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Originally Posted by Red Sea
I think questioning things is GREAT but to do so in a meaningful way. A big nose (I also have one although its also been broken for years) is an insult or a fact it may even indicate a religion. A monkey implicitly indicates a backward step in evolution, not as intelligent a bit thick.
And talking about Jewish jokes does not make it ok to insult others. You and numerous others can insult me until the cows come home its water off a ducks back, I really could not care. However I’m not sensitive, but I know others who are and to be fair as a kid I was and do not want to make people feel bad. If that makes me obtuse or whatever i can live with it, in the 1970s I campaigned against racism and i was in the minority and took an awful lot of abuse.
Although I agree it is impossible not to be racist even in a minor way that makes it all the more reason to fight what I know to be right from wrong
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Alright. So the issues are, What constitutes racism? and If something is not racist, but could be interpreted as such, is it wrong to say it?
Now tell me how you could possibly interpret what I said before as racist. I admitted it was probably too sensitive an area to go around just calling whoever you like simian. But what i said was very different from that. Any black person, or a person afflicted with high sensitivity like yourself, should be able to see from the context that I was not being derogatory towards black people. If they can't, they're too stupid to understand the conversation and can feck off.
It's one thing being very careful about language. It's another censoring language, maintaining that ANY use of a particular term or metaphor or whatever is WRONG. For instance, if a ballet reviewer wrote a glowing review of a black dancer, in which they praised his sophistication, intelligence, genius etc., then went on to say he was "as sleek as a cat, as nimble as a monkey, as graceful as a flamingo" or some such guff, should we castigate the cnut for racism? What about if they're black themselves. It's complicated.
Well done fighting racism in the seventies and all that, must've taken some guts. But that was only the beginning of the battle - fighting against raw bigotry. Surely the fight can only be won when people stop having to censor their speech, thus differentiating between people of different colour. When if someone thinks Sean Wright-Phillips looks like a chimp (which he does, as does George Bush, as doesn't, say, Ainsley Harriot, or Hasselbaink, or Dr Dre), they can say so. Course we're not there yet, but talking about the complications involved might help, shouting everyone down as racist doesn't.
By the way, monkeys aren't a backward step in evolution from humans. We didn't evolve from monkeys and all living monkeys are just as evolved as we are.