Talk:Racism/Archive 8

message: "It is not so much about skin color, because Chinese are people of color also, but rather it is inadequacies or insecurities of the Hong Kong Chinese men."
Why would so-called "people of color" be less capable of discriminating based on skin color than White Europeans?  And why is a Wikipedia article taking an unbiased, nonfactual stance on what the Hong Kong Chinese men are supposedly thinking when they make racist remarks?  To say that they are inadequate and insecure is clearly a value judgment; why is that acceptable, while my own (made-up) value judgment -- that the foreigners are sub-human, ape-like savages -- is immediately deleted?  This is not a place for liberal propaganda.  The passage should be changed.
:Please sign your postings.
:The statement may reflect "personal research," but to have an unbiased view would require a great deal of work. From my personal observations some Chinese people irrationally equate darker skin color with being dirty. It is also common, in my experience, for Chinese women to attempt to avoid having their skin darken due to UV.  Their rationale may be that people with darker skin are those who labor outdoors (which is indeed one good way to get a good tan), and that it is undesirable to be categorized as "lower class." P0M 15:38, 7 May 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Hong Kong

message: This article is heavil focused on Americans. Do you seriously believe that you are the only people alive on this planet? Its truly sickening!
:No one is stopping you from editing the article. If you are unhappy with it, why don't you improve it? It's probably heavily focused on Americans because only Americans bothered to contribute to it. 66.35.138.9 08:52, 28 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  European / American Focus 

message: Good recent edit, Bcorr. Sam [Spade] 21:13, 4 Oct 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Thanks Sam -- I appreciate it. BCorr|Брайен 21:35, 4 Oct 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Recent edit 

message: In its modern form, racism evolved in tandem with European exploration, conquest, and colonization of much of the rest of the world, and especially after Christopher Columbus reached the Americas.  As new peoples were encountered, fought, and ultimately subdued, theories about "race" began to develop, and these helped many to justify the differences in position and treatment of people whom they categorized as belonging to different races (see Eric Wolf's Europe and the People Without History).  Some people like Juan Gines de Sepulveda even argued that the Native Americans were natural slaves.
:there is nothing new or modern about this. Have a look at roman, egyptian, jewish, babylonian, etc... history. How about how the aztec's interacted w other tribes. Sam [Spade] 15:23, 19 Oct 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Such forms of racism have in these enlightened times been defined out of existence. VeryVerily 00:25, 21 Oct 2004 (UTC)

text: Two words: Caste system. Sam [Spade] 17:23, 20 Oct 2004 (UTC)

text: Thats ironic, your suggesting I perhaps am doing something other than research by volunteering on an encyclopedia? I suggest you take personal comments / venom to User talk / email. Sam [Spade] 20:15, 20 Oct 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  from article 

message: I think this section needs to be substantiated, significantly revised, or removed.  The main problems I see are as follows:
1) Although Israeli law treats all citizens equally, it does discriminate between Jewish and non-Jewish non-citizens. This needs to be backed up with, at the very least, an external link or two.  More detail on this point would also be helpful.
2) The Israeli constitution grants Jews the right to immigrate, while denying the right to return to the former inhabitants of its area, the Palestinian refugees.  To my knowledge, Israel does not have a written constitution.  The right of Jews to immigrate is codified in the Law of Return.  Also, the part about "denial of the right of return" is terribly oversimplified; Arabs who remained in Israel after the 1948 War were given full citizenship.  It remains an ongoing issue in the Israel-Palestinian conflict whether or not a Palestinian right of return does, in fact, exist - making this possibly a NPOV issue.
3) One fringe Jewish extremist group, Kach, does preach racism towards Arabs.  The first three sentences of this section all insinuate racism in the Israeli government.  Could it at least be mentioned, for the sake of fairness, that Kach was outlawed by that same government for acting upon its racist views?
Because of the sensitivity of the issue I will wait for any comments before making changes to the article.  -Joshuapaquin 21:06, Oct 29, 2004 (UTC)
:1) Israel does not practice this discrimination on explicit racial lines (as the Republic of South Africa did) — both Jews from a European and African, etc. racial complexions can and do qualify in the Law of Return policy.
:2) Israel does not have a written constituion. Denial of Palestinian Right of Return is not based on an explicit racial policy as was the case in South Africa, Rhodesia, etc.
:3) Not condoned by any political party with elected representatives that I know of, and indeed, outlawed.
Hopelessly POV and innacurate, needs to be rewritten from scratch or deleted.
El_C
:: It's been a week with no proposals for improvement save deletion.  I'm deleting the section.  -Joshuapaquin 00:29, Nov 9, 2004 (UTC)
: Agreed, no reason to delete--KEEP IT!! But It does need to be mentioned that there have been some disciminatory actions taken (in violation of the Law of Return) against many Jews who have converted to Messianic Judaism (a form of Christianity). Sweetfreek 04:20, 1 Mar 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: From the above, it appears someone removed it as they thought it was biassed/inaccurate. If you can reply to this criticism, and the best way is to improve the article so that it is NPOV, then do so and reinstate it. There is plenty of documented evidence in Israel of racism, just as there is in all other countries of the world. Wallie 20:21, 19 November 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Israel & Palestinian Territories 

