[andrey-p]

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.)

[golergka]

The fact that it was a part of liberation struggle didn't make it not racism.

[coldtea]

Actually it did. Jews in Germany in 36 hating on the German people for what they're doing to them is not "racism".

[golergka]

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.

[coldtea]

>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.