I’ve always thought that spending the majority of my life working in multiracial environments has tempered my racism. The positive people have always outweighed the negative, of any race, by far.
However, the lowest bar in those environments was not the lowest of society or of any particular culture. People tend to be educated & have a fairly good work ethic. So I think that the idea would be to live in a racially mixed neighborhood of a higher social class, not to avoid other races entirely.
I’ve used the Project Implicit Test a few times & it seems like my responses tend to be influenced by specific individuals (eg. once I scored prejudiced against asian peoples when I had a terrible immediate supervisor who had a very nasty impact on my life). I read once that you could manipulate your response to the test by watching news reports which showed either positive or negative reports about a particular race.
Well, I think it’s shorthand for European culture, or maybe the right term would be Helleno-Germanic. There is a distinct culture that is not shared by people in the Middle East (“The Orient” originally), the Maghreb, Sub-Saharan Africa or Central or East Asia. As far as “saving” it goes, that’s usually an indication that the speaker is either an idiot or suffering some sort of cultural panic because things ain’t like they used to be. The culture is always evolving, and that’s usually because of the influence of other cultures. And thank God we don’t have to figure out what the square root of CDIXL is (It’s XXI, by the way).
The fact that they aren’t Judeo-Christianized. I’d just use Judeo-Christian, but that offends the atheist who don’t get that, even if they don’t believe, Christianity has changed their culture. And because it doesn’t include all Jewish or Christian people, so it offends Middle Easterners.
And I for one will not be referring to “Eastern” values since there is no one system. That doesn’t mean that there isn’t a Western one.
And this isn’t even getting into the concept of western democracy.
I’m sorry, but you and MOL come off as if you are reaching when you claim that “Western” does not include African Americans or other black people. Except when used by racists, it usually does.
Are Judaism or Christianity Western religions? How much farther east is Mecca from Jerusalem? Neither of these three religions started in Europe, all three are Asian imports.
Buddhism, Hinduism, Zoroastrianism and various other pagan religions have changed our culture, too. It doesn’t offend me; it’s just not any more accurate than any other label.
Christianity, whatever it may have been in the time of the Apostles, is thoroughly Hellenized. Islam never was. Mecca is not far from Jerusalem, but just far enough that it was never assimilated into a European empire.
No, they didn’t. The Reconquista started in, the 8th Century, and was more than half finished by the 12th. If you’ve ever read The Poem of the Cid, that’s based on an exciting true story that took place in the 11th Century.
The Ottomans controlled most the Balkan Peninsula from the 16th to the 19th Century. They were never assimilated into the Turkish Empire.
I’m not sure what the point of these fun facts is, though. Is there any doubt that Spain is more like France than it is like Tunisia or Iraq?