Gregory's Server@JorisMeys @ct_bergstrom That's a good point. I don't mean to absolve the specifically American history of racism, but to contextualize it within a human story that involves ethnocentric violence going back to the ancient world. The problem is deeper than any one nation, and the current approach doesn't seem to be working but rather intensifying the wrong attitudes. If we recognize racism as a human problem, then we share a common ground from which to transform our societies, I would hope.
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 @aishasie Thank you for this comment and for your answer, @JorisMeys - these are the precious moments in social media where I can learn and widen my horizon.  @madrush @ct_bergstrom same goes for antisemitism. Think Dreyfus affair. Yet, Germany managed to get rid of the stain of Nazism by not only acknowledging its history, but also acknowledging that there's still people to this day that think Hitler was right. Germany has the strictest anti-Nazism laws I know. A Nazi salute in public can end you in jail, and rightfully so. They don't negotiate or "contextualize". And neither should the US. |
@madrush @JorisMeys @ct_bergstrom Speaking as an Asian European: yes, of course racism is rampant out here too, of course that's a wider human problem. However, the WWII incarceration of Japanese Americans is a trauma very specific to that Asian America diaspora due to the very specific context that it happened in, that we lack. To take that context away entirely doesn't do justice to that very specific pain to this very specific group.
Generalizing racism in my experience has only gotten white people to dismiss it as too abstract and large to deal with, or worse, to see racism as traditional to wider society so why is it a problem at all. We _need_ specific contexts of specific pains to keep the experience human and taken seriously.
We need to sum up those specific contexts, not strip them away.
@madrush @JorisMeys @ct_bergstrom Speaking as an Asian European: yes, of course racism is rampant out here too, of course that's a wider human problem. However, the WWII incarceration of Japanese Americans is a trauma very specific to that Asian America diaspora due to the very specific context that it happened in, that we lack. To take that context away entirely doesn't do justice to that very specific pain to this very specific group.