Top Gun wrote:Ferno wrote:So if I were to get my mates together, get some tiki torches and walk to anywhere with them lit, it's suddenly a racist demonstration?
If you and your mates gathered together around a statue of a Confederate general with the intent to keep it on public display, all while shouting white supremacist slogans, then
★■◆●ing right it would be a racist demonstration. I'm going to put this bluntly: you're not from the US, and you're apparently woefully ignorant of at least one prominent aspect of 19th and 20th-century American history. This is a very deliberate optic designed to recall an entire string of affronts against African-American southerners. Arguing against that is like trying to argue that draping a noose in a tree outside a predominantly-black school is just an innocent bit of trolling. Sometimes a cigar is not just a cigar.
Because I argue for more than one connection, because I ask for solid facts, clear intent and weight of evidence, I'm 'woefully ignorant'?
How dare you.
How dare you accuse me of being woefully ignorant when I come from a line of people who were sold into slavery.
How dare you dismiss what I've said because I'm not 'from your country'.
That is the highest form of dismissal and as a teacher, you should be ashamed of this. This sort of dismissal should be beneath you.
The funny thing is, you lambast what I say and then, at the tail of it, you actually say something that I was talking about all this time - clear intent and weight of evidence. A solid connection between intent and a group.
Had this group of people with tiki torches walked into a predominantly black neighborhood, and chanted overtly racist tirades, we would see clear intent. A provable case. Something that can be prosecuted as a hate crime.
But the only thing linking that protest to hate is the leader, who wasnt even there, only shown to be holding a torch, and that's not a lot to go on.
"Russia is our friend" isn't racist. "Blood and soil" isn't racist. Poor choice of words, probably. "You won't replace us" has been used in different forms by different groups.
Did we see "white power"? No. We saw "what brings us together is that we are white". Not inherently racist, because if 'white' was replaced with 'latino', 'black', 'asian', 'Peruvian' or any other nationality, it would be the same message.
Did we see "go home (insert racial slur here)"? No.
All I'm saying is in order to consider this a racist demonstration, there has to be more substantial evidence than what we've seen. It's not a lot to build a case on, and the accusation of racism is starting to be flung at people with less and less evidence to back it up.