This passage is from Postmodernism 101, a David Kaiser post, quoting from the Guide in his narrative account:
'The definition of “racism” identifies the group that holds power more specifically.
'“A system of advantage and disadvantage based on the socially constructed category of ‘race’ and the idea of white racial superiority and black racial inferiority. Specifically within the United States, racism refers to white racial prejudice and power used to advantage white people over indigenous people, black people and people of color(IBPOC) and has been made possible by the historic and present-day unequal distribution of resources. Racism is enacted on multiple levels—institutional, interpersonal, individual and ideological—and can exist both consciously and unconsciously. Unconscious or covert racism is often hidden and not recognized as racial discrimination, whereas overt racism refers to conscious attitudes and intentions to harm and discriminate against IBPOC. Both covert and overt racism are forms of violence and are rooted in the idea of white supremacy.”
'In an age when any of us can send a swab to ancestry.com and receive a breakdown of the tribal and racial origins of our particular genetic inheritance, one cannot help but be a bit surprised by the assumption that “’race’” is nothing but a socially constructed category, even if one believes, as I do, that the intellectual endowments of all racial groups are comparable. More shocking, however, is the extraordinarily America-centric idea that racism only involves beliefs in white superiority over black people (although the definition immediately includes other “people of color”—that is, nonwhites—among its victims.) As a matter of historical fact, racism, whether defined as prejudice or as systematic oppression, has existed all over the world since the beginning of human history. Many Asians remain convinced today not only that Asian civilizations are superior to others, but also that certain Asian peoples such as Chinese or Japanese are superior to other Asian peoples. Both American Indian tribes and African tribes often regarded each other with the deepest hostility as well. But here, racism connects only to “the idea of white supremacy,” and the rest of humanity receives a pass. In the same way, while the guide defines misogyny as “A type of gender-based oppression founded in the belief that women are inferior to and must remain subordinate to men,” “misandry,” the parallel prejudice of women against men, does not appear in it. This is because, as another entry on “reverse oppression” explains, “women cannot be ‘just as sexist as men,’ because they do not hold political, economic and institutional power.”
'Gender, indeed, plays a much more important role in the guide than race. Here is the definition of “male privilege”:
'“A group of unearned cultural, legal, social and institutional rights extended to cisgender men based on their assigned-sex and gender. Cisgender men have access to institutional power, make the rules, control the resources and are assumed capable. Masculinity, as enacted by cisgender men, is universalized and viewed as the normative gender. Cisgender men are often unaware of their differential treatment (see Fragile Masculinity). While trans men, masculine-of-center women and nonbinary folks have access to benefits based on their proximity to hegemonic masculinity (see above definition), male privilege is reserved for cisgender men. This is particularly true for white cisgender men.”....' DK
What is especially illuminating now, with David Reich's book in hand is to compare and contrast the account in the Amherst Guide with Reich's DNA and genome hard science data and conclusions regarding race and sex throughout hominid prehistory and into its early recorded history.
