Jeremy Stangroom

1. In this form, it's in effect a tautology - racism is defined in terms of structural power, so it follows whites can't be "racist".

2. You can define things however you want, but you don't erase anti-white, racially motivated bigotry (for example), merely by definition.

3. Sociology is a contested discipline. There are no central sociological authorities dictating the way that words have to be used. Also,

the idea that the way sociologists tend to use a word - and there are tendencies - is the only reasonable use of a word is *nonsense*.

I don't know where it comes from, actually. A sociologist might have a highly esoteric concept of social class, for example, but surely...

not even the most ideological of sociologists would think that no other use of the notion of social class should be permitted.

3. The idea of institutional power, the notion of social structure, etc., all these things are far from straightforward & contested.

This isn't new. Ethnomethodologists, for example, were criticizing such notions back in the 1960s. Generally, there are a whole bunch of

philosophical problems to do with reification, emergent properties, reductionism, etc., that you've got to sort out before you can be

confident in your pronouncements about institutional power. (Not the sort of thing easy to do unless you're trained in social theory.)

Generally speaking, you should be deeply suspicious if people claim that there are established sociological truths. Sociology only very...

rarely escapes the malign influence of ideology. I say all this as somebody with a PhD in sociology/social theory. Don't trust it.