Haseo21 said:
I just watched an Avenue Q video that brings up an excellent point.
Do you think everyone is at least just a bit racist?
I believe we all have the capacity to be racist but most will never use that capacity. So basically I'm still working on my stance.
No.
I think everyone is a bit bigoted at least, but not everyone is racist. The distinction can be hard for a lot of people to seperate however.
To be a racist you need to think your ethnicity is intristically better than others OR that some other race is intristically inferior. Not all that many people believe this, in those terms. Especially people who realize that global power has been transient over the history of humanity, with differant regions of the world and the ethnicities living there having been the most advanced/civilized group at differant times.
Most people can tell you that human civilization started with dark skinned/black people around the Fertile Crescent region. Around this time other ethnicities were comparitive barbarians, running around in skins and living in caves (well, maybe not literally, but far less advanced). With time power shifted and you had the rise of the first civilizations of light skinned people in the Mediterrenean such as the greeks and romans. It wasn't
until after the fall of Rome that you saw the rise of the White Anglo-Saxons who currently define global civilization.... people who were incidently Barbarians during the time of Rome.
This is a simple version of course, but the point is that it's varied. You can't sit there and say "white people are better because of all these things we have and have done" because that wasn't always the case. You can't sit there and say "black people are better as they started civilization way back at the dawn of history" because those civilizations fell and the focus of history changed.
It's more about regions and cultures, than any real intristic natural abillity and I think most people realize that.
On the other hand most people tend to believe their culture and way of life is superior to others. What racism you see that still exists is mostly outside of the first world, and comes from situations where ethnicity is a defining part of a cultural identity and it's values.
Conflicts between Democracy, Socialism, Theocracy, Capitolism, Communism, Neo-Anarchy and all kinds of other philsophies are largely societal.
Anyone in a surviving culture by definition thinks his way is best, and if not dominant it's due to some unfair twist of fate. When a culture realizes that other ways are better, it typically dies and gets absorbed by whatever culture caused that change of heart.
As a result you have French people thinking that France should be the center of global activity and everyone should speak French. You have America believing everyone should embrace American ideals of human freedom (free speech, the right to bear arms, etc...), you have the Chinese thinking we should all acknowlege our inferiority and unite under their ways as second class citizens, and you have the Muslims thinking everyone should convert to Islam or be killed, with Allah's chosen people (Arabs) in charge as our leaders... just to name a few.
Racism exists, but it's views are not held by anyone, and throughout most of the civilized world human conflict is more idealogical than anything. In most cases where racism does exist it comes about as part of a philsophy, not so much due to genetics, but because some Holy Text says the chosen people are supposed to lead or whatever.
Such are my thoughts.
The bottom line is that I think racism is mostly a political tool, and throughout the civilized world it's more or less dead in any real sense. People see cultural conflicts/bigotry and mistakenly call it racism.
I find it akin to how the UN and liberals have redefined "Genocide" on paper to include wiping out an ideaology. Something that I find darkly amusing given the job the world did on Nazi Idealogy yet nobody starts screaming "Genocide" or seriously suggests that we should have preserved the Nazis as a major force because getting rid of them to the extent we did would be morally wrong....
