When you live in a country with actual history (as opposed to rural Iowa where nothing ever threatened it), it's not racism.
You don't start because you believe the neighbors are somehow inferior, you start because you know that you have dangerous differences, or that they occupy some parts of you country that should be freed, or because they are in the offensive every now and then and so on.
Words have a meaning. Not all situations where a group is cautious or even hates another are racism. The same way blacks in the US being cautious of whites is not racism -- they do have a long history of suffering in their hands that justifies that as the prudent behavior.
That's the critical point about racism that no one seems to mention though. Every racist person is racist ultimately because of fear. Regardless of how justified their fear is, they hate because they are consumed by fear and mistrust of the other, which is a natural human reaction. We may not empathize with their fear but to them it is very real.
When you understand racism in this context it becomes clear that the narrative of people being racist because they are hateful is far too shallow. It goes much deeper than that.
>That's the critical point about racism that no one seems to mention though. Every racist person is racist ultimately because of fear.
The thing is, fear can be totally rational and even justified and not your fault. In which case, it's not racism.
E.g. a black in the 30's south fearing of whites (for lynching, beating up, etc) is justified.
But a white feeling superior, and believing those blacks are animals, to be kept in their place, etc, that was actual racism.
[Added] If fact actual racism, from the first land grabs in Americas, to the development of official theories of "race" back in the 18th and 19th centuries (Gobineau, Galton and so on IIRC), is strongly tied to power grab -- painting the other as inferior to morally justify taking other their land and enslaving them. Racism was used as a tool to justify European colonialism, US slavery, Japanese conquests, etc.
Racism without having the upper hand, is hardly racism.
You don't have to have the upper hand to be racist, and you don't have to be voluntarily racist, and you don't have to be at fault to be racist. Blacks in the 1930s making generalizations about whites is still racism, regardless of how justified or disadvantaged they may be.
I know this means that there's an uncomfortable category, a shade of gray that is "justified racism" and there are situations where not being racist might mean you're putting yourself at risk by trusting someone (e.g. your historical violent white man example) that due to historical circumstances has the "upper hand" and might use it to cause you harm, and these aren't very comfortable or popular ideas, but ... too bad?
When you can wrestle with the idea that racism can possibly be justified or a useful heuristic, you can possibly relate to the people who are racist, understand their fears and mistrust, and possibly bridge a gap to where you can explain to them that they don't have much to fear from the other.
But the rational fear they once had is no longer justified. The judge on that TV show has no reason to be weary of the contestant's husband at all, it's completely irrational. And anyone that looks at that situation and says, "actually, history shows he's justified in his xenophobia" is making the same irrational mistake.
>But the rational fear they once had is no longer justified.
That's not how it works in those places though. The neighbor countries can (and historically have) turn around and attack the other neighbors again and again, and there are tension and provocations and such even after periods of relative peace.
And you can't tell someone who lost their loved ones due to this or that incident involving some people, that it's now all "water under the bridge". Healing from such things takes many decades, and even generations to actually heal.
If X murdered your father, you didn't want any relation with them, even decades later, even if there wasn't anything else to fear from them. And you probably wouldn't be best buddies with their relatives in general either. Now, imagine that in a more widespread way, where whole countries were under attack, with perhaps hundreds of thousands or millions dying, and you having multiple people you mourn from that time.
We might be "very often ruled by emotion" but there's also an objective reality out there. A black guy flirting with a white woman in the 20's Alabama would indeed find themselves hanging from a tree -- whether they were "objective" or not.
I tend to agree that history is important to consider in such situations, but only if you apply this concept equally instead of picking and choosing when and on whom to apply it. Otherwise, it's nothing more than hypocrisy.
A thought experiment: would you react the same way if the original example was of an Egyptian singer being interviewed on an Egyptian channel and revealing that he/she was married to an Israeli?
On the contrary, I think we should apply it selectively, and chose when and on whom to apply it.
For history is important to consider but not all historical situations are alike.
We could justify a reaction from whatever side, if they had equally suffered from the other side.
History is painful, and we might say "but she's just married to an X citizen, what's the harm", but the other's that got offended might have visions of their family or friends or themselves being killed, or treated badly because of being non X. It might not have been that particular X citizen that did those offenses, but they didn't see other X citizens rushing to their rescue either -- on the contrary, they might have seen a lot of them cheering for it. (And I'm sure the same would hold if an Israeli woman was revealing in a Israeli channel that she was married to an Egyptian -- and it could still be justified and understood under their experiences).
I have to agree. This sort of hatred kind of made sense 150 years ago when it was part of a liberation struggle, but it's just plain racism at the moment. People should be better than this.
(Disclaimer: I'm a Bulgarian who's lived in the UK for the past decade. Most Bulgarians who have lived in Bulgaria their whole lives would probably disagree with me.)
Yeah, I had most of my family killed in Holocaust and I still think that if a Jewish person would be hating on a random German person (like what happened to German colony in Haifa right about this time) is still racism.
We're so hardly conditioned to believe that "racism is wrong" that when we see instances of racism that actually make sense, we instinctively want to name it something else.
>We're so hardly conditioned to believe that "racism is wrong" that when we see instances of racism that actually make sense, we instinctively want to name it something else.
Part of it is that.
Another part is that we conflate any collective tension or precaution or generalization to "hating".
You might not hate blacks, but you still wont want to walk alone in 3AM in downtown L.A. Even if 99% of the people you meet there are great with you, it only takes 1-2 persons to attack or rob you to make the precaution (and thus the generalization) perfectly rational. That doesn't make you a racist, just a person aware of crime statistics.
Few, if anyone, can just say, "I'll just visit downtown L.A. at 3 AM without a care in my mind, and judge people I meet there on an individual basis". And even the few that do that, if they end having it bad, they rarely keep to the same ideal.
Indeed, they are. The same should be said against those who look down upon Caucasian Europeans because people from Europe bought slaves from Arab traders and took them to the Americas, about British ex-prisoners who took land from the Aboriginals, about Europeans who took land from native American tribes, about... well, you get the gist. What happened in historical times is just that, history. The inhabitants of modern Turkey carry no guilt for the atrocities of the Ottoman empire, just like modern-day Japanese (except for surviving war criminals) are not to blame for the misdeeds of the Japanese empire, nor are current Europeans the same as those who traded in slaves or established colonies in Africa. It is good to have this sorted out so people can get on building functional societies based on the here and now, not on old feuds and historical misdeeds.
You don't start because you believe the neighbors are somehow inferior, you start because you know that you have dangerous differences, or that they occupy some parts of you country that should be freed, or because they are in the offensive every now and then and so on.
Words have a meaning. Not all situations where a group is cautious or even hates another are racism. The same way blacks in the US being cautious of whites is not racism -- they do have a long history of suffering in their hands that justifies that as the prudent behavior.