Fragmachine wrote on Jul 22
nd, 2009 at 9:31pm:
The name is Fragmachine and I'm new to the discussion but I'd like to say my piece.
Racism is undeniable in Australia as I have expirienced first hand in my travels. In fact, I would propose it is undeniable in many, if not all countries in the world.
Racism is defined by colour, nationality or religion of a person though I would beg to differ.
Racism, I belive, could be defined as the fear of the other, we humans gravitate to what is known and fear what is not known.
So in that context, racism involves a lot more than the simple phyisical description of a person and we should involve the bigger picture in the discussion.
I think legitimate "racism" of others can very often simply be chalked up to the misactions of people
of other races. For instance, we are often told that the fact that Aboriginals/African American blacks commit far, far more crimes on average than white people is simply a "negative stereotype", kept alive and disseminated by "ignorance" (a very popular epithet in itself). However, if one actually bothers to examine the statistical records they will find that this so called stereotype is actually true. I have always found the constant leftist denial that the existence of stereotypes very often is predicated upon patterns in actual human behaviour among groups very silly indeed. To furnish my argument further, take another stereotype, a so called "good stereotype"-- that Asian people tend to be far better at mathematics than other groups. For some reason, leftists find a stereotype like this one equally deplorable, despite its positivity. But again, as measured by the Wechsler scales, Asians
do (for reasons that I am not entirely sure of) tend to have conpsciously elevated visual-spatial skills (which are highly related with right brain function and thus mathematics) to verbal skills-- and this is true not only in Western countries, but in Japan and elsewhere. Stereotypes simply naturally formulate themselves from the void of information; taken to a logical conclusion, they are simply a way the characterstic human ability to recognize patterns from disorder asserts itself. But no, because they concern
other human beings, they are forbidden!
Racism, probably, is always going to be with us. As long as we continue to be DNA based lifeforms, the characteristic assortive marker of our very existence-- that which determines that we prefer people who are like ourselves, will continue to present unbreachable cleavages between even sub-species that are only "trivially" genetically different. I don't really think racism is a fear of what is unknown-- more often than not, as I illustrated up there, it is a fear of what is
actually known.