vertigo wrote:jc88 wrote:vertigo wrote:jc88 wrote:I must agree with Tmaq here. Personally, I think "racism" as a concept is wholly incomplete, in that it is an emotionally charged term that simply points to specific instance of cultural phenomena, that was accepted to be unjust to an observers morals. People use it as if it's an end all term. You might as well call someone a human instead of a racist, it would carry the same weight in a conversation with me.
IOW - Anytime someone does not like somebody, and they make a remark about them that is descriptive, you might as well call them a racist. I play alot of basketball, and if I were to say to a friend "damn dude you're like a black goddamn mamba out there dude" would I be a racist? Many people would think so, if my friend was black, and I said it angrily instead of with a smile and a pat on his back. Kobe Bryant doesn't seem to mind, and thus, in the general population the term is congratulatory and not "racial." But consider, Kobe Bryant is being called a black snake. Call him a black snake instead of "Black Mamba" and see the looks you get, just for a fun experiment
Racism isn't about words, it's about attitudes.
Yes it is. So the question becomes, how does attitude effect society? Im not sure that question has meaning, as society has a collective attitude and the individuals within display components of that whole.
There are different groups in society that act differently. There is no collective attitude. There is the law of course but the law is not an attitude. Perhaps there is an attitude of law abidence in society but what goes beyond the law fractures into group behaviour, and of course there are criminals.
I'm not sure that people act so differently. There are universals of behavior, regardless of the place in time or specific culture. One culture may have a passion for bat poopy, and another a passion about gold, and they both would get emotionally charged and go to war over their valuables. The circumstances may be unique, but the behavioral capacities are the same, and in my example here, identical. These universals are what I mean by collective, in that as a whole, the human species has underneath all of it's different cultures the same operative principles. Any observed difference would be just a a new component of that whole. If you could see the entire human species at once, and watch them spin with the Earth in real time, and the behavioral "waves" that pass through the species as they communicate and learn from and display themselves to each other, would would it's collective behavioral "temperature" be? We could only be compared to other animals on our planet, and at that point a new conversation begins as we would be comparing each species to each other and describing species as "individuals" and new definitions of behavior must be agreed on. I wonder would they could be.
