Re: Racism
Posted: 30 Aug 2019, 19:39
And you should post more often.pavoneveneto1+ wrote:I hardly ever post because I realise most people on this forum know more about football than I do and I don’t feel I could contribute much, but I read practically everything, and love the site. I do, however, know something about this subject so I’ll have my say.
It seems to me that the whole idea of race is quite outdated. When people talk about racism they often mix up two different things. One is ethnic group, which in my understanding means being part of a group who are socially and culturally distinct from others. That might or might not depend on national boundaries or genealogy or language. Black is not an ethnic group without any context; Asian certainly isn’t ; Irish, arguably, is. The other factor is physical appearance.
In defence of racism (not an oft-heard phrase), we can like or dislike a particular culture and what, in our perception, it stands for. That leads some people to dislike people of that ethnic group. For example, you might perceive Norwegian culture (yes, I’m choosing Norwegian as a safe option) to be very conservative, the people reticent and over-serious. As a consequence you might not feel attracted to it. By some definitions that would make you a racist. It seems to me you have every right to harbor that dislike, but it’s how you display it that is the crux; you don’t have the right to decide that a person of that ethnic group embodies the qualities you find distasteful, and you certainly don’t have the right to abuse somebody based on your perceptions of the ethnic group they belong to.
In the case of people’s physical appearance, it’s pure idiocy because it doesn’t put them in any group anyway. Race, in these terms, is a myth.
At the end of the day we all know what we are talking about which is a-holes, as Rigger put it, who aren’t intelligent enough to express their frustration in any way other than banal, facile insults. “Racists” are just inarticulate and simple-minded.