The roots of racism are part of 'in-group' and 'out-group' preference, these likely pre-date race. Take away race and you get the same psychology along other arbitrary lines - for example the Rwandan Genocide. The fact we can post-hoc rationalise the thought process is what separates us from other primates - but that rationalisation happens after the initial primate instinct to form 'my group' and 'your group'.
The WASPs were indeed at a pivotal point, but my own country (UK) has a complex part to play in what happened next. Whilst the British Empire was a huge part of a primative nationalistic drive, it also drove much of the enlightenment and industrial revolution. We can argue after the fact about the morality of Empire etc, but we got the world we got and we now have to dismantle the structures created without throwing the baby out with the bathwater. You can argue the world might've been more balanced without WASPs causing chaos across the 17th 18th and 19th centuries, but it may also have just been stagnant and we could all be dying of smallpox. Such subjunctive worlds don't help with where we are now.
The contradiction I can see is a semantic one. An argument can be made that a middle class BIPOC author on Medium has less privilege than a homeless white man - and I'd agree - but it's complicated - and taking such a stance might be counter intuitively bad for both people. Something I wrote about in this article. https://medium.com/lucid-nightmare/what-we-all-lose-when-society-plays-identity-politics-397dcb896d5b
Your rebuttal is excellent and I think you will find many who agree with you and I expect your comment to be applauded a great deal - but that's the point of having Medium as a marketplace for ideas. People can (and do) read the comments to think about their own view. I don't think there's one answer to solving racism, nor do I think it's a simple problem to fix - but the more people can have discussions and consider their views the better the world gets. So thanks for commenting and carrying on the conversation :o)
