Are all cultures inherently racist ?
There are some who would argue that only "white western" cultures are truly " racist " in that they de-mean or otherwise consider other non western cultures inferior.
I was listening to a professor of culture ( sorry I forgot his name ), but he argued that " our " western racism is so deeply entrenched, that we can't at all see it.
He went on to suggest even the western scientific method of doing research....carried within it a seed of racism..in that it implied all other forms of knowledge were inferior to its relentless logic...
He stressed that much is being lost in the cultural divide between the west & the east and that both have much to gain from sharing their cultural / societal values & insights.
So is it just Western culture that can be labelled inherently racist or can this tag be applied to all cultures ?
I have my doubts..
PS :
Since posting the above..I actually managed to trawl thru two trash cans in a increasingly lunatic search for the name of this professor..
Patience bears fruits..
His name is Professor Ziauddin Sardar.
I heard him at the recent Adelaide Festival of Ideas..
If I may quote from an article on his address with reference to the science aspect..
" Fundamentalists believe there is only one great culture, one way to believe, one truth, one way to do science, one history. This kind of civilisation is extremely fundamentalist, and you " stabbing the air toward his audience.." you belong to that civilisation ".
He adds.
" Western culture is so used to being right most of the time that it now thinks that it is right all of the time. Westerners think that there is only one way of being. All other ways are inferior. The dominant way of the west allows no space for difference".
Sydney Morning Herald: Spectrum july 26-27 page 17. reporter :Angela Bennie : " The scepticism of a believer "
He co - published a book entitled
" A manifesto on Western Racism "
He is Professor of Post Colonial Studies at City University.London. He is also a broadcaster, editor of " " Futures ", a cultural theorist and gives lectures on the above subjects..
His most recent book is entitled.
" Why do people Hate America ? "
I was listening to a professor of culture ( sorry I forgot his name ), but he argued that " our " western racism is so deeply entrenched, that we can't at all see it.
He went on to suggest even the western scientific method of doing research....carried within it a seed of racism..in that it implied all other forms of knowledge were inferior to its relentless logic...
He stressed that much is being lost in the cultural divide between the west & the east and that both have much to gain from sharing their cultural / societal values & insights.
So is it just Western culture that can be labelled inherently racist or can this tag be applied to all cultures ?
I have my doubts..
PS :
Since posting the above..I actually managed to trawl thru two trash cans in a increasingly lunatic search for the name of this professor..
Patience bears fruits..
His name is Professor Ziauddin Sardar.
I heard him at the recent Adelaide Festival of Ideas..
If I may quote from an article on his address with reference to the science aspect..
" Fundamentalists believe there is only one great culture, one way to believe, one truth, one way to do science, one history. This kind of civilisation is extremely fundamentalist, and you " stabbing the air toward his audience.." you belong to that civilisation ".
He adds.
" Western culture is so used to being right most of the time that it now thinks that it is right all of the time. Westerners think that there is only one way of being. All other ways are inferior. The dominant way of the west allows no space for difference".
Sydney Morning Herald: Spectrum july 26-27 page 17. reporter :Angela Bennie : " The scepticism of a believer "
He co - published a book entitled
" A manifesto on Western Racism "
He is Professor of Post Colonial Studies at City University.London. He is also a broadcaster, editor of " " Futures ", a cultural theorist and gives lectures on the above subjects..
His most recent book is entitled.
" Why do people Hate America ? "
Comments
racism is as it implies directly targeting hatred or ill intent at a certain race (often one different from oneself). if i say all indigenous forms of medicine (ie folk medicine) are stupid and suggest that the form of medicine that has followed a scientific (read in this case western) approach, i am not being racist because all cultures as it were have folk medicine that do not abide strictly by a scientific process.
Originally posted by billybobsky
please note that i realize science is not a result of western thought alone.
His point was that from the outside of western culture, others see science as it is practiced in the west as being without any ethical or theological considerations. His other gripe was that science is often practiced for money & profit & not for the benefit of society at large..
And yeah, that damn science, acting like it's sooooo superior.
Originally posted by BRussell
And yeah, that damn science, acting like it's sooooo superior.
Now, now. If some isolated tribe living deep within the Amazon basin believes that the moon is a giant pig's testicle that gets eaten every month by a enormous piranha in the sky, that's just as "valid" as some smug Western notion of the moon being a 2,000-mile diameter rock some 230,000 miles away.
