Why the oppressed can be racist
If your speech shows that you're OK with speaking in a derogatory fashion (beyond the occasional stupid joke) about a large number of people you've never met, then you are injecting approval of that sort of thing into your world.
Maybe we should all look in the mirror and ask whether we're supporting by our behavior the very thing we say we condemn. Acceptance of the idea that the oppressed have license to condemn whole groups of people contributes to racism because it represents approval of the very thing a racist does..
Maybe we should all look in the mirror and ask whether we're supporting by our behavior the very thing we say we condemn. Acceptance of the idea that the oppressed have license to condemn whole groups of people contributes to racism because it represents approval of the very thing a racist does..
Comments (27)
Quoting Mongrel
"Whole groups of people"? Nationalities as well as races? If so, depends. Did Jews who condemned the German people en masse for their acquiescence to Nazism somehow contribute to racism? Hardly. Does their attitude suggest they were racist / bigoted? Not really. Were they justified in feeling antipathy towards every German for the behaviour of the Nazis. Strictly speaking, no, but...
On the other hand, when Louis Farrakhan says, "The white man is our mortal enemy and we cannot accept him. I will fight to see that vicious beast go down into the lake of fire..etc...", yeah, racist and encouraging racism.
Depends on level of oppression, type of generalization etc. Context, basically.
But more typically, the oppressed man oppresses women; the oppressed woman oppresses children; the oppressed child oppresses the disabled child. If society teaches oppression, everyone learns it.
There is no virtue in being oppressed, it is a hierarchy of power, not virtue. Nevertheless, when one looks from above, it is impossible to distinguish those that fight to end the hierarchy from those that seek to invert it. One needs to ask whether Farrakhan's 'white man' is a race or an institution, but from the position of an instance of the institution, it comes to the same thing.
I won't argue the toss on Farrakhan. I think we're agreed it's not valid to posit a symmetrical relation with regard to the interpretation of language in the context of an asymmetrical social relation between the groups using it. I'd say it's the same principle as applies to the use of the words "nigger" / "nigga" and so on.
EDIT: I should add that the reason I agree with Mongrel that we shouldn't be afraid to say that minorities can be racist in some contexts is not so much the worry that not doing so will spread the very thing we object to and thus be hypocritical etc. etc. but that it doesn't mitigate oppression to reduce the oppressed to people who can't even be morally wrong about stuff. (And I take it you would probably agree from what you've written).
I think it's natural for the oppressed to feel angry and full of hatred. Those are potentially toxic emotions. I don't mean to sniff at the psychological journey of the oppressed. Not everybody finds peace. Some people end up dead or worse because of the hatred they face internally and externally. A bystander isn't really in a position to tell them how to navigate it.
But what I see is that sometimes people think they've found a safe spot to vent their bigotry. With a little dose of self-righteousness and an approving crowd.. out it all comes. A person who really knows better than to engage in that sort of thing enjoys a spew.
I don't think there is any safe spot for it. There isn't any exception to the rule. It's precarious to believe that there is. Teaching that it's a free-for-all for victims is dangerous for that reason.
I think to some extent it's neither. There's a problem with oppressed people agreeing with their oppressors...like a giant case of Stockholm syndrome. Isolation from white people became a path to combating it. Farrakhan was involved in that.
As I said.. I'm not saying I'm in a position to tell anybody how to work through their insanity. I can pay attention to what I'm condoning, though.
1) A white person says it's wrong for blacks to use the N word because it encourages racism.
2) A Republican politician claims the slogan "Black Lives Matter" is inherently racist.
3) A Jewish politician claims Palestinians should be denied rights due to their inherent anti-semitism.
Who's the racist in these cases: The historically oppressed? The historical oppressor? Both? Neither?
I see some distinctions here, though. Germany as a nation was the enemy in WW2 and they were officially Nazis. So, to hate those Germans and those Nazis was not racist. The enemy was clearly defined. I would say, though, that if in 1940, you hated a German immigrant in the US who had nothing to do with the atrocities solely because he was German, you'd have been racist (considering some Germans were Jews). And certainly you'd be racist today if you continued hating the krauts.
On another note, could you guys add a feature so that when a post says "Jew" in it, I get notified, just like when it says @hanover?
Not sure about the official enemy bit. The Germans were acquiescing to Nazism well before WWII started (and I use "Germans" as a convenient shorthand for "Germanic people in Germany as opposed to other ethnic groups living there"). Point remains that the weight of oppression on one side somewhat relieves the moral burden of offensiveness on the other.