message: The beginning of this article uses the expression: "negatively discriminate against". The person who wrote this sentence may know what s/he meant by it, but I believe that the average well-informed reader will not.  If one discriminates between two groups of organisms, "the orange ones" and "the purple ones" for instance, that may be a value free categorization by color. However, in the way I learned to speak English, if one discriminates against the purples then at the very least one's personal evaluation of and/or attitude toward the purples is less favorable than that toward the oranges.  The word "negatively" is an adverb and in the phrase under consideration it modifies the word "discriminate."  To "negatively evaluate someone" is to evaluate that person and do so in a way that decreases the "value" of the person from some reference level, just as to "negatively rotate a screw" means to rotate it in a "negative" direction. "Discriminate" literally means nothing more than to be able to distinguish something from its background. To "negatively discriminate" something would then mean what? To pick something out from among others and to do so in some "negative" direction perhaps? Would that not probably mean to most people to pick something out from among others and to give it a negative value? And that suggests to me, and I think to "the average well-informed reader", that one could "positively discriminate against" somebody. 
The problem for me is that as a reader I regard all of the above as guesswork applied to try to make comprehensible something that should have been said more clearly. My impulse as an editor would be to delete "negatively" as redundant. 
If an article begins with a problematical formulation, then the remainder of the article may show all sorts of fracture lines. P0M 06:02, 2 Nov 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Clarity of basic formulations needed 

message: Why is Sendhil Mullainathan "the Great"?  The link is to a stub, describing Sendhil Mullainathan "the Lesser"...
-Joshuapaquin 21:45, Dec 16, 2004 (UTC)
: Sendhil himself encouraged such labelling earlier today, but you're right that it doesn't belong (at least yet!) and I removed the references. Tobacman 23:52, 16 Dec 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Sendhil Mullainathan 

message: Someone changed "African-American" to "black man" because (so the edit summary says) not all blacks are from Africa.  I reverted for two reasons: first, not all "blacks" are black -- labels such as these are almost never meant to be taken literally.  Moreover, African-Americans don't "come from" Africa.  They are born in the US and as American as anyone else.  (If they had just come from Africa they would more likely be called "Nigerian-American" or "Liberian-American.")  They are called "African American" because at the same time that the ancestors of Whites were coming from Europe, their ancesters were coming (or forcibly removed from) Africa. Slrubenstein   |  Talk  17:04, 17 Feb 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Your missing out on the amerocentrisn in saying "african american". Black man may not be perfect, but african american needs to be replaced w something not focused on america. Aboriginies in australia are black, but didn't come from africa at all. (Sam Spade | talk | contributions) 18:11, 19 Feb 2005 (UTC)

text: Ah, ok, nevermind then. I find the phrase "people of color" disturbingly divisive, btw, but I guess theres not much point in discussing that. (Sam Spade | talk | contributions) 21:09, 19 Feb 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  explanation for revert 

message: I am a Swiss citizen and I just read the article about racism in Switzerland. It says that Black people "experience frequent public humiliation" but I have never witnessed such an event. I do not either feel that it is accurate to say that "Racism based on skin colour today is a widely accepted norm" in Switzerland, notably given that there are explicit laws against racism. Furthermore the reference to a "recent study" is incomplete. I could not find the referenced publication since the link points only to the general website of the Federal Commision against Racism. -cedric
Cedric. I have been an auslander living in Switzerland. As mentioned below, I have modified the article. The bit about hate stares towards black people gave me a laugh. I find that most Swiss kids think they are cool. As for people not sitting on the train beside black people... This doesn't happen on my train, the S5. Any free seat is like gold, and would be grabbed immediately. Wallie 20:26, 17 November 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Switzerland 

