Following up on Klaudia Amenabar’s charges about sexism in Star Wars and a recent story by N.K. Jemisin on race, this seems like a good time to offer a discussion on relativism as it relates to racism, sexism and homophobia. In recent years, we’ve had several heated discussions in the SFF community provoked by statements from minority writers that look/feel like racism or sexism but aren’t defined that way. This is because of relativism in the way we define racism, sexism and homophobia. The current progressive paradigm is that racism, for example, is about oppression, so only members of an oppressing group can be considered racist. This means we should define comments about race (or gender/sex/sexual orientation) from oppressed minority persons as activism or protest, when the same statement, made by a white male (considered an oppressing group), would be considered damningly racist. This also means that minority writers have a free pass to say whatever they want about race, sex, gender and sexual orientation without repercussions, while white writers (the oppressor group) have to be careful of what they say.

This system provokes some interesting questions. If racism is relative, then should it be defined differently by locale and by who feels oppressed? If a school is majority black, for example, and has a black administration, should white students be considered a minority and given a free pass to say whatever they want? The city of Atlanta is majority black and has a black head of government. Are white supremacist statements made in Atlanta a form of protest, or are they considered racist because Atlanta is part of the larger US system? Ok, so then what about Zimbabwe? Not only is the country overwhelmingly black, but the government has a history of human rights violations against white residents. Are white supremacist statements made in Zimbabwe still to be considered racist, or are they protest? And last, what happens when whites become a minority in the US within about the next 20 years. Younger age groups (currently in elementary school) are already experiencing this issue, and it will become nation-wide as older residents die off. Will the definition of racism suddenly shift at that point?

We’re given to knee-jerk assumptions about racism, but the whole thing is pretty confusing when you start looking at the details. I’ll try to sort it out. First, should we rate oppressor status by population majority? Asians, it turns out, are the largest world demographic group with ~60% of the world population; whites and blacks are roughly even at about ~15%. The sex ratio is currently skewed slightly to male, maybe because of cultural issues in China and India, but remains roughly 50/50. Definitely white men don’t hold majority status world-wide, so majority/minority won’t work very well as a measure of white oppression of other races on a global scale.

Minority pie

Source

So, should we maybe equate oppressor status with wealth instead? When it comes to that, then we do see a worldwide distribution that skews heavily to white and male. About 55% of the world’s billionaires are white, 30% are Asian, and less than 1% are black. About 11% of the world’s billionaires are female. About 1% of the world’s population owns half the wealth, and the distribution of wealth leans heavily to the US and Western Europe.

Wealth Table

Source

So, if you equate wealth with oppression, then definitely white men are going to be the powerful oppressors both world-wide and in the US/UK. But, is this a statement that can be generalized to mean all white men are wealthy oppressors?

Let’s look at wealth demographics of the US population. By race, Asians tend to have the highest household incomes, then whites, Hispanics and blacks. About 10% of whites fall below the poverty line, and 20% fall into the upper socioeconomic class. That leaves 70% of households that fall into the middle and working socioeconomic classes with annual incomes somewhere between $10,000 and $100,000. So if we’re equating wealth with oppressor status, should the 80% of poor, middle and working class whites be lumped in with the upper 20% as racist oppressors? And what about the lowest 10% of whites that fall below the poverty line? Should apparently racist statements about this group by minorities be considered differently?