Quoting Hanover
All doable within the current system, mon ami. Just set up another account with the user name "Jew". I will then make a new rule that everyone must write @Jew instead of "Jew" when referring to said ethnic group. I'm sure that will be a crowd-pleaser. :-*
Multiple accounts is an interesting idea. I've always thought that I'm the only one fully qualified to debate against me.
A lot of people are probably "ethnicists" rather than "racist" but that requires more mouth-part movement than is convenient if you are going to utter the word 10,000 times a day.
Some people (some Danes, for instance) are willing to accept multi-ethnicity; they are not willing to accept multiculturalism. Danes have a long and valued cultural history which, like all peoples' history. involves the good, the bad, the ugly, and the indifferent. If they accept desperate immigrants from the Middle East and Africa, it doesn't seem like an enormous imposition to insist that the immigrants adapt to Danish / European folkways. This is doable for the immigrants. So, a Danish grand mosque was designed in the Scandinavian modern style. Religious food rules can be relaxed. One's children can be Moslem and eat the pork roast that their fellow Danish children are eating in school. Granted: some Moslems are much more observant than others. But isn't the decision to be very observant (like being ultra-orthodox or strictly Methodist) your problem rather than everybody else's?
Individual and group differences are spread out on several axes: religion, geography, ethnicity, diet, language, race, occupation, education, politics, recreational drug preference, sex, and so on. It doesn't make sense to boil all conflict down to "racism".
But that's already a generalisation that is neither true nor useful. It is arguable whether there was ever even a majority of Germans that could reasonably be described as Nazis. (And I do need to remind you that Germanic peoples include the English so your shorthand is itself of a shorthand that is wildly inaccurate!). Any attempt to view the persecution of the Jews as a collective act of the German people is itself therefore nothing but propaganda .
There is of course considerable historical support for the observation that when freed from oppression the oppressed become oppressors. The interesting thing is that it is usually not those who actually suffered that are responsible but the first generation after them, those seeking 'justice' by which, of course, they usually, if unconsciously, revenge, for their parents.
Not if your host country actively seeks to prevent you from doing so while espousing a 'charter' of human rights and religious freedom which as an EU member Denmark certainly does. The absurdity of the burkini bans in France, now thankfully ruled unconstitutional, is a prime example of a country ignoring its own legal system and its philosophical foundations to espouse prejudice. The very opposite of 'your problem, believer'!
It is true when you keep the goalposts where they were. (Note the key word "acquiescing").
Quoting Barry Etheridge
True, it was badly phrased to the point where if you didn't read any of the rest of my post you might have been confused about what I obviously meant.
Quoting Barry Etheridge
I'm not interested in arguing about this as it doesn't really bear on the point I was making.
This just in... "A court on the French island of Corsica upholds a local ban on the burkina..." BBC
Can I see some please?
Post-revoultion Russia
Post-war Zionism
Nazi-hunters
The Reformation, the Counter Reformation, the Counter Counter Reformation (actually pretty much the entire history of Christianity post-Constantine's 'conversion')
Cromwell's Protectorate
Islamic extremism
Where do you want to stop?
Yes, well, Corsica! Any excuse to poke a finger in France's eye!
Why would any rational oppressed person disperse his/her anger instead of directing it at their oppressor?
Did I say a rational oppressed person would do that?
No, only the ones that don't "focus their anger, hatred and militant actions instead of indiscriminately dispersing them across whole peoples".
There were Nazi hunters because the post-war West German government had demonstrated less than an enthusiastic commitment to carrying out the necessary detective work to find, arrest, and prosecute named Germans who were responsible for atrocities under the Nazi regime. These were not antisemitic Germans who kicked a Jew or two down the stairs. They were people who were directly responsible for the Holocaust--like Dr. Josef Mengele or Adolf Eichmann.
If the Allies were anxious to be done with the war crimes trials and denazification programs, it wasn't because of some inchoate sympathy with the Nazis. Rather, the Allies wanted Germany to take care of itself as soon as possible. Germany had been significantly damaged by the war, both in terms of physical infrastructure, but also in its human resources. The Allies felt that the trials and denazification programs weren't conducive to Germany becoming productive again.
In so doing the Allies didn't issue an amnesty to leading Nazis. They expected the Germans to pick up the task of prosecution. For the most part, that didn't happen.
The Burkini prohibition, I think is really kinda prescient, given that ISIS has recently banned the burka. It is an excellent way to disguise an carry weapons.
http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2016-09-06/in-surprise-move-islamic-state-group-reportedly-bans-burqas.
My fear is that small minority groups will become normalize by the media coverage of candidates such as Trump. Interviewing White Supremacists at Trump rallies, given them a legitimacy which they would not have had if not for his candidacy.
The whole thing about Jews mystifies the shit out of me. I guess they are the historical scapegoat.