It is practically impossible to talk about race in America without running into concerns about “reverse racism.” In fact, some studies suggest that many white people believe racism is a problem in America — but it’s prejudice against white people, not minority groups, that many of them see as a problem.
Fed up with hearing concerns about reverse racism, comedian Aamer Rahman in 2013 gave what I still think is one of the best responses to these concerns, highlighting the systemic global oppression of black and brown people that’s existed for centuries:
I could be a reverse racist if I wanted to.
All I would need would be a time machine. Now what I’d do is I’d get in my time machine and go back in time to before Europe colonized the world, right? And I’d convince the leaders of Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and from South America to invade and colonize Europe, right? Just occupy them, steal their lands and resources, set up some kind of like, I don’t know, trans-Asian slave trade, where we exported white people to work on rice plantations in China.
Just ruin Europe over the course of a couple of centuries, so all of their descendants would want to migrate out and live in the places where black and brown people come from.
But of course, in that time I’d make sure I set up systems that privilege black and brown people at every conceivable social, political, and economic opportunity. White people would never have any hope of real self-determination.
Just every couple of decades, make up some fake war as an excuse to go and bomb them back to the stone age, and say it’s for their own good because their culture is inferior. And then, just for kicks, subject white people to colored people’s standards of beauty, and [they’ll] end up hating the color of their own skin, eyes, and hair.
If after hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years of that, I got onstage at a comedy show and said, “Hey, what’s the deal with white people? Why can’t they dance?” that would be reverse racism.
