Guest Post by Michael Phillip
I don’t think “reverse racism” is a useful or even entirely coherent concept, and I don’t think thought-experiments are a particularly helpful way to think about racism in the first place: in my view, something about the subject demands an “ecological” or “in vivo” rather than thought-experimental approach.
In other words, the topic demands engagement with the living, breathing complexity of real-live experiences of racism, not with thought-experiments that abstract away from them.
I also think that if the topic is racism, as it should be, focusing on black-white relations in the U.S. is overly narrow, and problematically distortive of our thinking.
It doesn’t even capture race relations in the U.S., much less race relations beyond American borders.