How to be a genteel racist in one easy lesson
Over at Making Light I spotted the following exchange, in which Bruce Cohen said:
It seems pretty obvious to me, but seems to have totally eluded the current President of France, for instance, that creating a subculture of young, angry men* who feel no identity with the country they live in, and who are constantly being told they should go back to a country they've never been in, and often whose language they don't speak fluently, is a political strategy just covered over with lose.
* It's the men who do the physical damage. Pissing off the women probably has worse long term consequences, though. If Angela Davis didn't have a price on her head, she'd be running a very much alive Black Panther party, and giving the US government a very hard time. Or think about how much heartburn Winnie Mandela gave the South African government.
to which someone called Raphael replied:
How, exactly, is anyone creating such a culture? It looks more like an automatic effects of those angry men's background in mediterranean-type cultures to me.
--which set off all my internal alarms, because, well, seriously, WTF? The only reason that young men from a certain subculture in France might be disgruntled is because of their regional background? Nothing to do with the ongoing legacy of colonialism, nor a longstanding history of ethnic discrimination and violent government repression in France resulting in poverty and lack of opportunity to escape said poverty, still ongoing and well-documented at that? Not to mention the old heritage of fear of Italian immigrants as too dark and too Catholic and too inherently violent, and the use of the meaningless combo "mediterranean-type cultures" sounded to me like a journeyman's attempt at Henry Cabot Lodge-style rhetoric* so I cast out a feathered lure and indeed, the ironically-monikered Raphael stooped to it:
I don't think a young author with an inflated ego is an "angry young man" in the same way in wich, say, a gang member is. I don't know enough about Maryland to tell wether it qualifies, but I guess the Italian Americans there have been culturally assimilated to a large deal by now. By "mediterranean-type" cultures, I mean cultures that place a very strong emphasis on a specific notion of honor, and in wich men are commonly expected to be always on the watch for anything that might in any way be insulting to them or their families, and to be very vigurous and aggressive about defending their honor against any perceived insults. It's a bit more complicated than that, but those are the basics. (I've used that term because many southern European, northern African and Middle Eatern cultures seem to have these traits.)
I think that when people from a culture where such traits are strong live in a place dominated by a culture in wich they are less strong, they should adapt to the dominant cultures as far as these traits are concerned. While we're at it, I think ideally in all cultures, the trend should generally go towards less of these traits- I have the impression that places where such traits are strong tend to be politically and economically instable.
And I think that, if there are a lot of very angry young men in one of the cultures of a multicultural place, and this culture traditionally values this whole "defend your honor at any price" thing, you should not always automatically assume that these men's anger issues are the dominant culture's fault.
Of course, Sicilians have no culture of "honor" at all, and there is no such thing as Italian-American gang membership today. Nor is there such a thing as gang violence, youthful or not, from other subcultures whose origins are far from the Mediterranean - Russia, Japan, Ireland, and plain old Anglo or Northern-European Mutt! Nor is there any history of disaffected, disenfranchised elements rioting in Paris or otherwise rebelling, before they started allowing "mediterranean-type" immigrants - shut up! Marseilles being a Mediterranean seaport is TOTALLY irrelevant!
But if Raphael had just come out and said "they just rebel because they're swarthy furriners," then he would have been a racist, see...but there's nothing racist when you use meaningless code words to say the same thing!
And at least he didn't cuss!
(Though I was very Nice™ and didn't point out that his English is abysmal and his ignorance of U.S. geography equally so...after all, he might be a non-swarthy furriner himself, and not a native English speaker at all, so it wouldn't be fair to mock him for that!)
* "You can take a Hindoo,and give him the highest education the world can afford. He has a keen intelligence. He will absorb the learning of Oxford, he will acquire the manners and habits of England, he will sit in the British Parliament, but you cannot make him an Englishman. Yet, he, like his conqueror, is of the great Indo-European family. But it has taken six thousand years and more to create the differences which exist between them. You cannot efface those differences thus made by education in a single life, because they do not rest upon the intellect. What, then, is the matter of race, which separates the Englishman from the Hindoo and the American from the Indian? It is something deeper and more fundamental than anything which concerns the intellect. We all know it instinctively, although it is so impalpable that we can scarcely define it, and yet is so deeply marked that even the physiological difference between the Negro, the Mongol, and the Caucasian are not more persistent or more obvious."
