Just to add a couple of (maybe rambling) thoughts (long thoughts, sorry – you know me by now)…

Note: I do not think the following is racist, but please tell me if / where it is, so I can reflect on the issue.

This is going to be quite abstract as I want to avoid slurs, even if slurs in quotation marks or asterisked-out would make the text clearer.

I’m going to put ‘race’ in quotation marks, here, to capture the difficulty of talking about this topic and the fact that its meaning is contested.

‘Race’ as a political construct. It is not biological. In Stuart Hall’s words, race is a ‘floating signifier’. To paraphrase him, we ‘read each others’ bodies’. If this is true, then there are no clear lines between ‘races’, and the process of associating a person with this or that race is fluid, political, and changes over time. This means there is no real question of ‘accurately’ saying that person X or Y is this or that ‘race’. That said…

Racists tend not to be overly ‘accurate’ in categorising people politicised as racially different. Racists use slurs developed about one ‘race’ to talk about other ‘races’. The racist is not trying to be polite, but only trying to ‘other’ whoever they are talking to / about (unlike, say, the liberal who preaches anti-racism, the kind of ‘I can’t be racist, I don’t even see race’ liberal).

So, to someone (e.g. an aboriginal person) who has been politicised as ‘raced’ by white racists (who are not overly concerned with fine distinctions), I can see how their subjective experience is of being ‘raced’ in general rather than specifically, and attached ‘inaccurately’ to a ‘wrong’ label.

If white racists constantly use an ‘inaccurate’ racial slur to describe a person of a ‘different’ ‘race’, that person may see themselves as part of the same group as others that also hear the same slur (more ‘accurately’) directed at them – even if liberal, ‘polite’ racism would not associate that person with that slur. If someone has been called a particular derogatory word their whole life, they may feel comfortable saying it themselves.

This leads to a second point about hierarchies…

‘Polite’ liberals, all of them, are racist. They may not realise it, but race and racism are connected to capitalism. Without anti-capitalism, the ‘polite’ liberal must be content with capitalism – which is historically ‘racial capitalism’ – and racial inequality, hence must be racist.

As liberalism is the dominant force in this world, and as the ‘ruling ideas of any epoch are the ideas of the ruling class’ (Marx and Engels, The German Ideology), the dominant modes of thinking and talking about ‘race’ and racism, are liberal.

From the liberal outlook, categorising someone as the ‘wrong’ ‘race’ and then berating that person for using a slur that only ‘in-group’ persons are allowed to say is perfectly coherent. But this accepts a racial hierarchy, and so is doubly racist.

‘Polite’, ‘well-meaning’ liberalism implies that it is better to be ‘higher’ on the hierarchy than lower, and that it is ‘racist’ for someone higher in the hierarchy to use a slur that only ‘accurately’ applies to people ‘lower’ on the hierarchy. This is partly why, to liberalism, it is bad for one minority to use a slur against another minority, but okay for people in the ‘same’ minority to use the slur with / against each other.

To be clear: I am not saying it is okay for anyone to use slurs. It is not. My point is that liberalism seems to accept that some people can use slurs, but this rests on a racial hierarchy, which is itself racist, and so we should reject the liberal approach to anti-racism.

To give an example of where the liberal view can lead, I’ll take us to Michael Rosen’s Twitter page. I can only find one example as I cannot browse the site properly without an account: https://twitter.com/michaelrosenyes/status/1088851387767762945?lang=cs. Rosen is Jewish. During the ‘Labour antisemitism’ crisis circa 2019, Rosen was repeatedly the victim of antisemitism (including by some Jews) for criticising the mainstream narrative on Labour antisemitism.

Rosen, at the time (again, I cannot find the tweets), was showing / arguing that the vocal anti-antisemites were falling back on racial hierarchies and themselves being antisemitic / racist. The point is that minorities can internalise liberal racism / racial hierarchies; and even when members of ‘in-group’ use slurs that they are ‘allowed’ to say, the end result is racism.

I think you are right, by the way, that within the liberal framework, white people know that they can get into trouble by being openly racist. So white liberals, etc, are careful not to be racist in public.

We must reject liberal conceptions of race and racism, reject racial hierarchies, see race and capitalism as intertwined, and combat both.