I am not saying that ethnocentrism is good. What I am saying is that ethnocentrism is irrelevant to a discussion of racism, because they are different. Racism is a systemic social system that is applied across a range of ethnicities, and ethnocentrism is how one single ethnicity perceives itself in relation to others. White Americans are not a single ethnicity and never have been. For the purposes of US racism, all whites are considered members of the same group, but it’s a social convention. It has almost nothing to do with actual ethnicity (except in the way the system creates ethnicity, but that’s secondary).
You brought up ethnocentrism, but it’s a bit like saying “I want to talk about pizza. Tomatoes are natural.” Ethnicity has very, very, very little to do with race, and thus very little to do with racism. In a specific American context, you have the fact that African-Americans are (arguably) an ethnic group as well as a racial group, and people seize on that as justification for conflating the two concepts, but that’s pure ignorance at work.
If what you’re saying is true, you’ve been hanging around some fringe sites. Check out the liberal mainstream and you won’t see any of that nonsense. Liberals aren’t anti-white or anti-American or anti-western. And I think even conservatives would get a chuckle out of hearing liberals being described as anti-government.
Let’s consider another example of something we all consider to be bad: disease.
Do you think there’s an acceptable minimum of disease? That we shouldn’t try to eliminate all polio or smallpox, for example? Sure, everyone agrees we should reduce this diseases down from epidemic levels. But we want to stop before we go all the way down to zero. We should just aim for marginalizing polio and smallpox. We should still have some people getting these diseases every year for the good of society.
I can’t see the sense of such an argument. I think we should aim for complete elimination of some problems. Our goal with disease should be zero. And I feel the same way about racism. I don’t see any need for an acceptable minimal amount of racism. Our goal with racism should be zero.
It seems natural, and perhaps in some incarnations it may even seem harmless. The problem is we live in an unequal society because the U.S. is dominated by one race. The country was for all intents and purposes built on the subjugation of other races, whether those would be immigrants or slaves. It’s easy for people to forget but the Irish, Italians, Polish etc. were not considered ‘‘white’’ as we understand it today. They had to pay the wages of whiteness, so to speak, by assimilating into the white culture.
Regardless of how well meaning we may be, we have still constructed a society that, consciously or not, favors whiteness, or the familiarity of culture you identify as being ‘‘natural.’’ That culture dominates the airwaves, the television, the internet, the courts, the schools, the corporations, and pretty much everywhere. That culture defines beauty and morality by its own white standards, and takes its own perspective for granted as normal, natural, common sense, etc. That culture is often blind to the fact that the country is full of people who have a completely different lived experience.
The result is egregious disparities between those who are white and those who are not. The statistics speak for themselves. On every general measure of quality of life, mortality, obesity, disease, income, wealth, etc. white people, as a whole, come out ahead.
That is inherently harmful, and refusing to acknowledge it only perpetuates it.
I don’t think there’s ever been any anti-racism program that didn’t expect black people to supply a large share of the effort. Even if you go all the way back to the extreme example of John Brown - he expected slaves to rise up and join him. And every program since has counted on black participation.
Civil rights has never been something white people do for black people. It’s always been something white people and black people have done together.
No, this is completely wrong. Many African immigrants often try their damnedest to stay away from black Americans and black American culture. There’s a huge amount of friction between the two communities. They only start assimilating into black America when white Americans make it clear that they’re not welcome.
Paula Deen still has a great career. They gave her a timeout, and now she’s back in business. So was Don Imus. So was Doug Tracht. So was Mike Wallace.
When I read about some of the conditions in some areas of sub-Saharan Africa, I often wonder if most of the everyday folks would’ve been better off under their former European rule.
Many of the replies read like “But the ruling whites were racist in Rhodesia”. Was that really much worse than living under Zimbabwe’s oppression and economic failures under Mugabe? Same with places like Somalia, Central African Republic, Sudan, and the DR Congo (vs post Leopold, naturally).
Even in the “good” colonies - the ones that didn’t involve massacres and such - the colonial administrations have a mixed record at best. In many cases, they took what had been a self-sustaining society and integrated it into the global economy. Which was often no great thing for the society. The colony or post-colonial nation was now subject to economic problems over which it had no control.