2017's winner for "I'm Not Racist but..."?

Commodus

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Oct 9, 2004
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https://twitter.com/LBC/status/939163176670601216

It's painfully cringeworthy to listen to, but christ, it's "I'm Not Racist But" pure gold.

Modern racists like to think of that disclaimer as a free pass. They forget that racism doesn't just mean embracing overt "I want to eliminate everyone who doesn't look like me" ideology -- it means being uncomfortable around people from other ethnicities. Racism means supporting policies that are clearly motivated by racist ideas, even if the creators use weasel language to mask their intentions (see: the US). Racism is believing that racial stereotypes have a serious basis in truth; racism is believing that you can do what you want because "racism is over;" racism is arguing that Black Lives Matter is a threat.

On this note, has anyone ever unironically said "I'm not racist, but..." without saying something that's explicitly racist? Demetri Martin had a bit about this. "I'm not racist, but you look nice today!" "That's not racist at all!" "Yeah, like I said, I'm not racist."
 
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mikeymikec

Lifer
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On this note, has anyone ever unironically said "I'm not racist, but..." without saying something that's explicitly racist? Demetri Martin had a bit about this. "I'm not racist, but you look nice today!" "That's not racist at all!" "Yeah, like I said, I'm not racist."

I've had customers prefix their complaint about call centre staff and not being able to understand their strong accents, which (if it stops there) is a fair enough complaint to make IMO. I personally don't care where a call centre employee comes from, but a fluent grasp of the language involved in liasing with customers and the ability to speak clearly is essential. Some natives fail on both points! :) My wife understands the broader variations of the local accent where we live better than I do despite her being German and me being English, on the other hand she was totally scuppered in an interview once when trying to understand the interviewer's strong Scottish accent.
 

DAPUNISHER

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mikeymikec

Lifer
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Quite the contrast to radio show hosts here; the host's demeanor is polite, friendly, and calm.

Every British radio presenter I've heard is like that, weird isn't it (considering I'd hardly say that our TV programmes are the height of high-brow entertainment); this one picked up an award for his Brexit coverage and is probably the best one I've heard for political topics.
 

Commodus

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I've had customers prefix their complaint about call centre staff and not being able to understand their strong accents, which (if it stops there) is a fair enough complaint to make IMO. I personally don't care where a call centre employee comes from, but a fluent grasp of the language involved in liasing with customers and the ability to speak clearly is essential. Some natives fail on both points! :) My wife understands the broader variations of the local accent where we live better than I do despite her being German and me being English, on the other hand she was totally scuppered in an interview once when trying to understand the interviewer's strong Scottish accent.

Hah, yeah... of course, in those cases you shouldn't need the "I'm not a racist, but" preamble. If you can't understand someone, you can't understand them, regardless of their ethnicity or how you feel about them.
 

JSt0rm

Lifer
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lolol this is trump.txt Russia has brainwashed all these people.
 

Moonbeam

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Nov 24, 1999
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You can begin to wrap your head around the nature of the blindness of bigotry if you understand some simple facts about them. They are highly moral people who believe in the good but have been programmed to believe the good is something that is actually evil. In shout they are only half fucked up and they see only the half that isn't. They know there is a good and that good should win out over evil. This is a correct moral belief but because what they believe is the good isn't actually the good they think it is, that can't be shaken from their opinion. They don't see that what is being challenged is evil because they associate the notion they are wrong with having to admit good should not triumph over evil. They should not and never will admit that. Again, good should triumph over evil.

They are simply defending the wrong good, a good that was inculcated into them before they learned to reason and which now can't be uprooted without destroying everything they believe and should believe is sacred, the good itself. They have little real faith that the good can't ever lose or that they can be mistaken about what it is.

You can die to all the bull shit you were ever taught and at the bottom of the barrel the real treasure will be found. There is a truth and a good that can't ever be destroyed. That truth isn't words but an awakening.
 

theeedude

Lifer
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Well he is pissed off about Polish, Romanians, and Bulgarians, not just brown people.
 

Bitek

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Well he is pissed off about Polish, Romanians, and Bulgarians, not just brown people.

You saw a lot of this in the SE of England, closest point to Europe. Not coincidentally it was the heart of UKIP support (Farange's party.)

Lots of growth, but large numbers of Eastern Europeans were coming in, seen as taking jobs and/or lowering wages in the low skill or trades jobs (very akin to the relationship of Mexicans to the US.)

Then also bringing in foreign languages and foreign religions (ie not the traditional Anglican CoE Christianity.)

There are a lot of Indians in the UK, but it's also partly a product of their colonial past. It was their decision to do this.

The UK had very little control of the borders in the EU, so this changes the view of the immigrants as more forced upon.

