Good/Bad Racist

The idea that not being racist is what makes you a "good" person.

A while ago, I had an online conversation with a woman I don’t know personally, but we share a connection with my alma mater, which is how we had a social media connect. She had posted something under the hastag #immigrantsareessential and I offered my opinions in the thread, commenting to others regarding their views.

She messaged me privately afterward, and explained that her intention wasn't to delineate the value of immigrants on their labor, but to push back on the criminalization of immigrants in certain aspects of society.

Which, fair enough. But her entire framing was still #ImmigrantsAreEssential, and the question I couldn't shake was, who are immigrants essential to, and why is that how their value to society is defined?

What I told her was this:

“I was responding more broadly to the way immigrants were being discussed in the thread, as valuable primarily because of their labor…Even in well-intentioned commentary... that kind of framing unintentionally erases the full humanity of immigrants, including my own family.”

There's more to that story—some of which I'm saving for a book—but this is just enough to make my point here.

My sense was that she had a negative reaction to my commentary, for various reasons. What struck me, though, wasn't what she said. It was what I inferred—not just about her, but about people, or at least about Americans, in general:

The idea that not being racist is what makes you a "good" person.

Here is what I keep observing. “Good” people can be racist. Racist people can be “good” people. The two are not mutually exclusive. You can be, on balance, a good person and still propagate harmful thoughts and perspectives.

Tying racism to goodness or badness itself is harmful. It makes it easy to point fingers: so-and-so is racist, therefore a bad person, while so-and-so else invites their Black friends to brunch and is therefore “good,” even as they go on to say hurtful or harmful things about Black people, often without realizing it.

And if racist means “bad,” then it’s no wonder people get so touchy when their racist commentary is called out. The defensiveness isn’t really about the comment, it’s about the self. It’s driven by their ego, by the need to protect one’s identity as a “good” person.

I find myself wondering how much of this is colonial; the idea that goodness or badness is inherent to a person, fixed in them, rather than expressed through what they do, say, and believe, outside of societal models of superiority and dominance.

What seems more useful to me is actually framing things in terms of harm. Not whether you are a good person or a bad person; that is, not tying it to morality and your sense of self, but whether you are harming.

And even that wording matters.

Not “you are harmful,” which still describes the person, but “you are harming,” which describes the action. I’m certainly not the first to say this, I’ve definitely seen others frame it in this regard, but it’s something I’ve been thinking more about.

That shift centers the behavior rather than the ego. It builds a narrative around changing what you do, which, to me, is far more empowering, and far less likely to provoke defensiveness, than it being an indictment of who you are or what your sense of self says you are. This moves us away from individualism and individual blame, and more into system-level conceptions of how to build healthier societal frameworks.

It’s possible this is splitting hairs, that this is all the same rhetoric with some makeup slapped on. It’s something I’m still thinking about.