It seems pretty obvious to me, but seems to have totally eluded the current President of France, for instance, that creating a subculture of young, angry men* who feel no identity with the country they live in, and who are constantly being told they should go back to a country they've never been in, and often whose language they don't speak fluently, is a political strategy just covered over with lose.
* It's the men who do the physical damage. Pissing off the women probably has worse long term consequences, though. If Angela Davis didn't have a price on her head, she'd be running a very much alive Black Panther party, and giving the US government a very hard time. Or think about how much heartburn Winnie Mandela gave the South African government.
to which someone called Raphael replied:
How, exactly, is anyone creating such a culture? It looks more like an automatic effects of those angry men's background in mediterranean-type cultures to me.
--which set off all my internal alarms, because, well, seriously, WTF? The only reason that young men from a certain subculture in France might be disgruntled is because of their regional background? Nothing to do with the ongoing legacy of colonialism, nor a longstanding history of ethnic discrimination and violent government repression in France resulting in poverty and lack of opportunity to escape said poverty, still ongoing and well-documented at that? Not to mention the old heritage of fear of Italian immigrants as too dark and too Catholic and too inherently violent, and the use of the meaningless combo "mediterranean-type cultures" sounded to me like a journeyman's attempt at Henry Cabot Lodge-style rhetoric* so I cast out a feathered lure and indeed, the ironically-monikered Raphael stooped to it:
I don't think a young author with an inflated ego is an "angry young man" in the same way in wich, say, a gang member is. I don't know enough about Maryland to tell wether it qualifies, but I guess the Italian Americans there have been culturally assimilated to a large deal by now. By "mediterranean-type" cultures, I mean cultures that place a very strong emphasis on a specific notion of honor, and in wich men are commonly expected to be always on the watch for anything that might in any way be insulting to them or their families, and to be very vigurous and aggressive about defending their honor against any perceived insults. It's a bit more complicated than that, but those are the basics. (I've used that term because many southern European, northern African and Middle Eatern cultures seem to have these traits.)
I think that when people from a culture where such traits are strong live in a place dominated by a culture in wich they are less strong, they should adapt to the dominant cultures as far as these traits are concerned. While we're at it, I think ideally in all cultures, the trend should generally go towards less of these traits- I have the impression that places where such traits are strong tend to be politically and economically instable.
And I think that, if there are a lot of very angry young men in one of the cultures of a multicultural place, and this culture traditionally values this whole "defend your honor at any price" thing, you should not always automatically assume that these men's anger issues are the dominant culture's fault.
Of course, Sicilians have no culture of "honor" at all, and there is no such thing as Italian-American gang membership today. Nor is there such a thing as gang violence, youthful or not, from other subcultures whose origins are far from the Mediterranean - Russia, Japan, Ireland, and plain old Anglo or Northern-European Mutt! Nor is there any history of disaffected, disenfranchised elements rioting in Paris or otherwise rebelling, before they started allowing "mediterranean-type" immigrants - shut up! Marseilles being a Mediterranean seaport is TOTALLY irrelevant!
But if Raphael had just come out and said "they just rebel because they're swarthy furriners," then he would have been a racist, see...but there's nothing racist when you use meaningless code words to say the same thing!
And at least he didn't cuss!
(Though I was very Nice™ and didn't point out that his English is abysmal and his ignorance of U.S. geography equally so...after all, he might be a non-swarthy furriner himself, and not a native English speaker at all, so it wouldn't be fair to mock him for that!)
* "You can take a Hindoo,and give him the highest education the world can afford. He has a keen intelligence. He will absorb the learning of Oxford, he will acquire the manners and habits of England, he will sit in the British Parliament, but you cannot make him an Englishman. Yet, he, like his conqueror, is of the great Indo-European family. But it has taken six thousand years and more to create the differences which exist between them. You cannot efface those differences thus made by education in a single life, because they do not rest upon the intellect. What, then, is the matter of race, which separates the Englishman from the Hindoo and the American from the Indian? It is something deeper and more fundamental than anything which concerns the intellect. We all know it instinctively, although it is so impalpable that we can scarcely define it, and yet is so deeply marked that even the physiological difference between the Negro, the Mongol, and the Caucasian are not more persistent or more obvious."