Put on top of it, a heavy-handed EU enforcing harmonization and regulations, then really it's no wonder why there was such a backlash.
 

Bitek

Lifer
Aug 2, 2001
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Point being, it's more complicated than white vs brown.

Changing culture is a better measure IMO, rather than just skin color.

Plenty of bad blood just between Catholics and Protestants.


This should also raise some serious doubts about the EU experiment. Is the UK merely a one off, or are they a herald of rising tensions?
The rise of RW nationalism across Europe should give pause.
 

interchange

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I am curious about this particular social value. If I were a member of a native tribe to a nation and my town (not my sovereign land) was legally being colonized by white industrialists, would it be racist to desire a new trade structure that disincentivizes white industrial immigration? What strikes me is not answering the question with right or wrong, but the automatic passion for which I want to condemn this man as a racist and defend the tribal native.
 

mikeymikec

Lifer
May 19, 2011
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You saw a lot of this in the SE of England, closest point to Europe. Not coincidentally it was the heart of UKIP support (Farange's party.)

Lots of growth, but large numbers of Eastern Europeans were coming in, seen as taking jobs and/or lowering wages in the low skill or trades jobs (very akin to the relationship of Mexicans to the US.)

Then also bringing in foreign languages and foreign religions (ie not the traditional Anglican CoE Christianity.)

There are a lot of Indians in the UK, but it's also partly a product of their colonial past. It was their decision to do this.

The UK had very little control of the borders in the EU, so this changes the view of the immigrants as more forced upon.

Put on top of it, a heavy-handed EU enforcing harmonization and regulations, then really it's no wonder why there was such a backlash.

Except:

http://localstats.co.uk/census-demographics/england/london/harrow

Count how many of those are EU countries that aren't already part of the UK. Of course the UK has/had control over its borders with regard to non-EU migrants.
 

pmv

Lifer
May 30, 2008
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Point being, it's more complicated than white vs brown.

Changing culture is a better measure IMO, rather than just skin color.

Plenty of bad blood just between Catholics and Protestants.


This should also raise some serious doubts about the EU experiment. Is the UK merely a one off, or are they a herald of rising tensions?
The rise of RW nationalism across Europe should give pause.


I have such mixed-feelings about the EU that I could have an angry shouty argument about it in an empty room.

But, while the EU has masses of problems (that it isn't doing anything much to address) I don't think any other EU country is likely to go the same way as the UK - the UK was always a bit of an outlier in the weakness of the factors that led it to join in the first place. It didn't experience war on its own territory or occupation in WW2, for one thing.

But the phone-in guy in the OP actually declared "I'm not a racist...but I judge people on the sole basis of their skin colour". That is the purest example of the trope I've heard for a long time.
 

pmv

Lifer
May 30, 2008
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You saw a lot of this in the SE of England, closest point to Europe. Not coincidentally it was the heart of UKIP support (Farange's party.)

Lots of growth, but large numbers of Eastern Europeans were coming in, seen as taking jobs and/or lowering wages in the low skill or trades jobs (very akin to the relationship of Mexicans to the US.)

Then also bringing in foreign languages and foreign religions (ie not the traditional Anglican CoE Christianity.)

There are a lot of Indians in the UK, but it's also partly a product of their colonial past. It was their decision to do this.

The UK had very little control of the borders in the EU, so this changes the view of the immigrants as more forced upon.

Put on top of it, a heavy-handed EU enforcing harmonization and regulations, then really it's no wonder why there was such a backlash.



Not _quite_ true. London is in SE England and had some of the lowest support for UKIP and Brexit outside of Scotland (as did most of the big cities...but even there it was mixed, Birmingham being much more pro-leave than London Liverpool or Manchester). You are really talking about Kent, mostly.

A feature of EU immigration though is that much of it went to areas that had never previously had much inward migration (e.g. from those South Asian countries). Many of those areas did not react to such sudden change as well as did the big cities that were accustomed to it (and formed by it).

I kind of agree about the distinction between immigration from former-Empire countries like those of South Asia and from EU countries that were never colonised by Britain. Personally I think those are morally very different things. But still...those EU migrants did not in themselves, by their intrinsic nature, bring any problems and if anything their culture fitted in too well (e.g. having a similar attitude to alcohol).

To me the problem is the whole structure of the EU - free-movement means a single giant, mobile labour force that is far bigger than any one nation or other institution that would be regulating labour competition, so it would tend to shift power from workers to owners of capital, it seems to me.
 

pmv

Lifer
May 30, 2008
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I am curious about this particular social value. If I were a member of a native tribe to a nation and my town (not my sovereign land) was legally being colonized by white industrialists, would it be racist to desire a new trade structure that disincentivizes white industrial immigration? What strikes me is not answering the question with right or wrong, but the automatic passion for which I want to condemn this man as a racist and defend the tribal native.

