Edited by Azizi Powell
This pancocojams post presents a complete reprint of a 2009 page from Jim Crow Museum.com that was written in response to the question "Can Black people be racist?".
The Addendum to this post presents information about the Jim Crow Museum that is located in Michigan.
The content of this post is presented for historical and socio-cultural purposes.
All copyrights remain with their oweners.
Thanks ro David Pilgrim, Curator, Jim Crow Museum (March 2009) and thanks to all those associated with the Jim Crow Museum. Thanks also to all those who are quoted in this post.
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COMPLETE PAGE REPRINT: QUESTION & RESPONSE: CAN BLACK PEOPLE BE RACIST?
WARNING: This reprint includes two fully spelled out uses of the derogatory referent that is commonly known as "the n word".
from https://jimcrowmuseum.ferris.edu/question/2009/march.htm
"Question
Recently I attended a showing of your traveling exhibition
called, Them. It was generally good but I saw something that disturbed me. Why
did you include the “white trash” costume and the tee that had “arrest all
whites” in the exhibition? I am a middle-aged white person and even I know that
blacks and other racial minorities cannot be racist, just like women can not be
sexists. Racism equals power. Whites are not hurt by the everyday flow of
society. I think you are trying so hard to be objective that you end up being
politically correct.
-- J.R.C. - Grand Rapids, Mich.
Answer
I will try to focus my rant. Can blacks be racist? The
answer, of course, will depend on how you define racism. If you define it as
“prejudice against or hatred toward another race,” then the answer is yes. If
you define racism as “the belief that race is the primary determinant of human
traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent
superiority of a particular race,” the answer is yes. And if you define racism
as “prejudice and discrimination rooted in race-based loathing,” then the answer
is, again, yes. However, if you define racism as “a system of group privilege
by those who have a disproportionate share of society’s power, prestige,
property, and privilege,” then the answer is no. In the end, it is my opinion
that individual blacks can be and sometimes are racists. However, collectively,
blacks are neither the primary creators nor beneficiaries of the racism that
permeates society today.
Let me share with you a story from my journey. In the early
1970s, I was one of several hundred black- and brown-skinned children who were
sent to Prichard Junior High, a school that was proudly all-white. Recall that
on May 17, 1954, the United States Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education
of Topeka, Kansas (347 U.S. 483) had declared that state laws which permitted
separate public schools for whites and blacks had in fact denied black children
equal education opportunities. By a 9-0 decision, the High Court had ruled that
“separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.” Brown attacked de jure (legal) segregation as
a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the
United State Constitution. The white population in Prichard, Alabama met the
Brown decision with, at first, a collective yawn, then later with open
resistance. By the time I was told to
attend classes at Prichard Junior High—about 16 years after Brown—most of the
local white power structure had reluctantly conceded that school integration
was legal and inevitable. Despite that, many of the whites that lived near or
attended the school were intent on keeping us out. There were fights, black
students against white students, and white parents and friends against black
students. We did not ride in buses to
school. Instead, we walked from our all-black neighborhoods near Highway 45
through the white neighborhoods that surrounded the school. Along the way,
people threw stones at us and we threw stones back at them. We were cursed at,
and we cursed back. The fighting, as I mentioned, was constant, especially that
first year. The Brown decision had attacked de jure segregation, but the cold
reality was that de facto segregation (by custom and tradition) remained.
I recount this story because it affords me the opportunity
to make several points. The people who threw stones and slurs at us were
pitiable, with a level of poverty that Americans often associated with
so-called Third World Countries; they were some of the economically poorest people in the nation.
One could argue that, although they lacked power, they nonetheless had (white)
privilege. I would argue, instead, that
they were marginalized in ways similar to how minorities of color were
marginalized. They worked jobs that paid starvation wages and they were poorly
educated. They did not have the power and privilege of middle-class,
“respectable” whites, and as a result, they were summarily dismissed as “trash”
by other whites. Despite being white, they were stereotyped as “White Others” –
nasty, lazy, ignorant parasites. Poignantly, it was not uncommon to hear them
called “white niggers.” To argue that one must have power in order to be racist
is to suggest that the man in Prichard, Alabama who called me a “red nigger”
and threw a rock at me was not a racist. A different explanation is that his
poverty and lack of power made him susceptible to anti-black racism.
There are few things in this world that I am surer of than
this: blacks can hate whites. The years that I spent at Prichard Junior High
are illustrative. We hated whites and
that hatred often manifested itself in racial ways. It was Us versus Them, and
the Them were whites, or at least the whites who lived near, attended, or
worked at the school. Only a few blacks – those teachers who came with us – had
the power to grade, expel, or suspend students.
Neither we nor any blacks, I suspect, had the power to not attend the
school. Although we lacked political, social, and economic power, we did have
the power to be intolerant and to hate. You can call it defensive hatred if you
like, but it was a thick, real hatred. The quirky part of this story is that
there were two groups of people, both desperately poor and treated as outcasts,
who used their hatred of the Other as bonding mechanisms. I want it said loudly
and clearly that we can define racism in many ways, but it is, in my opinion,
intellectually disingenuous to define it in a way that trivializes the role
that racial hatred plays. Certainly, not all racism is hate-driven, but to
ignore the connection between racial hate and racism is to reduce the concept
of racism to a useless theoretical abstraction.
Definitions of racism have clearly become battlegrounds. I
have attended academic conferences where it was professionally chic to accept
definitions of racism that only focused on white privilege or dominant group
privilege. In chats with scholars, many of them white, I heard a disdain for
social scientific, especially psychological, definitions that characterize
racism as an attitude. For those who
share this disdain, racism could only be viewed as an organized system of group
privilege, and since blacks collectively lacked that privilege, they could not
be racists. This tautological reasoning remains problematic for me.
