If you want whites to subscribe to Kendism, do NOT show them group disparities outside of those that depict whites as racially privileged.

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Suppose those categorized as 'white' today were encouraged to preserve their distinct ethnic identities, practice strict endogamy, and were not collapsed into a homogenous 'white' category.

In this alternative reality, the systemic racism industry/narrative would be...

Less potent/influential 58,9 %

No difference 22,5 %

More potent/influential 18,6 %

409 votes

No difference. Systemic racism theories are an attempt to explain how black Americans' life outcomes can still be unequal

But unequal relative to WHICH group? Other groups would also start to ask, why are we behind groups X Y Z and just barely better than African Americans?

In 1969, 1972 and 1977, the Polish American Congress analyzed state government departments in Illinois. Italians and Poles were doing better than the officially recognized minorities, but only barely. Blacks were clearly doing the worst, but Polish Americans were only barely above the levels of Latinos.

The candidate who lost the Boston mayoral campaign would be the first Polish-American mayor of a city over 100,000 people in history (even though she painted herself as an Arab American). Chicago used to be 1/3 Polish, yet never had a Polish mayor.

For many Americans, blacks are the protagonist in American history-as-morality-play. Other ethnic groups just aren't as important to the narrative as Afro-Americans.

Of course, the response could likely be that ‘you groups weren’t discriminated/oppressed enough’. But such would inadvertently expose the fallacy of the whole narrative: that because huge disparities emerge in the absence of oppression, there is no reliable basis on which to conclude that Black/White outcome disparities are necessarily the product of oppression.