Why there is no such thing as reverse racism

I came across a good article explaining the difference between discrimination and racism and wanted to share. The entire article can be found here and I encourage you to read the entire article, but I would like to highlight the following definitions:

Prejudice is an irrational feeling of dislike for a person or group of persons, usually based on stereotype. Virtually everyone feels some sort of prejudice, whether it's for an ethnic group, or for a religious group, or for a type of person like blondes or fat people or tall people. The important thing is they just don't like them -- in short, prejudice is a feeling, a belief. You can be prejudiced, but still be a fair person if you're careful not to act on your irrational dislike.

Discrimination takes place the moment a person acts on prejudice. This describes those moments when one individual decides not to give another individual a job because of, say, their race or their religious orientation. Or even because of their looks (there's a lot of hiring discrimination against "unattractive" women, for example). You can discriminate, individually, against any person or group, if you're in a position of power over the person you want to discriminate against. White people can discriminate against black people, and black people can discriminate against white people if, for example, one is the interviewer and the other is the person being interviewed.

Racism, however, describes patterns of discrimination that are institutionalized as "normal" throughout an entire culture. It's based on an ideological belief that one "race" is somehow better than another "race". It's not one person discriminating at this point, but a whole population operating in a social structure that actually makes it difficult for a person not to discriminate.

Too often, I hear of people in positions of privilege claim reverse racism when they get discriminated against. But what is an isolated act of discrimination by individuals does NOT amount to an entire institutionalization of that discrimination, which is what racism is. In the US and Australia, it is still far to easy to name all the ways racism is built into the system (voting rights, policing of ethnic minorities, job interviews, etc). Reverse racism is not real - white people still have as much privilege as ever (just look at how many cases against affirmative action there have been in the US) and if anyone tries to use it as an excuse for anything, it needs to get called out.