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#14766862
Somebody can be racist without harming anybody.


:hmm: Is there a difference between having racist thoughts and being a racist?
If it is just thoughts, then we are all racists and there is no need to discuss it anymore.
If you do not act on those thoughts, then I do not believe you should be called a racist. The term is being misused and we should try to correct that to move ahead.
I was a racist in thought until the 6th grade. I lived in a small all white town of 600 that had a GM factory that employed 2,000. Many of them were African Americans. Being children and seeing all these different colored people pass through our town every day, resulted in us making fun of them to one another. This caused no harm to anyone. I then moved to a school that was 50% black and on the first day learned there were consequences for my words and they hurt others. As far as I know, I have never harmed another person because of their race. I have harmed people of other races and some of it had to do with cultural norms, but it was that individual and me. This is not racist in my mind. I deal with people as individuals and whether or not racial thoughts go through my mind has nothing to do with anything. Our brains do all kinds of weird stuff.
Last edited by One Degree on 23 Jan 2017 20:51, edited 1 time in total.
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By Oxymoron
#14766863
If you are not racist, then you are a liar. Tribalism is the most human trait of them all, the only difference between us and SS is extremity of our actions not our beliefs.
By Decky
#14766865
Show me someone who does not dislike the French and I will show you a liar.
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By Rancid
#14766869
Everyone is a little bit racist. We're hardwired for it, really. It's the reason we're having such a hard time eliminating racism.
#14766870
Oxymoron wrote:If you are not racist, then you are a liar. Tribalism is the most human trait of them all, the only difference between us and SS is extremity of our actions not our beliefs.


Or maybe what we are told is racism is actually not really racism?

As far as I understood it from the youngest days of my life, racism was if you were unpleasant towards someone or hated them on account of their race.

Now days I am told racism can be anything.
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By Oxymoron
#14766872
Political Interest wrote:Or maybe what we are told is racism is actually not really racism?

As far as I understood it from the youngest days of my life, racism was if you were unpleasant towards someone or hated them on account of their race.

Now days I am told racism can be anything.


Indeed, Racism has become a convenient weapon of the despicable left.
#14766920
I think people need to think deeply about what being a true racist means. Most human beings are territorial. Like our primate ancestors. Strangers in competition for the same resources. Xenophobes. It is interesting to read Harari's NYT bestselling book about our human ancestors. There were co-existing different species of humans for a long time. Eventually the others who weren't homo sapiens died out. Why? One studies show how donkeys and horses can pro-create yet since they don't produce fertile offspring---it is an evolutionary dead end. So far scientists agree that all humans now are ONE SPECIES. A Nubian black African can mate with the whitest and lightest skin Scandinavian Swede and produce fertile offspring. So we are one species. But very slight and significant differences occur between groups. All groups rely on variation to be strong and to provide the essence of evolutionary adaptive survival.

The land (nature) dictates which slight differences are chosen over others. What many confuse though with artificially socially constructed ideas of 'race' are what is tremendously problematic. We accept myths as truth and think we are being open minded, often, we are incredibly narrow minded, ignorant and just plain false in thinking about other groups, cultures, nations, languages, tribes, traditions and societies. It is based on our own ethnocentric and extremely limited body of experience as individuals. Many people never have met a single member of many other ethnic groups and have no idea what the rules, regulations, traditions, concepts and value systems and thought processes and paradigms are accepted as the standard or the norm in that foreign society and assume they are the same as their own. Then when they find out how deeply the differences in thought processes are? They assume these are chasms of understanding that are impossible to bridge. Most humanity has very similar needs and desires and thoughts and dreams.

But---people are experts at emphasizing the different and not doing the very hard work of learning fully how to place one's entire self in someone else's shoes. Completely doing the hard work of placing one's own life aside and thinking very hard of what it is like for someone else? Very few humans have that enormous sense of duty and empathy and respect to a foreign reality. And that is what is dangerous. You miss the forest for the trees. That is how world wars start. That is how genocide happens. That is how inhumanity flourishes. Lack of real work in understanding another human experience. That is racism.

