Everyone has a race card

The debate on racism should be about the impact of expressed behaviour, rather than about intent.¹ Hence the absurd incessantly repeated refrain of “I know XYZ, and he's no racist,” even after XYZ may have said or done something that is in fact unequivocally racist. By making it a commentary on the whole of that person's “character,” it becomes expedient to minimise and even rationalise certain behaviours on the grounds that they occur “infrequently,” are “aberrant,” or are “not indicative of the norm,” etc. We wouldn't do this if someone had picked up a chair and thrown it at someone, would we? “I know XYZ and he's completely non-violent.”

We need to become more perspicacious and industrious about helping individuals see the impact of their daily low level bigotry in the lack of leeway they give to certain others, in the generalisations they make, in the disbelief they express even as these others describe their experiences of marginalisation, exclusion, harassment, ridicule, and even assault.

A mainstream person also has a race card—and he or she plays it far more often than a visible minority—because it is worth far more than the discredited race card of a visible minority. It is a trump of disbelief and dismissal—the ultimate form of prejudice where the person in the mainstream denies even the daily lived reality of his or her visible minority counterparts and colleagues.