Here’s my answer as a white man, and yes it is the definitive answer that should apply to all white. (LOL)
Racism can be personal and systemic. Context is king here (even in a democracy). Systemic racism is the centralized government codes, laws and policies that creates adverse structural practices across all levels of government that control the negative or non-equal treatment of another ethnicity as defined and/or signaled in a given country. It can be inherited by all public officials representing at any level of government and can be deputized to non-government people through explicit or implicit signaling through the primary representatives of that system, which are typically judicial decisions, legislative decisions (laws, codes), and/ or executive branch decisions (policies). The use of control is where the systemic racism is manifested and measured through the use of force and money, the two primary ‘weapons’ of the nation-state. Systemic decisions are often long-lasting and difficult to immediately reverse, so tend to make long term perceptual differences for all the citizens of that nation-state.
Personal racism is typically an individual’s use of derogatory slang and/or force against a perceived ethnicity and usually represents the state’s view of systemic racism.
In America, the ethnicity that is defined as systemically different for accepted social differentiation and ‘singled out’ for unequal and lesser treatment is blacks. (Wow, no surprise there.) One systemic notable decision for example is the ‘famous’ Supreme Court Plessy Decision of 1896. It institute the “separate but equal” policy based on constitutional grounds that allowed for physical separation of ‘races’ or ethnicities in government and non-government institutions, such as schools, stores, dinners, and government work forces, as well as the military. This atrocity lasted until 1954 when the “famous” Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision ‘reversed’ the Plessy decision. By then, after 58 years, the separation has become normalized for generations after into creating a structural belief that blacks should not be allowed to work or go to school with whites, based on an arbitrary ethnic distinction. Whites reacted violently from Boston to Missouri to Alabama against ‘forced’ integration, which many children never really knowing or talking with blacks. This adverse centralized decision of Plessy was hard to reverse and still is because of accepted institutionalized differences that were allowed by the central government and trickled down to all levels below it.
Personal racism is when someone call you the n word, or it can be when a black person calls a white person a cracker or some other derogatory slang. However, I would say that since the institutionalized systemic racism that originated from the central government is creating the perceptual differentiation of inequality power status, than the white person calling the N word would be seen as having the unofficial ‘backing’ of controlling power structure and the black person who is calling the white person “cracker” does not have tat backing, and really could be seen as acting from resentment and anger from being repressed.
So, sorry, that wasn’t on Google because I don’t think dictionary definitions easily searchable are satisfying. The reason though I put it in an abstract way at the start is because ‘context is king’. For example, in the genocide in Germany, both stigmatized ethnically differentiate groups —the repressors and the repressed—were white; in the genocide in Rwanda, both were groups were black. In France there is tension between Arab, that is North African Arab in particular, and white French. In China we see the Northern Chinese “mandarin” ‘ethnic’ group against the Uighurs, in Japan the dominant group has friction with the Korean born Japanese, etc., etc. The list goes on. All cases involved this centralized controlling group through their ‘leadership’ who to oppress. We are seeing it now in the Ukraine being created where previously there was not a major differences. Differences and ethnic branding are depending on historical and geographic location and which leader seeking more power picks the ethnic group to repress.
Wait a minute, I’m not sure that answer is definitive sounding as I wanted it to be. But if I go by scientific reasoning and evidence, then according to biological mating tests, there is only one race, the human race. And that answer satisfies even less. But no, blacks really can’t be racist since their anger is justified.
