Can you be unracist?

Is campaigning against racism, by nature, promoting racism?

I'm not saying we should not campaign against racism - I'm just not sure how to do it without making the problem worse.

This all started when I read about P'Diddy commenting on "his people" - and the thought occurred to me that until "his people" means everyone, it is inherently racist.

Effectively, any targeted campaign against discrimination risks seperating the world into two groups: the minority and the majority: Men and women, Black and white, Christian and Muslim - which risks reinforcing the very distinction of "them" and "us" that we seek to remove.

This leaves a true yet hard to convey "tolerance and diversity" message, devoid of any examples (Or again, we must choose sides).

In this context, you can see power of words.  The need to avoid, not just change, labels - for examples avoiding racist, sexist remarks - perhaps on the day there are no labels, there can be no discrimination?

Comments

[David McQueen]

You raise some good points as to the direction that many of the anti-racism lobbies tend to go down.
Racism is a malicious disease that has affected mankind as far as history records. What the core for any campaign should be is to remove assumptions about someone based on a racial construct and just get back to people communicating with people.

I think I will link to this on my blog.

[Andy Harris]

You've hit on a point there Tom. I too have noticed several situations like the P Diddy one and have always thought "hang on a minute, what would happen if it was reversed?".

For example, you've got a predominantly 'black' neighbourhood anywhere in the world and there's just a few 'white' people living there and those people start publicising the fact that their culture is being squashed by everything around them - would those 'whites' then be classed as being racist because they're pushing what they believe to be their rights to be recognised etc.?

Just re-read that and it looks like a racist rant but it's not! My point is: there's so much fuss about racism but I wonder what it would be like if at some stage in the future there are 'whites' acting in the same way.

Andy