Value judgments do that too. My society is in the right. My culture is the one to follow. My language is the best one to speak. My experience is the one that is valued highest. Once that stuff gets a hold of a human being's brain. All thoughts of you being 'non-racist' is gone. For me the USA is full of very racist, narrow minded, ahistorical people with a real lack of understanding of how others think that are not subject to this very market driven, profit driven, modern liberalistic society. They think they are exceptional. American exceptionalism. When I see evidence of their lack of exceptionalism in almost every single endeavor they dedicate themselves to. But they don't. And that is what is damn dangerous!
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By Nonsense
#14766931
Know It All wrote:Are you a politician. Look at the thread title and answer please



NO, I NOT 'racist' as an individual, however, as I pointed out, those in politics who profess their political position to be against 'racism', appear to be 'racist' by denying the existence of the natural indigenous section of the British population mentioned.
As with the rest of the former groups, they are recognised by Labour, perhaps you have the answer as to why the latter group's are not recognised.
Ignoring some people, but recognising others according to groupings can only mean, particularly when the ignored groups are the indigenous, that Labour is subversive & racist, as well as having hypocritical double-standards.
#14766980
The OED wrote:Racist: An advocate or supporter of racism; a person whose words or actions display prejudice or discrimination on the grounds of race


The OED wrote:Prejudice: preconceived opinion that is not based on reason or actual experience


Typically people sort through this by saying that racism is in the structure of a society. So, for instance, the United States was a series of slave colonies. The argument would be that baked into the base of such a society is a racist hierarchy. Before the Civil War, Marx commented:

[url="[url=https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/wage-labour/ch05.htm]Marx[/url]"]A Negro is a Negro. Only under certain conditions does he become a slave. A cotton-spinning machine is a machine for spinning cotton. Only under certain conditions does it become capital. Torn away from these conditions, it is as little capital as gold is itself money, or sugar is the price of sugar.[/url]

These "certain conditions" are essentially what constitutes racism. It is a society that measures race and makes a value judgement upon it. This is as simple as saying that capitalist society is classist—which, of course it is.

It's a little less clear when the structural racism moves from the base of the society and into the superstructure—or when this translation is not clear. Regardless, these structures of power, these, "certain conditions," are absolutely racist. And I don't think anybody would argue that American slavery was not racist as race was the entire premise of said slavery. Nor that the day the Emancipation Proclamation was signed any vestige of structural racism completely disappeared.

This structured part of society is different, though often related, to prejudice. A prejudice would be to internalize the racism without any other context.
#14766983
And I don't think anybody would argue that American slavery was not racist as race was the entire premise of said slavery.


Good post, but this part is not entirely accurate. People of all races were slaves in the Americas. The fact the vast majority were black does not make the statement accurate. Slavery was an economic institution, not a racist institution. Racism existed as a side effect of blacks being slaves and therefore not a desirable thing to be. If you wish to argue they were made slaves because they were black, then you can not lay that solely on Americans.
#14767017
One Degree wrote:Good post, but this part is not entirely accurate. People of all races were slaves in the Americas. The fact the vast majority were black does not make the statement accurate. Slavery was an economic institution, not a racist institution. Racism existed as a side effect of blacks being slaves and therefore not a desirable thing to be. If you wish to argue they were made slaves because they were black, then you can not lay that solely on Americans.


I don't think we're entirely at odds here. After the English Civil War, Cromwell sent slaves from Britain and Ireland to the Americas—that's true. And there was no shortage of Native American slaves. This said, as you imply, this wasn't racial slavery. Cromwell's slaves were prisoners of war—perhaps the oldest type of slaves. The Native Americans were sometimes POWs, some times in debt slavery, sometimes in some position where they were forced to work in exchange for their soul—but it wasn't a racial institution at the time.

