No they aren’t.
It’s the same ignorant ideas dressed up in sheep’s clothing.
:rolleyes:
Well it may whereever you live. It doesn’t where I live. I’d be interested in a simply statement from MrDibble or some other South African as to what connotation the idiom carries there. I think there may be a whole lot of cultural baggage transfer going on here. There may not be also, but I’d like a straight answer from someone who knows.
If you genuinely don’t understand why black people would be offended by being told they have one foot in the jungle then it would be utterly pointless to explain unless you come from a dramatically different environment then most people on this site.
What country are you from?
You seem to genuinely not understand that you can’t divine someone’s meaning simply from the words they’ve spoken. Where they are from, and what those words mean there, are important.
How about
Underlining added.
I wasn’t addressing you.
Exactly.
Oh please. I’ve been paraphrasing what was said, the original is plenty bad enough and I’ve repeated it exactly too. If I was steadily worsening it why would I still use the same original phrasing later in the thread?
No. They don’t. If they did, you could show the link between the two, or the relevance of “the bush” to the South African majority populace.
I don’t need to prove anything to you. You’ve already made your mind up for whatever partisan reason. Nor do I need to prove anything to anyone else - dude already got his warning. What I’m doing is calling your so-called reasoning for defending racism exactly what it is - disingenuous.
No-one’s defending racism. What we’re doing is attacking the somewhat ridiculous process of minutely parsing every sentence in the hope of find some oblique reference that could possibly be considered racist, if one assumes the very worst about the writer, then getting butthurt about it.
When you defend racist statements, you defend racism.
No. In fact, it take assuming absolutely the best of the writer from the outset to explain why “one foot in the bush” is not racism in this context. And the “the country was a safe and a clean one to live in” line was where Delon had already lost that assumption. No “minute parsing” necessary. Dude had already outed himself as a racist at that point. “One leg in the bush” was just the overt “let’s see how far I can take this” bit.
If I saw just that phrase in a post by some other regular poster, I’d assume he had no idea what he was saying and would correct him, but wouldn’t assume he was a racist because of it. But note that Delon only had two posts, both in that thread. Survey says “drive-by racist” but go ahead, defend it all you want to.
You forgot to mention that the fellow stopped by and registered just to resurrect a one and a half year old zombie thread with his unsubstantiated views. Hasn’t been around since. To be scrupulously fair though, if you take the title of his post “The problem with South Africa” and make an anagram you get, “Twirl Shrimp: Toot A Cab Fee, Huh,” which isn’t racist at all!
Maybe. But when one defends another’s right to make a statement that is not explicitly racist, and indeed takes some twisting to make it racist, one isn’t defending racism at all.
In other words, your default assumption is to assume racism. I’ve never understood why people do this, or why they look for racism anywhere they can find it.
I’m going to add something important here, and it echoes what Rand Rover said about calling people “scientific racists” earlier. Stating that a *correlation *between race, however defined, and a trait (whether positive or negative), exists, is not racist. It is a simple true-or-false statement.
Stating that causation exists is racist. Saying people are less intelligent, or worse at governing, or better at basketball, because they are black, is racist. Saying that they are those things and they are black is not.
It is the difference between an observation and a judgement. Delon’s post was the former, it was not racist, and it shouldn’t have been moderated.
Good thing that’s not the kind of statement we’re talking about, then.
Nope. There’s a difference between a default assumption of racism and a reading of racism for just cause. By the time I got to the phrase in question I already had reason not to take a neutral stance. That’s what I mean by “assuming the best … in this context” - Delon already had a negative impression before I got that far in his post. His earlier Apartheid apologia had already coloured his entire post (as it were :))
Are you seriously arguing that you think this drive-by posting was just an innocent comment with no racial overtone whatsoever? Seriously?
The scientific racists never just point out correlation - hell, we non-racists in those debates happily acknowledge the correlation. We just point out the likely other causative factors
Oh, for fuck’s sake - this is bullshit. Delon wasn not moderated for saying South African Blacks are incapable of governing themselves - lots of other posters have made similar ignorant statements on this board and not been moderated. He was moderated specifically for the “one leg in the bush” comment. It’s there in the OP’s link and everything.
In my response to Delon I gave him the benefit of the doubt and assumed he was being unwittingly ignorant of SA history/politics; however, I was not assuming that his comment/post wasn’t racist. In retrospect I can see how it need not be taken as a racist, but I can’t see why I (or anyone else) must not, cannot, or should not take it as racist. Quick lesson to all the “racial comments about people is not racist per se” people:
You are not owed “the benefit of the doubt” from anyone. Especially not from a non-white South African who’s within living memory of Apartheid. Suck it the hell up.
I had started straight out assuming Delon was South African, actually, given that he/she said “this country”. That’s kind of why the bush comment was worse than coming from, say, a Norwegian. It’s a very South African idiom.
I know. I just saw some more ignorance from you, so I fought it.
Ibn’s point to Prin seemed to be (he can correct me if I’m wrong) that there* isn’t* any place he knows of (that Dopers come from) where saying the equivalent of “you all just stepped out of the bush” to a large, diverse group of Black people isn’t offensive. He was asking where Prin is from, that that bare-bones reading of that text is not offensive.
I don’t think the ignorance is coming from him. But you keep fighting, little trooper.
I’m good with **MrDibble’s **explanation of what the idiom means in SA, as re-iterated to me by Irishman. Sorry I missed it the first time round.
Ibn I’m from Australia. As I said upthread, here the expression would just mean “hick” or “unsophisticated”. It wouldn’t mean the targetted people were racially substandard.
And besides which, I’m feeling better about **MrDibble **since checking the cricket score 
Aaah crap, double century! Stupid Clarke…
…brilliant knock, though.