| Kasz216 said: A) That's a totally different situation. Specific hate crime murders are a total different thing... and i'd argue it has less to do with people finding more fun to point out other peoples flaws.... when the truth is.... everybody is racist and sexist to some degree. You couldn't be otherwise raised in modern culture. Heck there are a lot of black people racially biased against their own people. |
I don't see how it's different. It's consistent with the fact that there is a double standard across the board in modern western culture: white racism is bad, full-stop, and non-white racism is an inconvenient truth and thus generally isn't discussed. When it does come up as in the New Black Panther voter intimidation case, it is heavily implied that only white racists would get worked up about such silly things when everyone knows that voter intimidation can only mean whites attempting to disenfranchise blacks.
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Kasz216 said: B) Why wouldn't it be worse? The damage is far worse. I've had black people say some straight up racist shit to me before... it didn't effect me in the slightest. It was actually kind of funny at the time because of how novel it was. Situations reversed that could be ruining someones whole week or month. B) Why wouldn't it be worse? The damage is far worse. I've had black people say some straight up racist shit to me before... it didn't effect me in the slightest. It was actually kind of funny at the time because of how novel it was. Situations reversed that could be ruining someones whole week or month. It's like the old legal question "If someone shoots a dead body thinking it's alive, did they commit murder?" No. They very well may have well wanted to, and even thought they did.... but they didnt.
As for kids getting beat up over their race. Well that's a violent act, so really i don't think it applies, since at that point we're talking about physical harm which pretty much outweighs any sort of emotional harm, to the point of where any motivation is mostly a moot point.
I mean on any average day, racism doesn't even enter into a white kid's mind. So it would be a LOT easier for that boy to write it off as a weird fluke. To a Black kid, it's part of a general byproduct of institutionalized racism that still exists to some degree, just in less overt ways. It holds bigger meeting then just getting your ass kicked once, and you'd be far more unlikely to be able to write it off as a "one time thing".
Is that reason enough to assign extra time? No. It's why I don't agree with hate crime laws. Does it make it worse though? Well yeah. If you were forced to choose at gunpoint which kid was going to be getting brutally beaten and they were exactly the same/you didn't know anything about them but their race... you could make a fairly logical decision on which was likely to do less damage. It would be a pretty fucked up decision you'd be forced to make sure... but you could still tell which was worse, and which was more likely to cause more damage. |
That all assumes a lot of things that may or may not be true. Whatever the racial make up of a country, it isn't evenly dispersed. So if a white kid in a white majority country lives in a predominantly black area and attends a predominantly black school, and he is constantly harassed for being white, it seems pretty myopic to just say, "Eh, cracker doesn't really mean anything." It could mean a lot to him.
There doesn't really seem to be much difference in your saying that it's not harmful for blacks to say racist things to or about whites because it didn't affect you when it happened to you, and guys in this thread saying they don't see the problem with female dancers at this party because it doesn't affect them. It might be true in the main, but your experience isn't everyone else's. I just can't see saying that statistically such and such a group is priviliged, therefore it's not offensive to hurl abuse at them because it can't really harm them. It might be true that there isn't the same kind of harm as experienced by an underpriviliged group, but the practical effect of this is that we end up treating some racism as more tolerable than other kinds instead of equally condemning it all. Offense should be taken whenever offense is intended. Less so when it is given out of ignorance.
Which may or may not be the case here. I'm quite fatigued of all the outrage over sexism in gaming lately, not because it's baseless but because it's so shouty and unproductive. In this particular instance we don't really know a lot and yet, predictably, there's a massive shitstorm over it all over the 'net. The dancers look pretty modestly attired, so it just seems tacky rather than sexist (or even sexy), and I can't really imagine why Brenda Brathwaite would resign over it if she didn't resign last year when they had topless females. But who knows, maybe something else happened or the picture isn't really indicative of the situation. Or maybe it has just reached a breaking point for her.
