Well, I can’t say much about how we can solve the problem of racism, but suffice it to say, a lot of people are racist simply because they need to feel superior to someone else, even if it’s for as illogical a reason as the color of their skin.

Why, do you want to feel inferior to someone else?

I think (and don’t quote me on this) it’s just a human psychological need to feel as if you’re worth something, taken to a more extreme level to degrade others.

How bad is racism?

Well, it’s bad, but it’s not the sort of thing that one gets rid of in a day. The situation of African Americans in the US is a pretty obvious example. Repercussions of slavery had effects decades and more into the future, even after it was abolished. To some extent, racism is just stereotypes, taken to extremes.

What are some racist insults?

I would rather not say.

How badly does it affect the victims?

I can’t say definitely, because I’ve never been a victim. But I would think that self-image issues, depression, and a lack of hope might result from consistent harassment. Also, one might become more angry and destructive in an attempt to lash out at the world. But again, don’t quote me- I’m just hazarding a guess.

For better answers, No One, I would refer to a reputable book on the subject. I am sure that there are many that can discuss this topic far better and in more detail than I ever could.

I’m sorry, I really don’t know. I haven’t done much personal research on the subject. I would just go to your library and see what they have to offer.

No problem, though my answers weren’t that much to be desired. I gathered that you were feeling particularly frustrated, so I tried to explain as best I could.

Yeah, I’m just psychic like that.

Hmm, good points you have there.

Yeah, I believe humans are pack animals/group oriented. (I’m a perfect example: I can’t bear to be alone for longer that 24 hours)

But why do we feel that we must group together with those we see that are similiar and reject those that are different? It’s just how we operate, yes?

Yeah….

Racism is not an easy topic to talk about, yes?

I’m afraid you lost me at “it’s also not MORALLY fair.” I’m rather sleepy today I’m afraid.

Yeah. 2 days straight of sleep deprivation. I must stop watching movies at night.

Any more? imagines a baby bird begging for more

Psych major! Need direct questions? Like what, for example?

GUMMI WORMS! <3 <3 <3

Yeah. I aim to overthrow everything and take over by the time I’m 30. You have 7.5 years free. :) [/yeesh]

Well, when you needed clarification. It was a certain point… racism itself is broad. You could pretty much go ANYWHERE with it.

edit: I forgot to say ‘compliment’. Sorry. Gosh, sooo sensitive.

No! Just said you came in here making a comment on my post. Just didn’t elaborate past the pain killers part. :D

Racism is by definition discrimination because of ethnicity or skin color. So being discriminated against for being handicapped or disabled is not racism, just discrimination. I’m sure there’s an actual term for it somewhere…

There’s certainly discrimination on disabilities. I’m a big girl—so with the weight comes a great deal of assumptions on who I am as an individual. Am I lazy? Uninspired maybe? Do I have no drive past the drive-through of the nearest McDonalds? You’ll see this sort of discrimination in the workplace though all employers will wave their hands frantically going “No, we’re equal opportunity employers”. I have yet to snag a single paying job, yet all of the times I volunteered during my academic career I was praised on being a hard worker. And they’ll disguise this by going “Well, obviously your weight is a liability” (even though I’m healthier than many people of well, lesser …stature. Girth. Whatever.).

As for racist slurs, I’m not sure of their origins. You could probably go the college-student route by looking this up on Wikipedia for a brief of some. What is offensive to one person is not always offensive to the other. A common one though that a lot of people don’t realize is in everyday conversation. A person goes “I’ve been gypped”... only gypped is a term (meaning swindled or cheated) coming from gypsies. A whole group of people. Right there.

I’ve been gypped.

Oh. my. god. I never made that connection.

:(

Now I feel guilty.

9/11?

Apparently, goo (or was it goose? something that sounds like goo. I’m hard of hearing!) is racist insult against Chinese or something.

Oh. OK.

Hey, why does people think you’re Muslim if you’re part Arab?

Going back to the original topic of whether or not Australia is a racist country…

Compare the treatment of native Americans at the hands of settlers. Compare the treatment of Indians at the hands of British colonists. Compare the treatment of gypsies and Jews by pretty much the entirety of western Europe. Compare the treatment of Germanic tribes at the hands of the Romans (going way back, there). Compare the treatment of Aztecs at the hands of the Spanish.