This one was easy though because the guy explicitly complained about 'non white faces' in the places he went. Judging people on the basis of the colour of their skin is about as non-complex a form of racism as you can get.

A complaint about demographic cultural-change is a more complicated issue. But note the long-standing racists of the likes of the BNP have tended to adopt the language of 'indigenous peoples' rights' as if white Brits were Australian aborigines facing a state-driven war on their culture. Its not really the same thing and its ridiculous to suggest it is. There is no 'Islamification' and such Muslim extremist nutters as there are are not backed by the full force of a state.

Like I said, my problem with it is more that the EU's economic integration has raced far ahead of the political or cultural integration, and we have a huge trans-national labour force that can compete with each other to drive down pay and conditions for all, and also all try to cram themselves into the same small areas of the continent - while there's no real will to ameliorate the effects of that competition or rationally manage such population movements. There's no single EU polis, no sense of a single 'people' built from the bottom-up, so all you have is economic competition and growing resentments. And every country in the EU appears to me to be in it for its own ends, for what it can get out of it on essentially a national level (Germany worries about the self-interest of Germany, Poland of Poland, and so on).

In my opinion they built the EU from the wrong end, from the top down. But I still think the UK leaving is going to make things worse not better.
 

pmv

Lifer
May 30, 2008
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I mean, it works as long as those national interests don't directly conflict or mutually benefit each other. But increasingly that seems not to be the case, especially with the Euro.
 

J.Wilkins

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Except:

http://localstats.co.uk/census-demographics/england/london/harrow

Count how many of those are EU countries that aren't already part of the UK. Of course the UK has/had control over its borders with regard to non-EU migrants.

Yup, this was the problem, we had UKIP with Russian money sell the people the idea that we had no control over Muzzie immies...

We had our own policy all along, the ONLY thing we went brexit over when it comes to that were the damn Poles who exported all thier poor people to Britain. Now... many of them got citizenship over the years and were premier Brexit voters...

I don't get Poland, they get 16 Billion a year, get to export all their poor but they are staunchly electing anti EU people who are not actually anti-EU but anti taking any fucking responsibility for ANYTING.

I agree with Blair, Poland out, UK in.
 

J.Wilkins

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This one was easy though because the guy explicitly complained about 'non white faces' in the places he went. Judging people on the basis of the colour of their skin is about as non-complex a form of racism as you can get.

A complaint about demographic cultural-change is a more complicated issue. But note the long-standing racists of the likes of the BNP have tended to adopt the language of 'indigenous peoples' rights' as if white Brits were Australian aborigines facing a state-driven war on their culture. Its not really the same thing and its ridiculous to suggest it is. There is no 'Islamification' and such Muslim extremist nutters as there are are not backed by the full force of a state.

Like I said, my problem with it is more that the EU's economic integration has raced far ahead of the political or cultural integration, and we have a huge trans-national labour force that can compete with each other to drive down pay and conditions for all, and also all try to cram themselves into the same small areas of the continent - while there's no real will to ameliorate the effects of that competition or rationally manage such population movements. There's no single EU polis, no sense of a single 'people' built from the bottom-up, so all you have is economic competition and growing resentments. And every country in the EU appears to me to be in it for its own ends, for what it can get out of it on essentially a national level (Germany worries about the self-interest of Germany, Poland of Poland, and so on).

In my opinion they built the EU from the wrong end, from the top down. But I still think the UK leaving is going to make things worse not better.

This is idiotic, the value of the monetary union to nations like Greece is OBVIOUS but to other nations like ours or Sweden or Norway it's not because we have strong production values of our own and so we get to keep our own currency. For nations like Italy, Spain or Greece the value is a stable currency and for us all a stable Europe.

I think you missed the point of the EU entirely.
 

pmv

Lifer
May 30, 2008
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This is idiotic, the value of the monetary union to nations like Greece is OBVIOUS but to other nations like ours or Sweden or Norway it's not because we have strong production values of our own and so we get to keep our own currency. For nations like Italy, Spain or Greece the value is a stable currency and for us all a stable Europe.

I think you missed the point of the EU entirely.


You are in a weak position to speak of 'idiotic' when you don't seem to understand the issue, or how the single currency works.

Germany needs a market for its exports, it has to run a trade surplus because it has long had the policy of keeping domestic workers wages low, and so keeping domestic consumption low, so its products have to go somewhere else. The Euro helps provide that. But the flipside is the weaker Eurozone countries have to run a trade deficit. But because they are in the Eurozone they can't devalue, and, crucially, the convergence criteria prevent them from running a fiscal deficit, so they end up trapped in a spiral of economic contraction. This is why those countries have _massive_ unemployment.

