An actual argument I recently saw:
Person B: “Any site which contains slurs against trans people in its sign up process is unreliable” (was referring to k!wifarms)
Person A: “Slurs aren’t considered bad in most countries”
Person B: “That doesn’t justify their usage. For example, conversion therapy isn’t considered bad or banned in most countries, that doesn’t mean conversion therapy is justified or good.”
Person A: “What are you talking about? Conversion therapy is banned in most countries”
Person B: “Shows a diagram showing that conversion therapy is only banned in a handful of countries”
Person A: “I mean in most civilized countries”
I’ve seen lots of other people refer to countries as civilized or uncivilized in similar contexts. Is this generally considered to be racist?
Depends on context. In the context of an informal conversation about a specific kind of law it’s fine IMO. It’s also fine if it’s obviously not that serious, like e.g. different styles of toilets that are both found in the ‘developed world’. When you’re talking about a topic where generally richer countries do it one way and poorer countries do it another way, that’s where calling the poorer countries ‘uncivilized’ starts sounding racist (or maybe just classist, considering countries like Belarus which are poor, authoritarian and underdeveloped but not inhabited by any brown people).
White on white can still be racism. There are subtle differences between nations.
“Jews” is actually a good example. Its both a religion and a race.
Its actually quite telling how when the less different looking people there are the more we start hating on even the smallest physical differences.
I don’t think that can accurately be described as “racism” though, if even the “racists” won’t say that the ethnicity they’re hating is a different race. More general terms like ‘chauvinism’ would fit better.
Jews are not a separate race. Separate religion and nation, but not race.
You can look this up easily. But the physical features of the Jewish population where well known and used in nazi-propaganda.
Wikipedia:
Jewish people, are an ethnoreligious group
An ethnoreligious group is a group of people with a common religion and ethnic background
An ethnicity or ethnic group is a group of people with shared attributes. … It is also used interchangeably with race.[7]
Ethnos and nationality isn’t a race. Completely different concepts.
Race is an American concept that is generally considered unscientific in Europe
It is unscientific, but let’s not pretend we here in Europe don’t sometimes do it anyway. Racism is still a thing in Europe, unfortunately. But also, it has been a thing in Europe for basically as long as humans have lived on a large enough scale to notice it. In the 19th century you had the “three great races” of “Caucasoid, Mongoloid, and Negroid”. Even way back in the time of the Roman Empire they were being weird about race, ascribing strength and aggression to the pale people to their north and intelligence and peacefulness to the darker people to their south and east.
We’re collectively getting a lot better about not doing it these days, but we’ve got to recognise that there’s still progress needing made
Ok, than now all we have to do is decide who’s civilized, Europe or America, and then we know which is right.
If we take the ancient Greek example of calling anyone whose language you can’t understand a barbarian, the US and UK are probably tied for peak civilisation
Now that’s easy:
The ones who currently try so hard to destroy the planet.
Europe is not a monolith, though - Putin’s Russia will happily watch the planet go up in flames. So it’s clearly “both”.
I included an example of it being used in the context I refer to in the post description.