We find a couple of interesting comments about racism on the Twitterz:

To a racist, the hierarchy of race is built into the structure of the universe…

So to a racist, “racism” just means being outwardly mean to the races that are obviously inferior to you.

— Jason Thalken, PhD (@JasonThalken) May 17, 2018

So it seems to me we need to better educate racists on what racism really is.

I suggest we try to make some changes in the way we talk about racism.

Saying a celebrity “made a racist remark” or something like that is probably not helping.

— Jason Thalken, PhD (@JasonThalken) May 17, 2018

We should probably be talking about how it is sad that a celebrity may have internalized racist beliefs rather than focusing on a word or phrase they used.

— Jason Thalken, PhD (@JasonThalken) May 17, 2018

But you know what would be great?

If we started talking about racist behavior as “signs of internalized racism” rather than “racist behavior”

And we should all talk about the inherent racism in various social structures, algorithms and sets of rules at every opportunity we get.

— Jason Thalken, PhD (@JasonThalken) May 17, 2018

I think using terms like internalize probably won’t be that successful. Instead, we need to shift the discussion away from racism as an individual failing to racism as an ideology, as a way of (mis)understanding the world. As some asshole with a blog put it:

For a lot of white people, racism is a powerful organizing principle through which they organize how they think about the world (that makes it no less reprehensible). But there are racists who overcome that perspective–the progressive deplorables. I think they do so because they use a different framework, one that places the blame on other economic actors, such as corporations. As the polling data I raised earlier indicates, there are a lot of bigots who vote in opposition to and in spite of their bigotry.

While we focus disproportionately on the eliminationist racists, since they want to, erm, remove all of us mud peoples various groups, the caste system racists are far more pervasive, and every bit as racist. There is an order with white Christian male at the top, and then various other groups slot into various places. As long as everyone knows their place and doesn’t get uppity or pushy, things are fine (if you’re at the top). For them, a racist order provides psychological benefits, both in terms of superiority and explanation. It also provides, depending on the person, greater or lesser material advantages.

But racism is just another ideological framework. And it’s one, if we are smart about it, that we can convince people, even if they still harbor some personal prejudices, to abandon.