It's all equal, and don't let any of those nasty pale white men of European descent tell you otherwise. If you say something like "But we can predict the position of the moon with incredible accuracy, and even send people to walk on the moon -- things you'd never be able to do if you thought the moon was a giant pig's testicle"... well, then you're just falling into the trap of using culturally-biased yardsticks for the truth.
Our Amazonian brothers and sisters have no silly need to reduce the world down to nanoseconds and precise angles. They can go to the moon via ritual trance any time they like. So, as you can see, giant pig testicles "work" for them just as well as our imperious racist science works for us.
Well, whatever. Fvck him, and academe, well, not yet, but soon.
Some of the damage was done by Edward Said, everyone's been getting their panties wet with "orientalism" ever since. But there are a number of reasons why, although we're racist, we're nowhere near as racist as other "cultures" around the world. Tolerance is another term that needs some adjustment.
News flash for all the leftist shit heads:.
WE'RE PRETTY FUCKING TOLERANT PEOPLE! See how far being gay or female or the wrong tribe/religion, political affiliation gets you in these backwards holes whose autonomy we're supposed to respect?
Dissent has cost here too, but it isn't paid in blood. Please. Some of these academics should be ashamed of themselves.
Go look them up.
I think most people are inherently fearful/hateful/mistrusting of those outside their "tribe," whatever they see their tribe to be. Whether it's racism, xenophobia, homophobia, ethnocentrism, sexism, etc., I think people are predisposed to identify with a group and at the same time hold (create? invent? inherit?) those outside this group as some sort of enemy. I think the professor's point of view is too narrow though, it is a more universal and less specific trait of all animals.
Then again, If a man is a slave to his inborn "nature," is that man really human? If they're just an animal and cannot learn to improve or change their beliefs and pathology, what would be the point of teaching?
Originally posted by BuonRotto
I think most people are inherently fearful/hateful/mistrusting of those outside their "tribe," whatever they see their tribe to be. Whether it's racism, xenophobia, homophobia, ethnocentrism, sexism, etc., I think people are predisposed to identify with a group and at the same time hold (create? invent? inherit?) those outside this group as some sort of enemy. I think the professor's point of view is too narrow though, it is a more universal and less specific trait of all animals.
Maybe, but the point I was making in my post above was that people who study these things believe that some cultures are more distrustful of outsiders than other cultures, and that in fact most western cultures fall on the "less distrustful" side of things.
Originally posted by shetline
Now, now. If some isolated tribe living deep within the Amazon basin believes that the moon is a giant pig's testicle that gets eaten every month by a enormous piranha in the sky, that's just as "valid" as some smug Western notion of the moon being a 2,000-mile diameter rock some 230,000 miles away.
It's all equal, and don't let any of those nasty pale white men of European descent tell you otherwise. If you say something like "But we can predict the position of the moon with incredible accuracy, and even send people to walk on the moon -- things you'd never be able to do if you thought the moon was a giant pig's testicle"... well, then you're just falling into the trap of using culturally-biased yardsticks for the truth.
Our Amazonian brothers and sisters have no silly need to reduce the world down to nanoseconds and precise angles. They can go to the moon via ritual trance any time they like. So, as you can see, giant pig testicle's "work" for them just as well as our imperious racist science works for us.
Don't ever leave AI, shetline.
Originally posted by BRussell
Don't ever leave AI, shetline.
Or more importantly, AO.
...I'm now off to chant, and project my soul onto the giant glowing ape scrotum (the sun).
In discussions like this I always use another example from Greenland. One of antropologists living with the Inuits have this story: He was canooing with them on the sea in their and all the men was singing. Suddenly they lowered their voices and soon they didn´t say a word. They canoed past a small iceberg and after a few minutes they started to sing again.
He asked why they had lowered their voices and they told him that icebergs are very sleepy and like to sleep. And if they are woken up they can get mad and choose to fall down on your kayak. What we would say was that the sound waves could trigger the ice to slide down on the kayaks and from one special POW (the natural science POW) that is more right than the way the Inuits see thing. But from their POW (the survival POW) their explanation is more right because it works in their everyday life. They view the world as animated and from that perspective their explanation is more right because its easier to grasp the concept of sleepy icebergs that get mad than one of sound waves. Its "right" becauase it prevents them from being killed.
Its not because anyone is racists but because the frames we understand our worlds in are so compatible.
Originally posted by aquafire
There are some who would argue that only "white western" cultures are truly " racist " in that they de-mean or otherwise consider other non western cultures inferior.
