprah Winfrey to be confronted with an overtly racist organization such as the Christian Identity Church, Oprah Winfrey would mop the floor with those scumbags because she’s more powerful than they are. This mismatch of power doesn’t make the Christian Identity Church any less than they are, nor does it make Oprah Winfrey racist herself. It simply shows that power is much more fluid and individualized than the racism formula acknowledges.

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