By: Paul Evans

Paul Evans
Wed, 09 Sep 2020 15:59:23 +0000

There are a couple of quotes from this article that I would like to address:

“Devon Stith, a third-year in exploration, said that the public safety notice’s definition of the assaults that took place Wednesday as a hate crime advocates for reverse racism, the idea that Black people can be racist towards white people.”

With all due respect to Mr. Stith, according to Merriam-Webster, the primary definition of racism is: “a belief that race is a fundamental determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race.” Meanwhile, it has no definition for “reverse racism”. The fact is, regardless of the melanin content of their skin or their perceived power within society, every individual is capable of being racist.

“’Even if, say, all Black people are afraid, scared, think white people are horrible people and are raising all their children to not speak to white people, avoid white people, everything like that, that’s not going to affect the white community’s success in life in this country. They’re not going to be hurt by our rhetoric,’ Stith said. ‘But, on the flip side, we have been and will continue to be hurt as long as their rhetoric is destructive.’”

The incident that spawned this outage originated when two black individuals allegedly assaulted multiple white individuals. Despite Mr. Stith’s ardent claims to the contrary, if the reason for the alleged assaulted stemmed either in full or in part from the suspects’ ideology and feelings toward white people (which, to my knowledge, has not been proven), then yes… white people were hurt by a racist rhetoric.