In the context of US racial history, that is not a silly argument.
By your logic then, discriminating against a group based on their height, or age, or taste in hats would count as racism. This is clearly reductivist nonsense. Words mean things, even when what they mean doesn’t have a scientific basis. Ghosts don’t exist either, yet I doubt you’d argue that it’s valid to call a toaster a ghost.
You should leave my logic to me. You’re not very good at driving it.
Is the obvious bigotry some (not all!) Brexiters feel for Polish immigrants racism or not?
I’d generally call that xenophobia.
“Race” is a fairly complex construct, that doesn’t just refer to skin color, but any number of various factors for tribal identification. The evolving definition of “whiteness” in the US is just one of the easiest referents for this.
It’s xenophobia too, but when the message is ‘no more Polish vermin’, that’s racism.
Yeah, just look at anti-Semitism. Especially in Western Europe, Jews pretty much looked like most other people by the 20th Century, unless they were ultra-Orthodox or something with the black clothes and hats and all. Doesn’t that still qualify as racism? It’s a different variety in the American context, stipulated, and by now almost non-existent, except among the true neo-Nazis and Bannonites.
And “Whiteness” was extended in the US to include the descendants of Italian and Eastern European immigrants as well. WW2 greatly accelerated this, I think.
Ethnicity is the term I’d personally use for racism. Judaism provides the perfect test case, imho;
Some people are ethnically Jewish but non-practicing, others are ethnically Jewish who practice the faith, yet both are considered Jewish by anti-semites. That’s why I think it falls under the racism umbrella, despite many ethnic Jews looking like any other European immigrants.
Yes, it’s all racism. Jokes positioning Poles (Polacks) as stupid are basically accepted because Polish people as a whole, as opposed to Polish Jews, haven’t been historically victimized. But those jokes are racist too, make no mistake, as are jokes by hacky black comedians putting on white voices and talking about their love for kombucha or whatever. We just don’t care about them because those targeted groups weren’t lynched or set on fire in the last 100 years.
Can you explain why? I’m not seeing how it’s racism rather than xenophobia.
Is the thought here that it’s not “merely” xenophobia, because that’s less bad than racism? Because I don’t think it’s any less bad.
Well, fear is generally easier to accept or forgive than hatred.
I can’t reconcile that with the accepted usage of homophobia.
‘Vermin’ means they’re other than human, therefore not of the same kind as us. We are not vermin, they are. That’s racism.
Yeah but Scott if someone calls Nazis vermin, that doesn’t mean it is racism. I think your definition is pretty broad, too broad.
Racism, bigotry and prejudice do not all mean the same-thing. Racism is fairly specific compared to the other two.
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I think a lot of people just use that anytime there is conflict against that group. I don’t think there is always fear involved.
They’re not calling Poles ‘vermin’ because of the Poles’ poltiical beliefs. It’s about their ethnicity, of course. That’s the distinction.
Yeah, -phobia is just a shorthand for group-based conflict. Because we don’t have a word that’s, like homo-misea or homo-kataphronea
That’s just an example. You’re taking a fairly narrow term, racism, and you’re trying to broaden it to include other groups; that’s completely unnecessary. We have terms for those, see above. Race and ethnicity, they’re different and established terms for a reason. They’re not interchangeable.
I’m really not. I’m pointing out that racism has always worked that way. The Irish, Italians, Germans, Greeks, Poles, other Eastern Europeans, were all at one time or another considered by white Americans to be a different race. This happens because race is an artificial construct, so it can be applied to any other ethnic or cultural group, as it is today for Poles in the UK and Muslims in the US. Is it always has been for Jews, in nearly every country.
It isn’t xenophobia, because we’re perfectly happy (and the Brits are) to let other white people into the country, as long as they’re the right sort of white people from the right sort of places. In the US, the white people from Germany are white people, but the white people from Mexico aren’t white people. In the UK, the white people from France are white people, but the white people from Poland are not white people. It’s just that those white people aren’t really white people. It’s racism.
You’re not really allowing for a difference between nationalism, racism, or nations and races then.
You seem to be under the false impression that xenophobia is an all-or-nothing proposition.