Pretty much every technologically advanced society, on coming into contact with a less-powerful group with exploitable resources (i.e. arable land, food, gold, strategic positioning {e.g. at a river or crossroads} etc.), before the rise of ‘post-colonial’ thought, used their power and technology to subjugate and steal from the ‘primitive savages’, in the name of material or religious gain.

So yes and no, British colonialists who arrived and settled in Australia were racially biased against Aboriginal people, but so was pretty much every society that found itself in the same situation.

EDIT: Actually, on second thought, three of the six examples I gave (including Aboriginal treatment from the top post) was directly caused by British colonials or settlers, so…

It’s all the fault of those Pommie bastards. :P

If you want to look at things that way the Chinese certainly subjugated in their time quite a few different races; the Mayans and Aztecs were far, far from innocent; etc etc. If you look beyond the now-typical 'white people are evil' rhetoric, you see that pretty much everyone has done nasty, nasty things within the past 500 years.

In the West at least the other way around, by far. Everyone's pretty laissez-faire about skin colour and ethnicity here, and to be honest I get more digs from being half Irish then a Ugandan friend of mine gets for her origins.

Umm. Tons of places where the Brits colonized, they found the current populations were already fond of killing each other off. African tribes had plenty of tribal warfare (often based on which tribe/ethnicity you were), as did other tribal peoples. Afghanistan used to (and still does in some areas) have warlords who operated on a rather racist system of : my tribe good. Your tribe bad. You annoyed me. I’m going to try to subjugate or murder all of you. Heck, the Europeans did this during the Dark Ages. Local feudal states would fight it out all the time.

Well, this is a pretty loaded subject. I can’t think of much to contribute at the moment, except to relate a story my old man once told me about how he discovered racism was an almost universal aspect to human culture, rather than a unique failing of white folks.

He spent one summer when he was in college in a Minnesota jail, for refusing to pay a speeding ticket and sassing the judge. Apparently he shared a cell with a Chippewa(IIRC) guy. One day when they were on working on building a highway, my old man’s cellmate pulled him aside and pointed out another Indian on the chain gang. “Stay away from that guy,” my old man’s cellmate told. “He’s Sioux, and all Sioux eat dog.”

I wanted to know the why, the how and the what. What makes people racists? How bad is racism? Why do they do that? What are some of the racist insults? Can we do anything to… er, solve the problem? How badly does it affect the victims?

walks in late

I don’t know how bad it is in other countries (like Australia) but here in the US….well, it varies. Down south (North and South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama) racism has a firmer foothold than it does up north. But honestly, I don’t know how firm a foothold because even though I spent two years of my childhood in the south, my parents didn’t raise me that way. I was raised to be color-blind when it comes to skin color, and I didn’t even start noticing skin color until I was eleven or twelve. I notice it now, but do I care? Nah.

My perspective might seem a bit…naive, but I think the best way to combat racism is to stop addressing it (at least here in the US. I don’t know how well that would work in other areas.) To explain: Growing up, my parents never talked about skin color. When I was seven, we went into an all-black church and stayed for the service. Mom and Dad didn’t mention the fact that we were the only white people there, though they surely noticed. What I remembered was the nice people, the loud music, the welcoming atmosphere. Because my parents didn’t mention race, it wasn’t a big deal in our household. Because it wasn’t a big deal in our household, it was never an issue for me when it came to choosing friends.

Now, I know it’s not that cut-and-dried. There are people out there who treat race like a huge issue—both racists and non-racists. But if everyone started raising thier kids to be color-blind and to treat everyone equally, racism would soon become less of an issue and more of a thing of the past.

We actually got into an argument on diversity in my theology class today. Most of the class was arguing diversity is good, it needs to be promoted. I said I thought that was silly. We had been specifically talking about college admissions. The prof said that if we have a majority with a 3.6, and a minority with a 3.4, we should let in the 3.4 because they bring a new perspective. I said perspective didn’t matter so much as qualifications. I think application forms shouldn’t have any reference to ethnicity on them. Just go with the top applicants.

I got weird looks from most of the class. I still don’t quite understand why.

butts in

First: No one, for another amazing movie on the subject of Racism in Australia, watch Rabbit-Proof Fence. It is amazing.