It wasn't until the late 18th century that Africans became slaves by virtue of their race. Looking at primary letters, you can actually track this occurring. The most famous instance would be the Kingdom of Kongo, which converted to Catholicism and was treated as equals by other Europeans for a few generations. The Kongo aristocracy were at the Vatican and in Spanish and Portuguese courts like any European power. But in time Alfonso I wrote a famous letter to the pope complaining that the Europeans were starting to see Africans as slaves instead of slaves as slaves:

Alfonso wrote:Each day the traders are kidnapping our people - children of this country, sons of our nobles and vassals, even people of our own family. This corruption and depravity are so widespread that our land is entirely depopulated. We need in this kingdom only priests and schoolteachers, and no merchandise, unless it is wine and flour for Mass. It is our wish that this Kingdom not be a place for the trade or transport of slaves.

...Many of our subjects eagerly lust after Portuguese merchandise that your subjects have brought into our domains. To satisfy this inordinate appetite, they seize many of our black free subjects.... They sell them. After having taken these prisoners [to the coast] secretly or at night..... As soon as the captives are in the hands of white men they are branded with a red-hot iron.


There still is that transition here too, where the Congolese see themselves as Europeans, but the Europeans have stopped seeing the social distinctions in the Congolese.

And as a result of these actions and actions like them, slavery becomes racist, that is to say, based upon race instead of class or social position, or anything else. And that's the social legacy that (depending on whom you ask) still exists today.
#14767037
I also recommend this Judy Helfand's Constructing Whiteness to better grasp how the base of society ends up in the superstructure and then serves to maintain such relations, thus the superstructure acts on the base simultaneously.

Also, this paper does not provide a complete history of the social construction of whiteness, even on this one dimensional level. Instead, the paper examines some historical events to provide examples of whiteness being constructed. The early history of Virginia Colony provides the foundational example, illustrating through laws passed by the colonial assemblies how the knowledge, ideology, norms, and practices that comprise whiteness evolved in response to the social, economic, and political situation in that colony and ultimately resulted in the creation of a white race. The history of immigration and naturalization policy illustrate how the white race created in Virginia Colony was maintained despite the entrance of people previously unclassified as to their status as white. A look at who became land owners in the conquered territories to the west after the Civil War provides an example of how institutional and cultural forces reflecting the knowledge, ideology, norms, and practices of whiteness contributed to a system in which white people profited over people of color; postwar suburbanization provides another. Labor history has provided numerous examples of the construction of whiteness and this paper uses the example of the Irish entering the workforce during the 1800s. Also in the field of labor history, the Social Security Act, the Labor Relations Act, and the GI Bill reveal how whiteness is constructed and maintained, and white people benefit, through apparently neutral government policies and institutions.


Another way of framing it is that economics creates positional inequality based on real and imagined differences. Then after this inequality is created it then reinforces a sort of status inequality, where ones social categorization is associated with positions of lesser positional status. So in a way the classist attitude that derives from positions in an economy go further into inferring status to associations such as race and gender. So being black becomes associated with things like poverty, crime, broken families, drugs and so on which are inherited from material history.

Though there is the idea of some innate tendency for tribalism, I think this doesn't go far enough into exploring why certain social identities are socially significant and what makes them felt as significant. The prior post by Goon shows a great example of how race as we imagine it today simply wasn't a socially significant category until it was. The social identities that many people are categorize by are in a sense based in very concrete social relations. This is why anti-racists and feminists have been able to touch on many things true to the social category of being a woman or of some particular race. Because their is a reality to those relations that are set within the limits of the material base of the society.
In a society with different material conditions that resolve many of the problems that face people within these categories, their social significance would be made almost redundant. Which is what I imagine political correctness and liberalism tries to imagine in an idealized abstract view of reality rather than a substantive one. Where one rejects the racial essentialism within the culture/superstructure but ignores the base that helps maintain race being a socially significant because of the concrete social relations maintained within it.
Nuance is lacking in those that refuse to acknowledge (PC) that many who happen to be of a certain social categories do fulfill the outcomes of the stereotypes. But it is certainly an error in people's understanding to attribute race to an essentially biological foundation with particular tendency which is thought to also correlate clearly to variations in skin pigmentation. And its also prone to error to treat everyone within the category as strongly homogenous, this isn't sensitive to the variation that occurs within a broad population. As things like race come to serve as a proxy for the more concrete determinants (poverty) of undesirable behaviours and beliefs. But race in this case serves to mask the concrete relations and thus serves as a mystifying ideological function. That one isn't to simply ignore race but to make race the be all end all is too crude to be true, though one might speak crudely because one isn't going to detail the nuances of one's thought every time. Though there likely is a fuzzy distinction between those that come to certain conclusions (opposing immigration) because of the base concerns than someone who is enamored with the super structural mystification (typical to middle class).

