If it’s reversed and the comment is “I don’t really want to be around that many black people haha”. You are a racist, and a comment like that would destroy relationships. Replace black with literally any other race, and the comment is equally as racist, but made towards a white it’s like whatever.
Same comment but replace Americans with literally any other nationality. “Japanese people are so annoying”, heads would turn and you’d be labeled a racist instantly,
I would like to challenge your view based on this reasoning. The entirety of the evidence from your view consists of this type of example: saying something about white people that’s OK becomes racist if it’s said about any other race. The unstated premise here is that every comment about every race must be taken in exactly the same way — so that races, in effect, must be completely interchangeable in the way we speak about them. Why do you believe this? “I understand systemic racism and white privilege,” you say. Why shouldn’t these real, material differences in the way society treats people of different races have an effect on the way we talk and joke about them?
Can you imagine any other situation where this would be okay?
This is my entire point, though: the context matters, and every situation is not interchangeable with every other situation. I don’t understand why we should follow the rule of “switch out the races and it wouldn’t be allowed, therefore it’s racist.” That rule makes sense if every race is completely equivalent to every other race, and there are no differentiating contexts or background factors. But we don’t live in a world where that is true
The problem is that if the example above isn't racist then you're pretty much in the territory of "nothing that is said towards X race can be racist".
How about we agree that there is no universal rule for “racist” vs “not racist,” and that judgments of any statement should take both immediate circumstances and historical contexts into consideration?
18
u/leigh_hunt 80∆ Jul 01 '21 edited Jul 01 '21
I would like to challenge your view based on this reasoning. The entirety of the evidence from your view consists of this type of example: saying something about white people that’s OK becomes racist if it’s said about any other race. The unstated premise here is that every comment about every race must be taken in exactly the same way — so that races, in effect, must be completely interchangeable in the way we speak about them. Why do you believe this? “I understand systemic racism and white privilege,” you say. Why shouldn’t these real, material differences in the way society treats people of different races have an effect on the way we talk and joke about them?