Remember, not everybody here lives in the US like I assume you do (I live in France, as a first approximation it looks like you’re all crazy over there).
You might be interested in a book called Racial Paranoia. It argues that since overt racism is publicly unacceptable in the US, people are focusing on tinier and tinier clues about who they can trust, resulting in a paranoid style which is actually a rational response to weird conditions.
That sounds like a stretch. While public racism is unacceptable, acting in ways consistent with racial prejudice usually goes without comment as long as plausible deniability exists.
The text was too small for me to read easily in your link, so I just sampled it.
I suppose it depends on what you mean by public—my handy example is that Trent Lott’s political career was destroyed (severely damaged?) because he made a racist comment.
ETA: And even his comment was mild compared to what people say when prejudice is considered the default.
Hard to tell from this. Facebook and Twitter exist in an odd kind of limbo where they’re treated as somewhere between public and private depending on how wide someone’s network is, how sensitive their life is to dumb crap they might say online, and how aware they are of online privacy issues, so the stuff that crosses your feed isn’t necessarily representative of what the people behind it might stand behind in a more traditional environment.
Then there’s contextual issues. The linked image clearly isn’t a conversation, or even a time slice of a hashtag somebody’s following—it’s out of chronological order and any replies aren’t shown, so it doesn’t tell us much about how representative this is of opinion in general or about how people usually respond to opinions like these, both of which are important when trying to gauge public acceptability.
That’s a plausible hypothesis—I do get the impression that overt racism is slightly more acceptable in France, and definitely more acceptable in China.
I also noticed that Americans tend to have a perspective on Arab Immigrants in France that seems weird and could be explained by the fact that they suppose “French”-Arab relationships are like the White-Black relationship in the US (or at least, that was one hypothesis I had at the time after some weird conversations).
You might be interested in a book called Racial Paranoia. It argues that since overt racism is publicly unacceptable in the US, people are focusing on tinier and tinier clues about who they can trust, resulting in a paranoid style which is actually a rational response to weird conditions.
That sounds like a stretch. While public racism is unacceptable, acting in ways consistent with racial prejudice usually goes without comment as long as plausible deniability exists.
I don’t disagree with the substance of your comment, but I’m not sure that public racism is as widely unacceptable as you’d like to think:
http://i.imgur.com/vcYuy.png
The text was too small for me to read easily in your link, so I just sampled it.
I suppose it depends on what you mean by public—my handy example is that Trent Lott’s political career was destroyed (severely damaged?) because he made a racist comment.
ETA: And even his comment was mild compared to what people say when prejudice is considered the default.
Hard to tell from this. Facebook and Twitter exist in an odd kind of limbo where they’re treated as somewhere between public and private depending on how wide someone’s network is, how sensitive their life is to dumb crap they might say online, and how aware they are of online privacy issues, so the stuff that crosses your feed isn’t necessarily representative of what the people behind it might stand behind in a more traditional environment.
Then there’s contextual issues. The linked image clearly isn’t a conversation, or even a time slice of a hashtag somebody’s following—it’s out of chronological order and any replies aren’t shown, so it doesn’t tell us much about how representative this is of opinion in general or about how people usually respond to opinions like these, both of which are important when trying to gauge public acceptability.
I think such paranoia is in play in politics and sometimes online, where most or all of what you know about someone is what they say.
That’s a plausible hypothesis—I do get the impression that overt racism is slightly more acceptable in France, and definitely more acceptable in China.
I also noticed that Americans tend to have a perspective on Arab Immigrants in France that seems weird and could be explained by the fact that they suppose “French”-Arab relationships are like the White-Black relationship in the US (or at least, that was one hypothesis I had at the time after some weird conversations).