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(A follow on from Speaking about bad ideas...atheism and race! since a lot of the same arguments came up in the comments)
Why I see cultural intolerance as racist: VERY few people in polite modern western society are explicitly racist in the "I hate everyone with dark skin" way. I tend to use "racist" to mean any tendency in society which consistently and unfairly discriminates against people of a particular ethnicity, even though most of these justify themselves using cultural rather than explicitly racist ideas. If you scratch the surface, a lot of the time these ideas are being applied arbitrarily or inconsistently and it really is about race after all.
I covered the basic ideas in Why you can't trust your values, so this is just a "few" *cough* extra things.
I mean you can't help but have values and judge other people by them, and since you don't grow up in a vacuum chances are you're going to end up seeing people from your own culture as being (on average) better since they follow your values more closely. But you have to be very careful about thinking about where those values come from, and if you're applying them fairly, and what consequences you bring from them.
Short version:
It's ok to say "I don't understand why more americans don't oppose the death penalty, though I guess I can see how it ties in with the emphasis their society tends to place on justice"
It's not ok to say "All christians are a bunch of bloodthirsty savages, just look at the bible and the way they all support the death penalty"
A lot of "obvious" moral situations are actually incredibly subjective, and what seems incredibly harmful and unnecessary is often deeply tied up with everything a member of that culture values so to ask them to change is a lot more significant than it seems.
Also, all cultures are complex and heterogeneous, with every tradition and opinion tying into all the others in complicated ways, and every member of that society having their own unique perspective. The borders and intersections of any given culture/religion/ethnic group etc are complex and fuzzy too. There's a lot of statements here which to be accurate should have "mostly" "in general" etc added in but this post is long winded enough as it is :D
To give a trivial example: wedding gifts. In Australia, everyone gives a gift, and it costs $100ish and is usually homewares, and everyone is told about the registry. That seems perfectly logical to me.
In America, people only give gifts if they feel like it, and so it's considered incredibly rude to assume they'll give you one.
Thus they think we're unbelievably selfish and grasping for so brazenly telling everyone about our registries and assuming a gift, while we think they're illogically coy and etiquette driven for setting up a registry and then not telling people about it unless they ask.
Other cultures just give money, which seems impersonal to us Australians but I imagine they see the giving of gifts we don't want or need (and the giver didn't even pick out!) as an absurd pantomime with no purpose.
Some give larger presents (so small and thoughtless!) some larger (so inconvenient and grasping!) while of course the amount we spend just happens to be exactly right.
And while I can see how those other traditions have their advantages, I am much happier with my own.
On the other hand, my dad is 100% australian and yet thinks gifts are pointless unless you happen to hit apon the Perfect Gift and tends not to give or want them. But he still wouldn't be happy in America, since he disagrees with so much else in their culture :)
Consider the death penalty. Like most australians I find it abhorrent. What's more worrying is the way that we paint asian countries as incomprehensible savages for doing it..but not Americans. Since we've all grown up consuming a lot of american media we can see the cultural context, the fact that their morals are not monolithic or simple, and the other good points of their society. The problem with most other societies, is that we don't know those things, so all we see is the (to us) incomprehensible and morally bad practices out of context, and see them as a homogenous society with no good points. Which is not to say we wouldn't still disapprove even with a more nuanced understanding, but you wouldn't get the "That whole society clearly sucks" knee-jerk reaction.
Another example is "Female Genital Mutilation". I am totally not saying it's good, but it is unfortunately just part of the continuum of unnecessary gynecological procedures performed on women and children either without their consent or after huge social pressure which happens in most societies. So why do we focus so much on it (and it comes up lot) instead of labiaplasty or forced sterilisation or Involuntary sex assignment? Because in all those cases we know the context, so it doesn't seem as incomprehensible or wrong, and we know how complicated it would be to change things, and that this behaviour is just a symptom of entrenched issues. Also, we're aware that there are people within the society working against it. But we can rail against the "strange" practices of other cultures without having to question our own values, society, and complicity, and we can happily talk about how those societies should just "listen to reason" and "simply" change their behaviour. Noone talks about sending the UN into America to stop girls being pressured into plastic surgery.(I came across a really good article about this but have lost it. Here is some discussion of the issues)
Another example is wearing headscarves: for your typical non-muslim western woman, it would feel oppressive, so it's easy for us to imagine it being equally oppressive for mulsim women. But afaict for them it's more like I would feel about covering my chest, just a natural form of modesty, and not wearing it makes them feel under-dressed and uncomfortable. Beyond that, you have the dodgy power balance of women from a non-white culture being told by white people that they don't know what's good for them and having their autonomy taken away, which ties into a long history of racism and colonial oppression, so wearing it becomes a sign of solidarity and self expression (I know, some muslims are white and some people who are against head-scarves are not. As always this stuff gets fuzzy and complicated)
I'm not saying we can't disapprove of other cultures behaviour, but it's very important to try to understand what's really going on rather than having a simplistic knee-jerk response based on limited information. And if we want to work to change other people's society (and that's a pretty problematic thing to do, so it's important to think hard about our motives), we should do so by supporting those within the society working towards our goal rather than coming in from the outside and messing everything up. And really, shouldn't we be working to fix the injustices we perpetuate before telling off other people for theirs?
