Politically correct notions of racism are childish and simplistic, and seem to be limited to "white people being mean to black people". This is so widely accepted that if a "coloured" person shows prejudice it is called "reverse racism". Having experienced racism from dark and light-skinned people, I can say with conviction that there is no such thing as reverse racism. Racism is racism, no matter which way you look at it.
Some observant European people identify me on first meeting as Indigenous, but most assume I am an "Anglo Australian." Under this assumption, I have often been told jokingly that I look like I have "a touch of the tar". When I respond that I am indeed Indigenous, the joker usually goes the other way then, to question my Aboriginality. These are the sorts of comments used:
"Some white fellas just want to be black fellas."
"We've probably all got a bit in us."
"Why can't you just be an Australian?"
"He's doing a white man's job, so he's a white man."
To be fair, such thinking is not limited to Anglo people. Similarly problematic comments have been made to me by Indigenous people of various cultural backgrounds, including,
"Look, half-caste boy there walking."
"We're smarter than them, because we got white blood in us, eh?"
"Eh! You walk in here just like you proper blackfella!"
"That's because you're white. We can eat totems in our culture." (On finding out I won't kill or eat my totem.)
So what is the answer? If our current definition of racism is so limited that its name has to be changed depending on the colour of the user's skin, then surely the definition itself is a racist one. So, we need to simplify things by looking at the literal definition. "-isms" are beliefs. "Race" is an outmoded seventeenth century myth of biological difference invented to justify slavery and imperial expansion. So, racism is the belief in the existence of separate human races.
By that rationale most of Western society, whose structures and cultures are built upon the myth of racial groups determined by arbitrary physical characteristics, is a racist society.
Reversed, sideways, upside down - that's just wrong, no matter which way you look at it.
More on reverse racism Here, particularly the links between the concepts of affirmative action, positive descrimination and reverse racism.
