Came acros this after i left this discussion, http://youtu.be/nN9hy4YNIv0
Made me chuckle so i guess i’m white.
I would say reverse racism would be something like a white kid getting bullied in a majority black school, in retaliation for the larger-scale abuse of black people by white people. It’s not reinforcing cultural dominance, but rather represents a poor attempt to rebalance power by attacking a member of a dominant group. I wasn’t thought of as English when I was growing up in Ireland (even though my parents are), but any English kids I knew had a hard time in school. Ireland was very nationalistic when I was there, but they wouldn’t have seen themselves as culturally dominant to the UK.
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I think the context in which this video discusses slavery and the emergence of entrenched racial privilege in the west is pretty clear, and I don’t think that it is negated by slavery in other cultures. He’s talking about white peoples attitudes to brown people in Australia, and that is a narrow frame of reference he targets quite nicely.
If my comment was too broad, I apologise, but the comment I was replying to was off base.
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I don’t think there’s such a thing as “reverse” racism. Racism is racism.
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Any kind of foreigner at all, as once covered here on Boing Boing.
Technically he’s wrong, he describes a situation pretty close to Regular racism, oppression of a people because of their skin colour/culture.
But the joke is still funny. Humour often comes from situations where we have to suspend reality a bit.
Give it up for my homie!
Dude sounds like an Aussie to me. A fellow Melburnian at that.
But yeah, +1 yeesh at ‘reverse’ racism.
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What’s the deal with White People? Why can’t they take a joke?
I mean, it’s like, you question the idea that they’re self-made individualists who exist in a pure meritocracy by pointing out the socio-economic and historical context in which they exist and benefit from, and they can’t even see it.
Stupid white people, all “Herp derp a bloo berp, everything I have is from only my own skill and luck. Derpy doo, hating white people be crazy racist, yo!”
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Funny how hard some people will type to make this guy be wrong. It’s almost as if they were desperate to say racism doesn’t exist.
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Actually, the abolition of slavery started in the 3rd century BCE. The renaissance did focus on humanist values, but not for slaves. Even though the Magna Carta is a product of the renaissance, slavery still remained common in the west. Most of the west didn’t start to abolish slavery until the 19th century, hundreds of years after the renaissance ended. The last country to abolish slavery did so in the 1980’s, most countries (both west and east) truly started to abolish slavery in the 19th century.
Having said that, the comedian has a good point when he says that the slavery in the colonies still has major repercussions to this very day in the western world.
In this case, it’s more that they’re insisting on a definition of racism that’s infantile, and useless for any meaningful analysis or as the basis of political action to end oppression.
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He makes the good point, and so do lots of people here already, that history and its continuing effects make racism to white people different to racism from white people. He’s right, if that’s his point.
But man, racism is something humans do, on all kinds of levels. Shit - animals do racism, and there’s every reason to think that human racism has its roots in our pre-human past. If you and 20 of your family members are in life-and-death competition for resources with every other human on the planet, tendency to racism is a distinct advantage. We’re only now getting to the point where people are civilised and enlightened enough to really set that stuff aside.
An - admittedly simple - way of looking at history is that certain Europeans got really lucky with their racism and violence at key moments. The rest of the world that ended up getting shafted by them weren’t shafted because they were peace-loving, principled, non-expansionists who got taken advantage of, it’s because someone was always going to be slightly luckier and come out on top of the whole bloody mess. That doesn’t mean those people weren’t racist, violent arseholes. In fact, it by definition means they were world-class racist, violent arseholes. That said, it’s not hard to imagine the whole thing shaking out exactly like Aamer puts it - in ‘reverse’ - and that would just mean a different group of violent, racist arseholes had come out on top.
The only way for everyone to not be racist is for everyone to consciously not be racist. Not by only being racist when the people you’re being racist to have had it too good for too long anyway. Not to only be racist ironically while also noting that your people have had it too good for too long. Not to be a little bit racist to make a funny point about inequality. Just don’t be fucking racist.
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Hahaha, NO. There is no such thing as SYSTEMATIC racism against white people. There is racism against white people and institutional racism is not the only example of it. Please though, tell me what made up definitions of well established words you would like to use because you have no other way to defend your point. What a joke.
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I don’t think racism depends on “systemic abuse”. And from a non-US centric view, you can find places where that is the case for whites.
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The irony of a privileged male Saudi complaining about white people is almost too much.
His complete ignorance to world politics and basic history (especially the history of his own people and religion) are just the frosting.
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Well, there’s two things at work.
One is the historical context of the moment, wherein non-caucasian people have been systematically otherized to the point of de-humanization on multiple fronts throughout the colonial period and beyond.
The other is the basic animal fear of the unusual, in which minor differences become exaggerated into taboo qualities due to the obsession with purity in a fear-centered mindset in animals and people.
These are related things, but they are different things. One is racism. The other is just general prejudice and bigotry (and is even evolutionarily useful, if not exactly useful in a society).
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I agree - they are different and related things, but you can get (or my working hypothesis is that we got) the first one as a long-term result of the second one.
I think we differ on where we put the bounds of the label of ‘racism’ - I think of it as being a sibling of all the other ‘x-isms’ - a general ‘irrational prejudice against x’… rather than something specific to a group of people or historical context.
Oh he’s saudi? Yeah, that changes things a lot. especially since there actually WAS an effort by islamic slave trade in Europeans to the muslim world, particularly women for the purpose of domestic work and concubinage (they were priced higher than the men) Its a real thing.
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You’re attempting to re-define racism here so that whether or not a specific incident of bigotry is racist depends on everything that’s ever been done by any member of the races involved throughout the centuries.
The problem is, that’s not what the word means in general usage. And attempting to redefine it that way can perpetuate racism, because it allows groups to excuse behavior based on the actions of people they’ve never met, rather than their current interaction with someone of another race.
Historical context matters, but not so much that it overwrites the actual actions and intentions in play.
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If you are judging a person or group of people based on their skin color, you are a racist.
BTW, slavery was not about black or white. It was about sub-humans. Slave cultures throughout history have had groups of people they consider less than human. One example would be the Irish who were white but enslaved by the white British to provide labor for the Caribbean colonies. In just 10 years the Brits killed 500,000 Irish and enslaved another 300,000. In a single decade the population of Irish was cut in half. The Irish were the main slave stock for a very long time.
Black slaves were considered superior to Irish slaves and were sold at higher prices due to the Celtic taint of the Irish reducing their intrinsic value. It wasn’t until the African gold market collapsed and the people of the Ivory Coast began selling Africans as slaves at a greatly reduced price that black slavery overtook Irish slavery.
As I’ve said, it was not about skin color. It has always been about sub-human peoples and who those are depends on the time period and the slavers themselves. The racist angle is short sighted, uninformed, and ultimately a divisive tool which serves the same people it always has; those who profit from hate.
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