Defining racism. Your thoughts?

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I think there is only one "race" of thinking beings on this planet, the human race.

Subdivision by skin color, religious preference, economic standing are man made division between and among people, not natural "kinds" or natural types.

ruveyn

No, but we can't fix everything.

Really? I think I could argue that in some of the photos of him that surfaced, Trayvon Martin was going out of his way to look thuggish, as many teens of his age tend to do; does that observation make me a racist?

I also could argue that Obama has the foreign policy of a thug, being polite in public while quietly murdering people in far off places out of the site of the world at large; again, a racist observation or simple reality?

If you really want to go into semantics, I would argue that of all the permutations of the word thug, the only one that has a racially specific meaning strong enough to state with certainty who it's users are referring to is the term thugged out, which applies elusively to appearance and is usually self applied or applied in group.

What you're trying to claim is that you know what people are really saying, reading nuances and hidden meanings into words that may or not be there, but the fact of it is that you don't know that, unless you're also claiming to be a mind reader. Are you making that claim?
Perhaps you should remember that you're on a forum for people with a communications disorder that are often plain spoken and oblivious to social faux pas, and absent strong evidence to the contrary, tend to mean exactly what they said and nothing more.

Racism is believing in the innate superiority/inferiority of different people based solely on their race, nothing less and nothing more.

The guy hurling racial slurs? Might be racist, might just be ignorant, might be provoking someone for his own reasons, definitely a jerk.
Racial jokes? Same deal.
The guy that stays away from a certain race because he thinks they're all criminals? Depends on if he thinks that because of statistics or because he believes in racial characteristics.

I think true racism is actually rarer than most people think, most of what passes for it is prejudice, ignorance, the remnants of instinct, and good old jackassery.

There are a lot of words that aren't necessarily racist, but can be applied in a racist manner if they're playing into a stereotype of one ethnicity or another. "Thug" is one of those; by itself, it means something along the lines of, 'overly aggressive,' 'mean,' 'bully,' or 'willing to hurt others for personal gain.' The problem comes when it's applied to African Americans in a way that plays to the racist stereotypes of African Americans as criminals or violent.

Wrt. Obama, if you called him a 'thug' with the explicit context of him being an American president, it wouldn't be racist; if you called him a thug, a Muslim, and an 'illegitimate president,' then it probably would be.

Also, people can say a lot of ignorant-ass s**t that, while they don't have bad feelings towards people of other races, still betray an attitude of superiority or condescension towards the target. My grandpa didn't have bad feelings towards non-white people when he asked me if my boyfriend was white, but it was still a racist thing to say. He would have been shocked if I had said so, though, and said something along the lines of, 'There's nothing wrong with colored people, but they should keep to themselves.'

What words are unequivocally racist regardless of context?





So would words like 'lazy', 'shiftless', 'criminal', etc, but no one accuses you of blowing racist dog-whistles when you use them in other contexts. Here's a fun one for you; when I say the word 'slacker', what ethnicity is the person you picture? Does anyone care to claim that that word has any racist meaning to it?



What about any of that makes it racist? If you think he's a muslim, I'd call you uninformed, but not racist. If you called him a thug, I'd accuse you of hyperbole at worst, but not racism. If you said he was not a legitimate president, well my response would depend on your reasoning, but don't think you could say that an argument that his criminality regarding his constitutional or other legally binding obligations disqualifies him is racist.



So are you saying that your grandfather was a racist, or would you say that he was a product of his times, ignorant, etc?

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hqCLr6MSBWk[/youtube]

I think that the various insults used to demean a particular type of person are racist/sexist/whatever, unless they are used by someone of that group in an attempt to reclaim/redefine the word.


exactly.


Gen X. I picture someone my own age, male or female, any race, and the sense of helplessness many of us were raised with because our teachers basically told us that the US way of life was unsustainable and we were all screwed. Damn hippy teachers. ;p
I've never been discriminated against because of my generation, though, so it doesn't bother me.


It would be racist because 'Muslim' (like Kenyan/Illegitimate) are ways of 'othering' the president, because of the sense that some white people have that 'real' Americans are white. I think that a lot of them don't even realize it - just, when they think 'American,' they don't think of a black guy. Ever. 'White guy' is the default for American, and, for that matter, it's the default for 'citizen.' It's part of the idea that white America cannot be represented by a black man, and that policies or programs that, by default, hurt predominantly or exclusively blacks aren't as bad as those that hurt predominantly or exclusively whites. Can you imagine 'stop and frisk' being implemented, to the degree that the NYPD has implemented it in NYC (more stop-and-frisks of young black men than there are young black men in the city, in any given year), in a predominantly white, wealthy suburb? With the level of disrespect that the cops show to the frisk-ees? That would have been taken to the SCOTUS on a 4th amendment challenge a decade ago.