Yeah, the question of diversity versus unity is one that is tough for me to answer as, frankly, I think it is cool when cultures melt and blend together (the now non-vogue melting-pot idea) AND when cultures keep their central identity. sigh I do not know the answers. There has to be a middle ground where people blend enough to keep harmony, while remaining different enough to…remain unique.

But I do know that judging someone based on their “race” is stupid as, technically, there is just as much if not more genetic diversity within what we perceive as “races” than there is between two people of different “races.”

Judging people by race = bad.

Understanding differences in culture = good
But yeah, when people start being all: Whites = evil, I get annoyed because basically all of history is human beings as a whole trying to find excuses to treat another “group” like crap. angryface

For the record, I know “whites” aren’t the only racists. I have a friend who went to China to train at the Shaoli temple for a year, and the monks were the worst racists he’d ever encountered, because he could speak Mandarin and the monks didn’t know. So they’d be all bowing and obeisance and… monk-y… to you, while AT THE SAME TIME calling you all sorts of insults, like ignorant foreigners, white pigs, and so on. TO YOUR FACE, assuing that you couldn’t understand a word they are saying. So my friend turned around and said in fluent Mandarin “I can understand yu, by the way, so please stop insulting me”.

Heh. Azns.

Well, maybe it’s just the kung fu masters.

I remember one episode of this fighting-around-the-woprld series on National Gepograohic Channel when the two kickboxer hosts went to Hong Kong to learn Wing Chun¹ (in a day) and test themselves on one of that school’s fighters.

The guy who taught them gave them absolute crap, and of course they were utterly humilated.

¹ I’ve trained wing chun for many years, so I have an idea of what exactly ‘crap’ looks like in this system. I could also see the sly little smirk of the master as he instructed them in something so ineffective as to be worthless, right before his student threw them out of the boat.

Ah, that was a fun episode.

But yeah, when people start being all: Whites = evil, I get annoyed because basically all of history is human beings as a whole trying to find excuses to treat another “group” like crap.

That seems to be a growing problem here in the US (speaking as an average white girl who has found that many scholarships are for minorities only). Did you hear about how, a couple months ago, a gang of blacks (not being racist; it’s just easier to type than African-American) beat up a white guy for dating a black girl from their neighborhood? That, and the whole Professor Gates incident…..

I like the melting-pot idea. But would everyone readily accept it?

They did for a while. Back in the heyday of immigration to America, America was called the Great Melting Pot. Many immigrants who came to this country weren’t concerned with preserving ethnic heritage or influencing the culture; their primary concern was creating a better life for themselves and their children. When my ancestors came to America, their surname was changed at Ellis Island from Saunders (a Czech name) to Sanders (a common practice back then; if the Ellis Island officials couldn’t pronounce your name, they changed it to something they could pronounce). Were they mad? Heck no! They were happy with their new name and their new country, and they passed on their Czech heritage despite not making it a priority.

Only in recent years has the “salad bowl” theory become more popular. Now the PC crowd is all concerned with people getting offended because they think the melting pot idea implies that everyone blends together and becomes the same, when that’s not the truth at all. Our culture is the way it is because of a history if immigrants coming to the US and adding their own unique flavor to the pot. America wouldn’t be the same if it really were a salad bowl.

About Brandon’s point about Asians wanting to be white: this is so true in India. I was looking at marriage advertisements in the paper for the lulz (don’t ask) and maybe about 90% of the men looking for a prospective wife specified that they should be ‘fair’.

Which really isn’t true as your true self isn’t altered by wanting to be something you aren’t because they generally just want to tweak the exterior, which really isn’t you. Unless they want to change their personality, in which case the very reason they may want to change their personality is DUE to their current personality, thus creating a paradox. Lesson being, little children, be happy with what you are or you risk ripping the universe apart. /nonsense

Or, to sum up…..

“Wanting to be someone else is a waste of the person you are.” —Kurt Cobain

That is a great quote, Danielle.

Thanks. XD It’s always been one of my faves.

“Evolution in itself is a racist idea. It basically says that my race is more evolved than your race.”