I was listening to a professor of middle eastern culture ( sorry I forgot his name ), but he argued that " our " western racism is so deeply entrenched, that we can't at all see it.
He went on to suggest even the western scientific method of doing research....carried within it a seed of racism..in that it implied all other forms of knowledge were inferior to its relentless logic...
He stressed that much is being lost in the cultural divide between the west & the east and that both have much to gain from sharing their cultural / societal values & insights.
So is just Western cultural that can be labelled inherently racist or can this tag be apllied to all cultures.?
I have my doubts.
1) you are so racist that you can even see it : in psychiatric term, people are anagognosic (they ignore their own illness), a symptom currently shared by schizophrenic peoples. Isn't it racist to assume that a whole color suffer from such a disease ?
2) the western scientific method of doing research, is the right one : this is the one who gave results, and who explained why occidental countries are rich (there is other factors, but it's an important one). China, for example has suffered from the Confusius philysopha, wich is an incredibely conservative one. China was the most advanced society some hundread years ago, and is in trouble now. The chinese revolution has rejected this values for the most part, and now science is in progress in china. In parallelar, japoneses took advantage of the "western scientific method" and became very powerfull.
My point is that there is NOT western scientific method, this is an abstract racist concept. There is a scientifical method. There is scientist all around the worlds. The level of science within the countrie has more to do the economical level of these countries and the level of education. . The man hate science that's all. Science is not in intself moral or immoral, it's what you do with science that is moral or not.
3) the mix of culture is good, this is a common idear. However there is a paradox. The world globalisation is discribed as the son of capitalism, and an ultimate evil for somepoeple. But this is this world globalisation that allow this kind of mix.
World globalisation is a threat when she erase some parts of the culture, but is good when she allows the mix of it. Like science it's not inherently good or evil : it's what you done with it.
Originally posted by Powerdoc
1) you are so racist that you can even see it : in psychiatric term, people are anagognosic (they ignore their own illness), a symptom currently shared by schizophrenic peoples. Isn't it racist to assume that a whole color suffer
Ermm..Exenophobia is such a neater word..But no..I don't agree with this guy..( Ps I am still trying to come with his name...he is of arabic descent, lives in america & europe and speaks vehemently against Islamic fundamentalist intolerance..
I think I read it in an article in " The Australian " Sorry I bumming out on the super sluething stakes...Googles is Not my best friend at the moment...
Ps while we're at it, the ongoing battle here is one of apology for all the past deeds done to the native aboriginal population..
But I don't like to apologise or be made to feel guilty for something that happened before my parents even knew of this country. Here, certain groups are using the apology or lack of apology a a measuring stick to see if someone is "racist". But it is ironic that in apologising, some of these groups see that very act of apology as a "proof" of their claims of inherent western " white " european colonial racism. "If you say sorry..it must be because your admiting your racist guilt."
It's the same moral question of collective guilt / racism as it relates to the Jews & Nazi's of germany..ie should the current German youth be held accountable..a sort of collective "blood guilt", or expecting new american citizens to apologise to native american indians or slaves.from all those years ago...should we all be made to apologise as a gesture of good will even if we individually don't feel we have ever acted in a racist manner...?
Are we racists if we don't apologise ?
In the meantime I keep looking for this Professor.
Originally posted by aquafire
Are we racists if we don't apologise ?
In the meantime I keep looking for this Professor.
No, but :
- we have to be honest with our own history
- we (the collectivity) must repair what was broken.
Feeling guilty or not is irrelevant, but the collectivity must be aware of her responsabilities even for the past events. In this ways problems should been fixed forever, and it will avoid huges problems we encounter in some areas of the world.
Originally posted by Powerdoc
No, but :
- we have to be honest with our own history
- we (the collectivity) must repair what was broken.
Feeling guilty or not is irrelevant, but the collectivity must be aware of her responsabilities even for the past events. In this ways problems should been fixed forever, and it will avoid huges problems we encounter in some areas of the world.
I call that universal conciousness, decency & just basic human compassion..treat others the way you'd like them to treat you in.
What I object to is the outward politicization of the apology; the presumption of racist guilt related to colour, culture or history.
It is also dishonest, as it is used ( more often than not ) as a tool to lever fiduciary compensation for all such "alleged " wrongs..even though in almost all cases the victims & perpetrators have long since died.
It is also a nice way to perpetuate the role of victim , while providing a social background & justification for not adhering to laws that otherwise govern the behaviour of every other citizen....
I'd like to think of myself as compassionate, concerned, ethical, but not a dupe.