El Duderino said:
I like your style as well... Ok... guess I´ll have to lay down some family history... My grandma was born and lifed in nothern germany... when WWII started she was forced to work in a military factroy... after the war she met my grandfather, an american GI... his parents were german imigrants from Berlin but he was born in the USA... when he was a kid lots of other children called him a Nazi for being german... anyway my grandma went to the states with him and they got married... she spoke very little english at first... many of intolerant jews (but of course not all of them) noticed she was german and blamed her for what the Nazis had done... so both of my grandparents had been subject to racism at some point during their live because they were german... What I´m saying is: Anybody can be subjekt to racism... but fact is bad people do bad things... there is no such thing as a bad race... we need to get over the past and judge people individually, not by what other people of their race have done... Everything clear now ??? |
Clear as mud. You gave an honest example. THAT'S A REAL BIG STRETCH THERE. You also didn't mention what the intolerant Jews did. Was it name calling? Did they try to lynch her? Was her treatment any worse than the Vietnamese refugees by a certain group of red-blooded Americans who treated any Vietnamese person badly?
I can play the "we don't like you because of the war" card too. My Grandparents and father were locked up in a detention camp. They lost hundreds of acres of farmland. They were US citizens and they were illegally detained because of their race. There were plenty of Germans in America, they didn't lock them up. I wonder why? There's quite a bit of documented spying and sabotage committed by American citizens of German descent. Why weren't they considered a threat to be dealt with?
But hey dude, we're really just nitpicking and quibbling here. Yes, any group can be discriminated against. The big problem is institutionalized discrimination and racism or whatever you want to call it. And hand in hand with that is how race is viewed.
Racism basically comes down to one group of people thinking that another group of people is inferior because of their race.
You didn't mention any instances when someone treated you as if you were inferior because you're German. I don't know of any institutionalized racist practices directed toward Germans in the USA. Dude, there are institutionalized practices, in business and law enforcement, directed towards other races.
You really can't tell someone "Get over it" because of something that happened to your grandmother. Why? Sure there are bad people everywhere. It's all around. But seriously, it's like by using your standard the SS was just a bunch of bad individuals and individually they did bad things. Well that's true, but you it would seem to be that you’re purposefully ignoring the fact that the SS was an organization with an agenda within an institution that represented the German people.
Maybe we just see it different ways. It's very easy as an "AMERICAN" to be discriminated against in many parts of the world but I find that hard to call "racism". But I get the idea that you might call it racism if for example some loud Americans sat down in a Bistro in Paris... and never got served. In fact, I think the waiters refused to talk to them even though one of the "AMERICANS" could speak French. Last time I checked, Americans aren't a race.
Really, let's talk about racism. It seems to me that people are confusing racism with prejudice and bigotry. They are different things.