Not at all. One species, subspecies, or race can only be considered “more evolved” than another in the sense that it has experienced more generations (in the form of higher birth rates and lower life expectancies). Evolution makes genetic groups different, it doesn’t make any one superior to another.

Well, we’re different species than monkeys, so technically, that would be ‘specieist’?

The very foundation of evolutionary theory is that all living things that still exist today are superior in their unique niche habitat, but that on a whole all creatures are equals. You may think you are ‘better’ than, say, a spider, but in terms of suitability to our environments we are about equal.

Every living thing exists in a unique niche habitat. Quite often, those habitats overlap, which is when one species drives the other to extinction by predation or competition; but more often than not only that species exists in that niche in that area, and all the species in a particular area exist in coinciding niches to which each is uniquely adapted.

Consider a greasslands area, like African savannah (working from memory here…) There can be many grass-eating animals living in harmony and without competition, because one species eats the very tips of the grass, another species eatsa the middle section of the grass, a third eats the tough ground bits, another would nibble at the tender shoots as they come out, and yet another would feast on the grass seeds… not to mention the insects that live around it as well, including insects that feed on the roots and the debris that was left behind..,. and then insects like dung beetles, who feed on the droppings of grass-eaters…

Equal, coinciding niches within a habitat. Each species is uniquely adapted to existing in that habitat and on that particular section of the grass, and alongside other habitats. Occasioonally competition comes about when, say, drought or overpopulation leaves one species without enough food (ofor example, the shoot-eaters eat all the grass shoots before the seeds can develop), so certain members of that species learn to survive on a different part of the grass, which of course encroaches on other species’ niches… f enough members of the seed-eater species migrate to the stalk-eating niche, then the competition will wage until only one species has survived, and the other either moves on or goes extinct.

And I haven’t even gotten to the meat eaters yet.

We talk about natural ‘harmony’, which is the wrong word to use because there is nothing less _harmonious_than nature. The word we should use is balanced: everything in an area, removing outside influences, exists in a balance. The plants feed the insects, the insects feed the birds, the birds feed the cats, the cats compete with each other and die, so their carcass feeds specialised insects, and eventually dissolves into the soil to feed the grass again… Much like the “Circle of Life” idea, but far more complicated (and messier). The point is that everything works more or less in balance, until an outside influence is brought in (like drought, flood, random genetic mutation, or introduced competitor or predator species changes the balance and force the species to adapt or die.

“Evolution in itself is a racist idea. It basically says that my race is more evolved than your race.”

Aside from the points Taku so thoroughly brought up, race as we conceive it is not a result of evolution. Race is a social construction, and there is no genetic or biological basis for race. As evolution is based entirely on genetic and biological differences, evolution cannot be racist.

For example, though you can have black, brown, spotted, and white dogs in the same breed, you don’t consider these different coat colors as different races; it’s just a matter of individual variation. For the same reason, basing race on different skin colors or other such physical features is equally ridiculous.

Danielle, regarding your hidden text: I really think you should look up Sartre’s “being-for-itself” pshilosophy. It’s a positive, affirmative philosophy that justifies humans as having intrisnic value despite the absense of a creator-god. It’s really good stuff, and it addresses all of the points you mentioned.

I’m a theistic (Christian) evolutionist myself. Admittedly, creationism is a nice idea, but I really can’t think of a sound reason to believe it.

Another theistic evolutionist here. I don’t see why there’s this concept that science and religion are wholly irreconcilable. They fit together just fine for me.

I don’t want this to get heated, so I won’t make any more comments.

Mythbusters!!!

I wonder why there’s a pressure on ladies (and men?) to be a white?

If the pressure does exist.

It’s more about money than race. Selling skin whitening creams in India makes more money than not selling skin whitening creams in India.

And being pale instead of savagely tan in America saves you a lot more money than buying fake tan lotion in America.

And it makes you look orange.

I’m naturally born tan. Which is at odd with my Azn inheritage. Which attracts a lot of racist. Not to mention that my hearing impairments just gives more for racist to insult.

Lucky I’m deaf, yeah?

Lucky I’m deaf, yeah?

Ever heard …

Nice, Danielle. Real nice.

Nice, Danielle. Real nice.

facepalm

Didn’t even catch that…...

A band that broke up years ago.

Huh. Must’ve been that good.