The way the Euro works is to strangle the weaker countries within it. It only works until the Eurozone economies diverge, when they do the trouble starts, because of the combination of a single currency without financial transfers between countries. Everyone pointed out this was a flaw in the idea when the Euro was first introduced (that countries with diverging economies would have different requirements for different currency strengths, so you'd have to either have different currencies or a fully unified superstate with financial transfers between regions), and sure enough, the critics were proved right in the subsequent crisis.

The UK has been acting as a safety-valve for that Eurozone unemployment, incidentally, hence the large influx of Greeks and Italians and Portugese to the UK recently to take advantage of our 'liberalised', low-employment-protection economy (which creates large numbers of insecure short-term jobs, but avoids the secure-insiders vs locked-out unemployed that is a feature of the Continental model).

It makes no sense to have fiscal union without full financial union (which means political union). At some point that is going to have to be addressed, but the Germans seem reluctant to accept it.

My gripe about the EU is the reverse of UKIP's - its political union doesn't go far enough, and unfortunately probably never will, precisely because of that UKIP-style reaction to it (itself probably an inevitable result of the failure to first build a single European 'people', and instead try and do everything from the top down). And as long as it's stuck in the middle ground, being neither a genuine superstate nor a collection of independent states, there are going to be all sorts of problems, that might eventually shake it to bits.
 

interchange

Diamond Member
Oct 10, 1999
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This one was easy though because the guy explicitly complained about 'non white faces' in the places he went. Judging people on the basis of the colour of their skin is about as non-complex a form of racism as you can get.

Is it? How many of the disadvantaged freely classify the "white devil" without any flexibility? Perhaps you argue that this is similarly racist or that different rules apply when someone is disadvantaged. I actually agree with both arguments, to an extent. But my point is that, even if an unobjectionable racist line has been crossed, it doesn't necessarily invalidate someone's position entirely.

A complaint about demographic cultural-change is a more complicated issue. But note the long-standing racists of the likes of the BNP have tended to adopt the language of 'indigenous peoples' rights' as if white Brits were Australian aborigines facing a state-driven war on their culture. Its not really the same thing and its ridiculous to suggest it is. There is no 'Islamification' and such Muslim extremist nutters as there are are not backed by the full force of a state.

I do not want to suggest they are the same. The comparison is made only as a demonstration of a split -- idealizing one stance and devaluing another. And only because it is a self-reflection. A split I think is extremely common, but I wouldn't dare think I know for certain how someone else feels about this issue.

Like I said, my problem with it is more that the EU's economic integration has raced far ahead of the political or cultural integration, and we have a huge trans-national labour force that can compete with each other to drive down pay and conditions for all, and also all try to cram themselves into the same small areas of the continent - while there's no real will to ameliorate the effects of that competition or rationally manage such population movements. There's no single EU polis, no sense of a single 'people' built from the bottom-up, so all you have is economic competition and growing resentments. And every country in the EU appears to me to be in it for its own ends, for what it can get out of it on essentially a national level (Germany worries about the self-interest of Germany, Poland of Poland, and so on).

In my opinion they built the EU from the wrong end, from the top down. But I still think the UK leaving is going to make things worse not better.

I appreciate this last part a lot. I did not ask for it, and really I'm not tied to the UK in any way, so it's not an issue I have much passion about. What I appreciate, though, is a thoughtful and meaningful analysis which does not seem to originate from a defensive rejection of racism. That's why I bring up the topic at all. When things are emotionally charged, we tend to have difficulty arriving at nuance. I really appreciate that, not only could you examine your own views on the emotional charge, you were able to distance yourself from it in order to substantiate your position with complexity and openness to discussion.
 

pmv

Lifer
May 30, 2008
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[continuing from my previous post]

...I mean, what freedom-of-movement does is create a single trans-national, fungible, labour force. But at the same time, things like minimum-wage, social housing, healthcare, taxation and welfare, remain controlled by domestic governments, and trade-unions and the media, and other sub-state level actors remain strictly national. To me that seems a recipe for a race-to-the-bottom on labour conditions and pay if not everything else. It's like taking a step back to the days before there was any regulation at all on labour competition.

Partly it's limited by the practical difficulties of relocating to work in another country, and also there _are_ restrictions on freedom of movement, but unfortunately successive UK governments have chosen not to enforce any of them. There's been a weird alliance between all sides to _not_ use what tools the EU makes available to reduce its own bad effects, an alliance between those who wanted completely open borders and those who wanted to make the EU look as bad as possible to the UK public.

The whole thing's a complete mess.
 
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