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?
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