message: I find it odd that there is no mention of Spain on this entire page. Not only is modern racism and white supremacy rooted in the concept of "limpieza de sangre", but Spain today is one of the most racist societies in the Western world. CPS 08:06, 21 Mar 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Please, be bold and add the appropriate material. Thanks, -Willmcw 09:28, Mar 21, 2005 (UTC)
Could you include some references that evidence that Spain is "one of the most racist sociesties in the Western world"? Because I live in Spain and, I think it´s as racist as most western societies come. You could say that, for example, France is a bit more racist than Spain is (after all the National Front there is an important political force, advocating covert racism).
In Spain as I see it, racism is not towards black or asian people for example. Its geared more towards Roma people ("Gitanos") and Muslim people ("Moros").
Also I don´t believe modern racism and white supremacy are based on the "limpieza de sangre". As I see it, the "limpieza de sangre" was more related to religious issues, considering anything which was not catholic christian to be strange to the spanish people. I don´t understand why do you consider it the basis of white supremacy (given that most spanish people don´t really look THAT white in comparation with anglo-saxons, for example). I would definitively see it as the basis for modern christian fundamentalism, more than white supremacy.  Violenciafriki 15:55, 26 July 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Spain 

message: The article hasn't been disputed for a while, and the tag was added by User:Panterka, who has made no related edits (contribs) BCorr|Брайен 20:46, 4 Apr 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  removed disputed tag... 