So for example, when someone like Richard B. Spencer is advocating for a white-ethnic only North America through a 'peaceful' ethnic cleansing, its hard to not take his desired ends as signifying racist beliefs and desires to implement severely white supremacist structures within society. If a person like that can't be labelled as racist, then I don't think anyone can, because one has likely diffused the substance of the word so much that it applies to no one in existence.
This seems different to the attitude that is more focused on the base, though one could perhaps emphasize that its all attitudinal stuff, where in action, the white supremacist and the person just worrying about competition int he job market work towards the same ends in regards to immigration.
Though a difference might then be argued about how they structure society itself, where one despite speaking of a peaceful ethnic cleansing, to actualize his goal would be required to use substantial force to realize his goal of a primarily white nation, whilst the latter may not hold beliefs amicable to such an end because he wasn't smitten with the idea of there something essentially wrong with the people just that didn't want the economic competition.

Though I think might be less clear when we get into discussions of culture, where the way some people talk seems to take too strong of a position on culture. Like the description I made earlier of the person who seems to treat culture as inherited biologically and embedded within one's biology because they also have a complementary belief in race as a biological concept. Which they don't necessarily describe in any great detail of how it relates to cultural affinity from one's genetics or what ever.
But at the same time, it is clear that cultural beliefs aren't so fragile and weak that one simply assimilates into a new society. To which comes a separate issue of to what degree does one expect assimilation.
Because I would take it that the laws of the land set the formal expectations of everyone, those who break the law no matter of their cultural background are to be prosecuted. Things being stated as cultural beliefs doesn't serve as a defense to certain crimes like domestic violence unless we as a society are in such a state as to defend domestic violence (which many do, they just like to categorize it as fundamentally different, they [url]burn their women, we shoot ours[/url]. Wow so different, clearly Honor killings Versus Domestic violence despite both largely stemming from in patriarchal ideologies).
Though there is also the case of how the law is to deal with certain cultural sensitivities, because people will come into conflict. And that has to be resolved within a society, so for example, many play up the whole women's autonomy liberal sentiment in rhetorical opposition to things like the Burqa along with points about security concerns. It is of specific interest because of its cultural difference, if it originated as a fashion trend within society to wear head scarfs, it wouldn't be seen with such animosity. The object itself not really being a problem as much as the meaning we inscribe upon it based on the relations that underpin its maintenance.
Though at the same time I do wonder to a double standard in an over exaggerated homogeneity within a culture to exaggerate differences between perceived in group culture and out group culture.
That there is always a degree of expected social conformity, but it seems in this case the state is expected to provide some expected standard of the citizen which even citizens within the nation may not be compelled to comply with and push up against. That if some other prick in my own country tried to hassle me for what I wear, it wouldn't likely reach to the same response as a foreigner whose backdrop is political and international conflicts.

Another interesting point is that in this idea of assimilation, one fundamentally expects a person to not be themselves in anyway, to throw away every part of their identity and adopt what ever national caricature is epitomized by that region. So one can even be a mutlifaceted human being, but one has to be the average citizen. That it seems that its inevitable that a degree of acculturation occurs when people between places mix. When I go to New Mexico being an Australian, I'm a foreigner that's bringing in certain internalized attitudes and behaviours not recently native to that region.