Both. Homophobic, too. Not that I didn't love him despite that.
Christopher Columbus was a product of his times, but he was still racist and genocidal as s**t.

I'm saying that I understand the context of their remarks, and when people who otherwise selectively ignore information use racist dog whistles, then I expect that I can make the case for racist speech. People often put on airs for photos, for example, or even costumes. If people overlook the statistics that show that people of color are charged with and convicted of crimes at a higher rate, and that the media report on crime in a racially biased and misleading manner, then I will expect to make a case for a racist attitude on the part of that person.

I saw your response.

I get the principle of what you're saying: that innocent words can become codewords.

Whether 'thug' is that, or has been used as that long enough to be considered a racist epithet- I dont know. I draw a blank at this point.

Its still not on my radar screen to think of "thug" as a racist codeword. But if folks are sensitive about it then I guess we should all tell OliveOilMom not to use the term anymore.

One more linguistic landmine I guess.

But I dont think using the word 'thug' is like a westerner wearing a Buddhist/Hindu swastika on his sleave and then expecting people to parse out that he is wearing it to symbolize his interest in Asian Indian mysticism, and not to kick his ass for being a neo-nazi. Its not a blantant racist symbol like that.

Humans are a sh***y sad excuse for a race and should be persecuted and mistreated because of it. The only people who have ever been meen to me have been humans. They are the cause of all my problems.

"The Man" wants to take away my freedom.... Humans all the way
A poor miscreant thief from the ghetto steals your car... Guess what, it was a human.
Unwanted TSA patdown... Humans touchin your junk.
Bullies in school. Humans, and filthy young ones at that
Adversary Party gets elected instead of who you're cheering for... Guess who... Humans
Fat Welfare momma misusing her EBT card... A human
Corrupt Rich White Banker and Cronies screwing up the Economy... Humans, Humans, Humans
And there is so much more about humans that is just ughhh...

Humans deserve all the racism dished upon them.

Humans are by far the inferior race in the Orion Arm. Pathetic Bags of meat and bone.


Now Robots

Don't even get me started. Abort Retry, Fail... Blue Screen, Not within parameters... Complete BS, I tell you. They can parameter your input just fine. No need to be a dick about the output. but they do it anyway.

I don't know if you saw the thread that sparked OliveOilMom's question, but that part of the post has since been deleted. You can probably piece it together from reading back in the Need Help from Mods thread, though. The word was used as part of a bizarre conspiracy theory involving Pres. Obama. If the person who wrote that post had called the NYPD thugs, it wouldn't have seemed problematic, but in the context of stretching to implicate a black man in a bizarre conspiracy theory it did.

By the standard of judging words in context, I don't think that OliveOilMom or you have to completely remove the word from your vocabulary.

Edited for spelling

Last edited by jrjones9933 on 28 Dec 2013, 11:07 am, edited 1 time in total.

Racism is anything that would offend a certain race. Any stereotypes or jokes about a certain race are racist.

I defend myself from the label of "rascism" by saying that, if stereotypes exist for each race, then certainly, we ARE different.
I view personality over color, but the fact of the matter is that a chain flow occurs with each one.
People from Mexico, for example:
They have a culture.
People from that culture raise their children in a specific way.
The people who run that country make decisions and can influence hatred or peace.
Thus, the majority of people from mexico can be generally mean, ignorant, nice, educated, etc.
So, if their economy is down, their military is weak, their leadership is corrupt, among other things, a "race" or group of people from another country can be legitimately labeled.
During WW2, the germans were... well, what do you think? The Japs from that time? What about russians from the cold war? Or how about Iranians during the Revolution? The iraqis under Sadam? People from Somalia or other failed states?

Rascism, in my opinion, is more based on the country. And within a country, their regions, terrirtories, or states.
I'm not rascist, but I'm simply saying that to judge a person from their background is more appropriate.
Majorities from races can act a certain way, so label THEM, but not the minority who have no affiliation with that behavior.

I don't know.

That's just cognitive laziness, and doesn't make any more sense than judging individual people by any other sort of group to which they just happen to belong by birth.

I have cheesism, I hate people that don't like blue cheese. I mean yeh it stinks but it's amazing, so screw you normal yellow cheese eaters go back to where you came from.

Begin Part Xhosa, Jewish, Irish, Spanish, a mixed son of mixed immigrant parents, you realise the hilarity of it being even a discussion. Like nationalism I wouldn't even die to protect my garden dirt let alone the dirt of a land my parents happened to stop at 9 months after my mother getting pregnant. A speck upon a speck.

I prefer to be anti-theist it allows me to hate in the dark.