1nvest wrote:Always amusing to see how racists consider/define racism and are all too quick to show/shout the racist card
Interesting to see the UN claiming trillions from Britain for reparations of past slavery of blacks, whilst giving no regard to the massive degrees of historic slavery of whites. In the 17th century coastal dwellers of Britain lived in constant terror of being kidnapped and sold into slavery in North Africa.
1. How do racists consider/define racism?
2. Why is it so amusing?
GS[/quote]
There's something about how modern academia revised the meanings of words in the social sciences, which has been eagerly taken up by the public, but being something of a pedant I like to go into it and if necessary resist this.
The suffix -ism up till the 1930s used to mean a school of thought, tendency or movement linked with the first part the word. So, Buddhism is the movement which follows the teachings of the Buddha. Likewise, -ist is a person who belongs to that -ism. A Buddhist follows Buddhism.
So in theory, racists are anyone who believes in the existence of race which is nearly everyone - who for example put "none" in the race question of the census? There is a discussion about whether race is something physical or just a social creation which approximately aligns with the right wing and left wing. But it's all still racism in the original definition.
But for some reason in the 1930s of all times, certain uses of these suffixes began to mean something involving discrimination and/or supremacy. I need to do more research into the history to find out the who & why. So to answer question 1 I'd say I'm both a racist and not a racist depending on how we define terms.
A similar twist in definitions happened in other words like feminism and sexism. Then there's the 'phobia' words like Islamophobia or homophobia which aren't used to mean what they say on the tin, so to speak. And antisemitism, where 'semite' is used in a different way. Come to think of it, why is 'anti' used in antisemitism, when according to the modern useage of -ism it already means discrimination? Shouldn't it just be 'semitism'?
PS for question 2, I don't find this amusing, rather it's confusing!