What does it mean, to be a racist?
Does it mean being irrational, unkind and unfair about someone on grounds of race? Well, I try not to be.
Or, it could mean "saying anything found to be offensive for any reason whatsoever by a member of another race". If that is the meaning then we are all guilty.
If you are a white landlord in London and you prefer to let your property to overseas students from Asia because you know they take off their shoes indoors rather than a member of your own race, are you being racist?
As long as we are all equal before the law, I would defend the right of everyone to be racist. It is a tremendous act of discipline to stop oneself from being unfair, irrational and unkind even with the best will in the world, and the existence of thoughtcrime legislation is simply abhorrent to any good libertarian, as well as being counter-productive since it creates deep ill-feeling against the protected foreigner.
A Facebook friend helpfully suggested, ' "Racism" means automatically disliking someone, and treating them as an inferior, because of the colour of their skin.'
If you treat a member of another race as automatically SUPERIOR, are you being racist? If you treat another race as inferior then it logically follows that you must treat another race as superior, does it not?
Did you know racists can even marry each other? Western man thinks butter wouldn't melt in the mouth of Eastern woman, and Eastern woman thinks Western man has money. If they do not make further enquiries about the character and income of each other they will find themselves horribly horribly mistaken and disappointed.
That is why we must not be racist.
1 comment:
That article written back in January just shows how ludicrous the politics of victimhood can get, and the number of different questions it raises without concise, clear answers. I think this quote sums it up perfectly:
"Imagine a sphere completely covered with hair. If I give you a hairbrush and tell you to brush the hair so it lies down flat everywhere, guess what? — you can't. There will always be one point where the hair just whorls around and won't lie flat. There's actually a rigorous mathematical theorem to prove that. Something similar applies to political correctness. You can make it work here and you can make it work there, but you can't make it work everywhere."
http://www.johnderbyshire.com/Opinions/RadioDerb/2012-06-15.html
See also: "The Man Who Invented Racism".
http://www.infotextmanuscripts.org/man_who_invented_racism_3.html
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