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  • "Colour prejudice" IS racism

    posted by Deleted user in Portugal forum 

    Any time a person is prejudiced against another on the account of SKIN COLOR it is racism. I don't know why you're fighting the connotation; it's obvious that racism exists there and everywhere else; the herd mentality is all-pervasive. The problem with "racism" is that it's so hard to define when things like nationalism, local pride, economics, and politics all get thrown into the mix. As the incredibly rude João Pedro Seara mentioned, some of it might be just a hatred for "uncontrolled influx" of immigrants, but oftentimes the attitudes are MIXED, there's racism (seeing other people as "them," as "different" (in a bad way) because of their skin color) plus real concerns. What's the best way to defeat those attitudes? Acknowledge that they exist and work against them. Here in the United States if someone were to say "Why don't you go back to Africa?" they would have gotten sued and/or fired. We have such a bad history of blatant racism here (inherited from our European ancestors and kept around because of economics) that we often push too far the other way and allow racist attitudes to exist in black, hispanic, asian, whatever, cultures. It's so bad that to call out a black person here on their racist attitude is to get branded a racist yourself. "Racism" is such a monolithic idea that things like genocidal tendencies, backwards morals, and uncomfortable events in history, are swept under the rug as long as you have a "racist" to point to. I had a class here at Temple University called "Race and Diversity in America" that basically condemned European (and the descended American) cultures for their genocide/enslavement of African and Native cultures, but said nothing of the fact that it was the Africans that sold each other into that slavery, and of the Natives that also had very racist attitudes towards the "dirty" Spanish and Portuguese. So basically I understand the mindset of someone that wants to rage against the accusation of racism - on the one hand it's so meaningless because of numerous cultural factors (and tends to only be accounted for if you're white), on the other hand it's so REAL and obviously exists that it's extremely uncomfortable to admit. Saying that "racism exists everywhere!" doesn't fix the problem. Trying to justify colonialism and pretending like there's a reason to be upset at the colonized people (for rebelling and killing like the colonizers did) is wrong. Yelling at someone because of an obvious problem and telling them to "shut your(their) mouth" is horribly rude. Again, the best way to defeat the racist, or incredibly nationalistic, attitude is to acknowledge it and move on. Finding similarities is so much better.

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