Though I think a discussion on culture can be had around whether one supports the costs it takes to help a people integrate into a society, because many immigrants might be ill suited to do well in a new country until a few generations later once they've established some wealth for themselves in a new country and come to better understand it. Because it seems a tendency that new people are generally poorer on average, thus when a mass of people migrate they end up where the property is cheapest and form a sort of ethnic ghetto. This hour long doco provides a good example of the Vietnamese refugees who were accepted into Australia after the Vietnamese-American war but weren't provided much support, making their transition into Australia all the more difficult.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfQ3TlzleaI
But I would emphasize in such a case, that though there was some chaos, in the long term, things worked themselves out to some degree of stability when people worked to deal with it. But one might not be keen on resources invested into addressing the problems that come from being in poverty and new to a country. Many aren't even sympathetic to the poor in general, let alone those that they might dislike for their differences.

For myself, I try to understand different cultures and situate cultural expression within its material context to get an idea of how significant shifts in material conditions yield chaotic transitions. So I would say that I reject the view of that I attribute to Richard B. Spencer based on his expressed opinions. But am amicable to certain policies that in practice would disproportionately effect people of certain backgrounds, but it isn't founded in any specific prejudice to them as a people though it could err towards that if not careful, but attempt to base it within perceived concrete implications. That in a sense I still retain certain liberal sentiments having been raised under a ruling class ideology living in a capitalist society, but I wish for it to be more substantive and grounded rather than idealistic and abstract. That I intend to enact certain beliefs and values that I imagine to be characteristically class based. That the working class should do its best to support one another but also to resist the means in which the capitalist class seeks to drive competition between them out of desperation of their circumstances. Which isn't necessarily that easy to understand depending the perspective one abstracts from. That things are much bigger than simply immigration, that it is not end goal or intrinsically good, but should only be considered strategically to larger and substantial goals.
#14767078
Like I said in capitalist first world societies words are(how capitalists like to buy their stocks) cheap and meaningless. Both interests groups(Altrags, Neo-Nazis,BLM,SJW,NBPP etc) believe the other is enemy to their life and goals. Therefore both groups try to spread buzzwords(cuck, racist, white genocide, ACAB), not only that clashes between races or class are now through memes instead of guns. This how ingenious capitalism is, it makes it's detractors and supporters docile and turn fanbase of ideologies into a farce. Anyway, contrary to what these right wingers here assume of me(irony of the statement) I don't hate Whites at all. I never said anything that generalizes Whites as a whole, I never said Whites are a "plague". Funny enough before the election and even during the election, I tried rationalizing "white nationalists" during my time in twitter, I had views that unintentionally attracted more whites on the right, than Blacks, which views(EthioMonarchism, Black Nationalism, PanAfricanism, Black Religion, Socialism) should attract them. The irony of that at the time I thought like them, but in a different way. I even tried to rationalize police brutally at the time, like you know how Whites said their "race" was suffering through White guilt, Afro Americans are also dealing with self loathing and blame game. These are all the symptoms of LSC, racism is irrational, cause you could tell how it affected different Whites in Europe. Germans were consider dirty compare to Britons, who are technically the same genes but different tribes. So if Whites some how not only differentiate themselves from other but some how call each other lesser beings, they have lost their humanity.
#14767080
Oxymoron wrote:
Indeed, Racism has become a convenient weapon of the despicable left.
Not one min ago, you just said you didn't care about inner city Blacks, pot calling kettle black. I'm not sorry the idea of you know, treating Blacks with humanity is oppressive to you.
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By Oxymoron
#14767132
Tewodros III wrote:Not one min ago, you just said you didn't care about inner city Blacks, pot calling kettle black. I'm not sorry the idea of you know, treating Blacks with humanity is oppressive to you.


Not caring and hating are two different things.
#14767133
Oxymoron wrote:
Not caring and hating are two different things.

True I do not care for whites bitching about not being the center of worship and I hate hypocrisy of western whites(Liberals and Regressive Right)

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