If that law was followed to the letter, black and white people would have had equal rights.

But, fine. Forced segregation is also racist. Optional segregation, however, is not.

But forced segregation does not constitute "harm" under your given definition. Am I to assume, then, that a law need not be actively harmful to be racist? If so, why would this be?

Segregation breeds racial hatred, which breeds harm.

Desegregation breeds hatred too, which means it breeds harm. Does that mean that Desegregation is racist?

Dude... If I were a non-white british person i'd vote for his party then just move somewhere else in Europe.  Still, though... pretty racist... and I'd be offended in taking the money.

Desegregation doesn't breed hatred. Segregation breeds hatred, but controls it. Desegregation releases hatred.

But it's a little unfair to call the reversal of racism racist. By your logic, it's when you STOP hitting somebody on the head with a baseball hat that he becomes angry at you. No, it's just that when you stop, he has the ability to attack you.

EDIT: To give a less meandering response, I said that all racist laws caused harm. Not that all laws that caused harm were racist.

Firstly, I apologize if I seem brusque, but you're wrong. You have it backwards. I don't blame you; in the US we have a very special perspecive on this stuff.

Segregation is a result of hatred. It does not breed hatred. It breeds injustice, and a sense of injustice, certainly, but it does not breed hatred: segregation comes about as a result of hatred, and through segregation it allows the propagation of a status quo that allays the expression of hatred, whihch mans that it does not actively impugn upon one's quality of life.

Desegregation, in changing the status quo, causes an explosion of hatred. The people benefitted by the status quo actively rebel against the change. Look up the race violence explosions in the 50s and 60s. The political assassinations. The riots. The end result was a net gain, yeah, but it caused an immense amount of harm and suffering in the interim.

Now from this we can acknowledge either one of two things: either segregation isn't racist (in that it does not cause harm in and of itself) or a law does not need to actively cause harm in order to be racist. Now which is it?

If segregation had never happened, desegregation would never have happened, and there would have been no hatred in the first place. Yes, there was hatred to begin with. But segregation continued the hatred. It bred hatred in the children who would then grow up and become furious when segregation ended.

It's like a heroin addiction. If you never take it, you're fine. If you take it, but don't stop, you die. If you take it, then stop, then things won't be fantastic, worse than if you'd never started, but they'll be better than if you kept taking it.

So I stand by my opinion that segregation is racist, because it does cause harm.

Getting back to the topic at hand, the BNP policy doesn't cause harm, breed hatred or propagate hatred. So, it's not racist.

You can't follow up "there would have been no hatred in the first place" with "yes there was hatred to begin with".

Segregation did not continue the hatred - it put a muzzle on it. It was ab ad thing, but not because of the activity it caused toward hatred. It was because of the expectations that it created in terms of sovereignty and the rights of the people involved.

The bigger issue here is that you're predicating "racism" on causing harm. That's not what racism is.

rac·ism

  <a href="http://dictionary.reference.com/audio.html/lunaWAV/R00/R0009800" target="_blank"><img src="http://sp.dictionary.com/dictstatic/g/d/speaker.gif" border="0" alt="racist pronunciation" /></a> /ˈreɪsɪzəm/ Show Spelled[rey-siz-uhm] Show IPA

BNP win + facepaint = 50K a month + holiday in the sun.

Hmmm, I might be able to live with this racism stuff.