message: The Darwin section is wholly incorrect and has nothing redeemable. If made correct, it would not be relevant to this page. Line by line...
:Charles Darwin's most famous work on evolution is titled in full The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. This has long been misunderstood to include human races. Although Darwin was racist by modern standards (in that he believed that the white man was in general superior to all other types) he did not see other races as subhuman.
No, the use of "favoured races" in the title did not refer to human races. This is quite clear if one has done any work on Victorian naturalism. In Darwin's day, "race" meant the same thing as "variety", which was generally taken as being the taxonomic level below "species". Origin did not talk about human evolution at all except for the famous last line ("shed light upon the origins"), so it is absolutely ridiculous to assert that the title of the book had anything to do with human evolution. This is the sort of misinterpretation that reflects a purposeful ignorance both to the ideas of Darwin but also the history of racism and racial theory. As for Darwin's own racism -- he did not generalize for the "white man"; he, like many Victorians of his political stripes, thought instead of the "civilized races" vs the "savage races". He often doubted whether "savage races" could become properly civilized. But it wasn't a black/white distinction. It is true he did not see other races as subhuman but that doesn't explain his position at all: Darwin was a monogenist (he believed all races were of the same species) in an era where anthropologists were usually polygenist (believed to be separate species). The large part of Descent was responding to this debate, as Darwin and the other Darwinians of the Ethnological Society saw this as essential for their theory of human origins (against the polygenist Anthropological Society). Anyway, long story short: if this paragraph were made correct, it would become irrelevant -- Darwin's view of races was not widespread nor did it lend itself easily to the sorts of typologies which would come later (black/white etc.)
:It is interesting to compare these two extracts from The Descent of Man:
::At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes [...] will no doubt be exterminated. The break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilised state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as now between the negro or Australian and the gorilla. [2] (http://www.literature.org/authors/darwin-charles/the-descent-of-man/chapter-06.html)
Yes, "it is interesting" to take quotes out of contact. Darwin's concern with the "extermination" has nothing to do with racism or eugenics, it has to do with humanitarianism. The Ethnological Society grew out of the Society for the Preservation of Aborigines (or something like that, I don't seem to have my George Stocking directly at hand), and it was common for those of the Prichardian ethnological persuasion (which Darwin clearly was) to believe that English colonialism was forcing many of the great "savage races" into extinction or absorbing them into larger civilized societies. Darwin was responding to the fact that the Aborigines in Australia, the Native Americans in the USA, and many other populations which "mysteriously" dying off when in contact with "civilized races of man" -- disease, genocide, whatever. Darwin's "hierarchy" of races existed in a sense but was far more limited that the quote implies: all in the species evolved to homo sapiens from a single origin, long diverging from the other anthropomorphous apes. The biggest end of his gap comes from the extinction of the apes -- if all that was left was the baboon, in his view, that would be quite an evolutionary jump indeed. So: if we correctly add context to this passage, what do we get? A long, long explanation which has no bearing on the history of racism. This sort of thing will be covered in depth at the entry on Descent of Man, where it belongs. 
::The same remark holds good with equal or greater force with respect to the numerous points of mental similarity between the most distinct races of man. The American aborigines, Negroes and Europeans are as different from each other in mind as any three races that can be named; yet I was incessantly struck, whilst living with the Feugians on board the Beagle, with the many little traits of character, shewing how similar their minds were to ours; and so it was with a full-blooded negro with whom I happened once to be intimate. [3] (http://www.literature.org/authors/darwin-charles/the-descent-of-man/chapter-07.html)
This is a fairly transparent statement: Darwin was struck that all three dissimilar peoples, from widely different places on the globe, were of the same species. How is it relevant to this page? The "full-blooded negro" was a man who lived down the street from him, a freed slave, who taught him taxidermy as a child. 
:However, this work did later seem to give scientific legitimacy to the notion of the inherent inferiority of nonwhite races. 
Darwin's Descent was neither popular nor influential. Its primary goal was to introduce the notion of sexual selection, which it was not terribly successful at (many of the Darwinians thought sexual selection unnecessary). Darwin's work was one which attempted to disprove the already existing scientific trends arguing for a much "harder" racism, one along purely biological lines (the work of Knox, Gliddon, Morton, Nott, Agassiz, etc.). When racists wanted scientific proof for their beliefs they did not cite Darwin directly -- there were so many other scientific racists to cite. Now, there is another phenomena in this, though: the tying of many beliefs to "Darwinism" because it was seen as being chic and scientific in its day, even if they had little to do with Darwin's actual theories. Herbert Spencer is quite notorious for this: Spencer's version of what is now known as "Social Darwinism" is built on a purely Lamarckian conception of evolution. The point of me saying this is not to exonerate Darwin, but to point out that one can indeed find many people appealing to Darwinism at a later point, even if it is not in the original text. You can similarly find many racists at an earlier point appealing to the Bible as a justification for their views. Does this mean that the Bible logically provoked racist thought? Or that it was used as a justification? If anything were to be mentioned along either lines, a careful distinguishing in agency would need to take place.
:Darwin openly supported eugenics, and his most outspoken proponent in Germany at the time was Ernst Haeckel, the ideological father of Nazi notion of an Aryan "master race." Further, the notion that blacks are more like gorillas than human beings remains a prevailing theme in white supremacist thought and rhetoric to the present day.
Darwin was indeed somewhat favorable to his cousin Francis Galton's early ideas towards the selective breeding of humans. He has a long section in Descent though where he goes back and forth over it: if we give out charity, does it encourage less 'fit' people to reproduce? But if we don't give out charity, aren't we giving up one of the best evolved traits we have, our moral nature? He leaves it ambiguous. In the conclusion of the book, he has a more forceful statement which looks like it was taken right from Galton. In any event, at this point Galton had only written Hereditary Genius, which argued not for the social programs or government intervention which made 20th century eugenics so infamous, but for changing "social mores" to be more conducive to "good breeding". Neither Galton nor Darwin's political inclinations would have ever led them in the direction of asking for the sort of "negative" eugenics characteristic of the Nazis (both were 19th century political liberals who believed in a non-interventionary government). The statement would be more accurate if it said, "Darwin ambiguously agreed with the early forms of what would after his death be called 'eugenics', which had little resemblance to the programs of the 20th century." That is, it would be long and uninteresting and not relevant to this article. Darwin's advocacy or disavocacy of eugenics had nothing to do with the future of eugenics. 
Haeckel was indeed an early proponent of Darwin in Germany, and was indeed quite problematic in his racial views (though the "master race" ideology is usually traced to Gobineau, not Haeckel, but no matter). However the causality of that has little to do with Darwin. 
As for gorillas, return to what I said before about Darwin's hierarchy. He did have one but it was far more vertically limited than any of the other "scientific" hierarchies of the day. The gorilla/"Negro" association was made long before Darwin and long after. He was not influential along these lines except in the general sense that people would use evolutionary notions towards this interpretation. The work of non-Darwinians like Nott and Knox was far more influential along these lines.
:There is a great deal of controversy about race and intelligence, in part because the concepts of both race and IQ are themselves difficult to define.
I have no idea what this has to do with Darwin. The notion of IQ came long after his time. 
In short, these passages look like they were written by someone either innocently ignorant of the arguments about Victorian racial theory, or someone who is ideologically trying to link Darwin and racism (a common Creationist tactic). While I am not opposed to explaining Darwin's views on race (and sex), they were not influential in a larger sense. One could, however, talk about the ways in which Darwinism was taken up as a way to justify racism (certainly true) in the way that many belief systems were at various times called into action for that purpose. However that would be quite a different section than this one, a much shorter one at that. To correct the current section would be to render it irrelevant to the current article, so I have deleted it for now. --Fastfission 15:56, 30 Apr 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Darwin and racism