Getting off the hook

On the blog post before this one, I posted a link to another blog that talk about the phrase “reverse sexism” and I linked to another phrase: “reverse racism”. After reading that blog and reading Johnson’s chapter 8, I now know what it actually means.

Just as this blog said about reverse sexism, it can be applied towards reverse racism, or any kind of reverse ism for that matter. A person with the privilege of belonging to a dominant group, race, religion believes, gender, etc, is the only group that can organized and utilized their privileges because of the power granted. Reverse ism happens because people with power want to “get off the hook”. They try to resist realizing the unseen privilege that they benefit from in society. So they blame the victim or call it something else. The reverse ism is created by blaming the other group. They say that just as the other group can suffer from sexism, racism, ableist, etc, they can too when something personal happen to them that affects their manhood, whiteness, ability, etc.

The people who do these comments have not experienced the real ism because what they think they experienced is not experienced by the large majority of privileged people and the world is not leveled so that everybody can be treated equal. Even though it may look like it happen to them, they need to be educated about their own privilege in society instead of calling it something else.