I have great respect for the scholarship and activism of Joe
Feagin, a past president of the American Sociological Association. Feagin has
theorized that every major institution in the United States was built on and
through the racial oppression of minorities.
I get that. Racism, in his view, so permeated the culture that he uses
the concept “total racist society” to describe the United States. Racism is for
Feagin inseparable from white power and white privilege. According to Feagin
(and his colleague Hernan Vera), blacks cannot be racist:
“Racism is more than a matter of individual prejudice and
scattered episodes of discrimination designed by African Americans to exclude
White Americans from full participation in the rights, privileges, and benefits
of this society. Black (or other minority) racism would require not only a
widely accepted racist ideology directed at whites but also the power to
systematically exclude whites from opportunities and rewards in major economic,
cultural, and political institutions. While there are Black Americans with
anti-white prejudices, and there are instances of black discrimination against
whites, these examples are not central to the core operations of U.S. society
and are not an entrenched structure of institutionalized racism.”1
Conceptualizing racism as prejudice plus discriminatory acts
that are “central to the core operations of the U.S. society” is knotty for me.
The fact that relatively few blacks can hurt whites does not mean that no
blacks can hurt whites. I see racism as operating on all levels from the
individual with irrational bigotry throwing a brick to the unintentional (and
intentional) race-based privilege that pervades a culture. Feagin is right to
highlight the often unseen ways that white racism permeates the culture. However, he underestimates the power (and
importance) of everyday racist actions by individuals of all hues and statuses.
His conceptualization gives “free pass” to blacks and other minorities to hold
racial prejudices and, when possible, act in discriminatory ways against
whites. Moreover, his conceptualization takes victimhood to a level that
encompasses all blacks, no matter their economic, social, or political
standing.
I would not be a sociologist worth my salt if I did not
acknowledge that racial minorities (and women) do not have a proportionate
share of power, prestige, property, and privilege. This inequality is one of
the criteria that sociologists use to define “minority.” In other words, sociologists accept as
axiomatic that minorities must have less power, otherwise they are not
conceptualized as minorities (yes, this too may be circular reasoning). This
does not mean that minorities cannot be racist, though. It means, rather, that
a minority (seen as a category) does not have the same or as many opportunities
to hurt (discriminate against) the majority group. You don’t have to be a
sociologist to recognize that some groups have more power and, with that power,
can do good things or bad things.
I also accept that the dominant (majority) group (the group
with a disproportionate share of the power, prestige, property, and privilege)
will be hurt less often by the “everyday flow of society.” For example, the
dominant group’s behaviors will be seen as normative and the conflicting
behaviors of others (especially others who look differently) will often be
judged as aberrant and deviant. This is true both in racially homogeneous
societies and racially heterogeneous societies. In these societies, minorities
are more likely to die the first year of life, more likely to be poor, and are
punished more in schools, have higher rates of unemployment and
underemployment, work for lower wages, spend more time behind bars, and live
shorter lives. As a social activist and a person of color, this saddens and
angers me. The inequality faced by blacks does not mean that they individually
cannot be racist; indeed much like the whites who threw rocks at me in the
1970s, it makes holding racist views and discriminating, when possible, against
whites more likely. And, yes, there are blacks who benefit from the “everyday
flow of society.”
Several years ago I read Martin Luther King Jr.’s Letter
From Birmingham Jail, well, I should say, for the first time I really read it.
This letter, one of the great public letters written by an American, contained
his well-known quote, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
That statement really stunned me. I had spent much of my life collecting
objects that I could use to teach people about the racism faced by Africans and
their American descendants. But King's words made me look at injustice and
inequality in broader ways. And so I began collecting objects that defamed many
groups, women, Asians, poor whites, Mexicans, gay people, and others. This
material helped me gained a deeper understanding of patterns of oppression. The
exhibition you saw was fruit from that work. The exhibition was not created to
compare “victim experiences.” Rather, it was created for the same reason that
the Jim Crow Museum was founded: to fashion a vehicle that stimulates
intelligent discussion about the relations between groups. All the objects in
the Them were chosen so that we could have the kinds of discussions that you
and I are having.
1 Feagin, J. R. and Vera, H. (1995). White Racism: The Basics, New York: Routledge, 1995, p.1.
March 2009 response by David Pilgrim
Curator, Jim Crow Museum"
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ADDENDUM: INFORMATION ABOUT JIM CROW MUSEUM
AI OVERVIEW (retrieved March 7, 2026)
"The Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia, located at Ferris
State University in Big Rapids, Michigan, is the nation's largest publicly
accessible collection of over 11,000 artifacts—such as everyday items,
postcards, and toys—designed to document, teach, and confront the history of
anti-Black racism in the United States. Founded by Dr. David Pilgrim, the
museum uses these objects to promote a more just society.
Key Details About the Museum
Purpose: The museum uses items of intolerance to teach
tolerance, and its mission is to reflect, teach, and research, as well as to
confront, racism.
Collection: The collection includes over 11,000 items that
represent, promote, or caricature African Americans.
Location: It is located in the FLITE Library on the campus
of Ferris State University in Big Rapids, Michigan.
Expansion: A new, larger facility is currently in the
planning and construction stages.
Values: The museum is based on the idea that racism is wrong and that these artifacts, while disturbing, are important for understanding the history of racial inequality in the U.S.."
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https://jimcrowmuseum.ferris.edu/location.htm (retrieved March 7, 2026)
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@gooodies4u1, 2023
"As a older AKA its amazing to see how the songs been modified over the years." -snip- Unfortunately, this commenter didn't respond to a request for the words that she knew for this chant.]