Quote:
Originally Posted by Crown Royal
I agree with Acey, this is 100% a good thing to post.
Racism is racism, it doesn't matter if someone is white, black, Asian, Latino, Aboriginal, Middle Eastern... etc. If you dislike someone and treat them poorly because of the color of your skin, you are racist.
One big problem I have is hearing someone say "you can be racist against ___" or "you can't be racist if you are ____" Racism is racism and it is always bad.
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This is particularly an issue when people and media start discussing situations where the racism isn't between groups they traditionally associate racism with.
For example, if you're a scifi fan or just a nerd of some sort there's a good chance you might have heard of Liu Cixin and his Hugo-winning book "The Three-body Problem". (First part of 'Remembrance of Earth's Past' trilogy.)
What you're probably not aware of is that Liu Cixin is quite openly racist, to the point of supporting what are, effectively, concentration camps. It's just that he's racist towards uighurs, who to a casual western observer look like just a slightly different variety of "Asian".
If western writer said things like "well what else is the government going to do to them, they've caused so much trouble" and talk about Black people, that writer would never be on a list promoting "books by people of color".
I mean, I don't support boycotting writers because they're bad people (I support not reading Three-Body Problem because it's a terrible book), but I do think that if your ultimate goal is to fight racism, you probably shouldn't be recommending one of the more openly racist writers in his genre.
I also think a lot of the time the western media really struggles to see racism even when it's so damned obvious. There are so many cases where I feel like whacking a reporter on the head for not understanding why group A is hostile towards group B in a foreign country, or call something "tribal conflict" when the "tribes" are millions of people.... Just makes me want to scream "it's racism!" in their ear.
...of course there's a rabbit hole here, where I could start pointing out how people not seeing racism between for example two "Asian" groups perfectly underlines how our concept of "race" is almost completely arbitrary, and has no basis in for example genetics.
I mean, how is Meghan Markle "black"?