

I am a racist : Good Math, Bad Math - dehowell
http://scienceblogs.com/goodmath/2010/04/i_am_a_racist.php?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+scienceblogs%2FCyKN+%28Good+Math%2C+Bad+Math%29&utm_content=Google+Reader

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mattmanser
I was recently pondering on this after another HN article about 'whiteness
workshops' (<http://www.nationalpost.com/news/story.html?id=2758198>). I felt
that what both these articles are saying is very wrong, and I guess it comes
down to this.

In the UK we have plenty of immigrants who are never going to have the same
life as me. Virtually every phrase he uses in this article applies to them.

And they're white. They're from the old communist block.

We also have plenty of people who are poor, can only go to bad schools, are
let down by the system and end up living in crappy council flats.

A lot of them are white too. We call them chavs. They are just poor, not a
different race.

So no, I am not a racist because of where I was born, or my education, or the
innumerable privileges I have received. Because if the sentiments in these two
articles are right, I am racist against my own colour, which is impossible.

I am just lucky to be born in the country I was born in. So are you. If this
really made you feel guilty, go do some volunteer work. But never think
yourself a racist because of poorly thought out drivel like this.

~~~
ZeroGravitas
I see the same thing and come to the opposite conclusion.

The very fact that you can create such beliefs about people who look the exact
same as you, makes it so much easier to believe that the "differences" between
those with different skin colors is entirely imaginary.

I don't know too much about them but in India and other places they have
castes like in Japan they have Burakumin (
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caste>,
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burakumin>) and these people are shunned based
on jobs their great-grandfather had. This boggled my mind and seemed alien to
me until I thought about the way many English people think about the working
class.

If you can create Us vs. Them out of a century old vocation or people who were
born in the wrong end of town then imagine how much easier it is when "they"
are immediately visually identifiable, regardless of clothing, without having
to hear an accent or a strange foreign name.

The kids of these immigrants you talk about will no longer be immigrants after
a single generation just like the italian, irish and polish kids I went to
school with who I never thought of as italian, irish or polish. My family and
my wife's family both come from areas that are "chavvy" but no-one would guess
that by seeing us from a distance. The kids with different skin colours are a
different matter entirely.

(And personally I think it's tragic that it's now socially acceptable to slate
people based on them being "chavs".)

~~~
mattmanser
But that's still not racism. And never will be.

What it represents is a problem to be sure, and I do not know the right words
to express it apart from poverty or disenfranchisement, but it is not racism.

Racism is believing that some races are inherently superior to others.

Discrimination because of your background is performed every single day and
its ultimate incarnation is by a document we all know as a CV.

------
sitmaster
Blah blah blah everyone's racist except black people.

