Me and White Supremacy: How to Recognise Your Privilege, Combat Racism and Change the World

by Layla F. Saad

though a BIPOC can hold prejudice against a white person, they cannot be racist toward a white person. They do not have the power (which comes with white privilege) and the backing of a system of oppression (called white supremacy) to be able to turn that prejudice into domination and punishment in a way that a white person would be able to if the tables were reversed.

what makes one culture dominant and another nondominant has nothing to do with the specifics of the countries where those cultures are from (e.g., population size, national GDP, or how far back that culture’s history goes), but rather it is about the historic and present-day relationship that exists between the two cultures.

We must ask ourselves whether that relationship includes colonization, land theft, mass kidnapping and enslavement, attempted genocide, forced assimilation, segregation, legalized racial discrimination, and the reinforcement of negative racist stereotypes.

what you describe as cultural appreciation is a form of tokenizing and exoticizing while continuing to discard and dehumanize the actual people of that culture.