This is discussed further within the context of religion and atheism Towards an Intersectionality of Atheism and Race.
Why I see cultural intolerance as racist: VERY few people in polite modern western society are explicitly racist in the "I hate everyone with dark skin" way. I tend to use "racist" to mean any tendency in society which consistently and unfairly discriminates against people of a particular ethnicity, even though most of these justify themselves using cultural rather than explicitly racist ideas. If you scratch the surface, a lot of the time these ideas are being applied arbitrarily or inconsistently and it really is about race after all.
I covered the basic ideas in Why you can't trust your values, so this is just a "few" *cough* extra things.
I mean you can't help but have values and judge other people by them, and since you don't grow up in a vacuum chances are you're going to end up seeing people from your own culture as being (on average) better since they follow your values more closely. But you have to be very careful about thinking about where those values come from, and if you're applying them fairly, and what consequences you bring from them.
Short version:
It's ok to say "I don't understand why more americans don't oppose the death penalty, though I guess I can see how it ties in with the emphasis their society tends to place on justice"
It's not ok to say "All christians are a bunch of bloodthirsty savages, just look at the bible and the way they all support the death penalty"
A lot of "obvious" moral situations are actually incredibly subjective, and what seems incredibly harmful and unnecessary is often deeply tied up with everything a member of that culture values so to ask them to change is a lot more significant than it seems.
Also, all cultures are complex and heterogeneous, with every tradition and opinion tying into all the others in complicated ways, and every member of that society having their own unique perspective. The borders and intersections of any given culture/religion/ethnic group etc are complex and fuzzy too. There's a lot of statements here which to be accurate should have "mostly" "in general" etc added in but this post is long winded enough as it is :D
To give a trivial example: wedding gifts. In Australia, everyone gives a gift, and it costs $100ish and is usually homewares, and everyone is told about the registry. That seems perfectly logical to me.
In America, people only give gifts if they feel like it, and so it's considered incredibly rude to assume they'll give you one.
Thus they think we're unbelievably selfish and grasping for so brazenly telling everyone about our registries and assuming a gift, while we think they're illogically coy and etiquette driven for setting up a registry and then not telling people about it unless they ask.
Other cultures just give money, which seems impersonal to us Australians but I imagine they see the giving of gifts we don't want or need (and the giver didn't even pick out!) as an absurd pantomime with no purpose.
Some give larger presents (so small and thoughtless!) some larger (so inconvenient and grasping!) while of course the amount we spend just happens to be exactly right.
And while I can see how those other traditions have their advantages, I am much happier with my own.
On the other hand, my dad is 100% australian and yet thinks gifts are pointless unless you happen to hit apon the Perfect Gift and tends not to give or want them. But he still wouldn't be happy in America, since he disagrees with so much else in their culture :)
Consider the death penalty. Like most australians I find it abhorrent. What's more worrying is the way that we paint asian countries as incomprehensible savages for doing it..but not Americans. Since we've all grown up consuming a lot of american media we can see the cultural context, the fact that their morals are not monolithic or simple, and the other good points of their society. The problem with most other societies, is that we don't know those things, so all we see is the (to us) incomprehensible and morally bad practices out of context, and see them as a homogenous society with no good points. Which is not to say we wouldn't still disapprove even with a more nuanced understanding, but you wouldn't get the "That whole society clearly sucks" knee-jerk reaction.
Another example is "Female Genital Mutilation". I am totally not saying it's good, but it is unfortunately just part of the continuum of unnecessary gynecological procedures performed on women and children either without their consent or after huge social pressure which happens in most societies. So why do we focus so much on it (and it comes up lot) instead of labiaplasty or forced sterilisation or Involuntary sex assignment? Because in all those cases we know the context, so it doesn't seem as incomprehensible or wrong, and we know how complicated it would be to change things, and that this behaviour is just a symptom of entrenched issues. Also, we're aware that there are people within the society working against it. But we can rail against the "strange" practices of other cultures without having to question our own values, society, and complicity, and we can happily talk about how those societies should just "listen to reason" and "simply" change their behaviour. Noone talks about sending the UN into America to stop girls being pressured into plastic surgery.(I came across a really good article about this but have lost it. Here is some discussion of the issues)
Another example is wearing headscarves: for your typical non-muslim western woman, it would feel oppressive, so it's easy for us to imagine it being equally oppressive for mulsim women. But afaict for them it's more like I would feel about covering my chest, just a natural form of modesty, and not wearing it makes them feel under-dressed and uncomfortable. Beyond that, you have the dodgy power balance of women from a non-white culture being told by white people that they don't know what's good for them and having their autonomy taken away, which ties into a long history of racism and colonial oppression, so wearing it becomes a sign of solidarity and self expression (I know, some muslims are white and some people who are against head-scarves are not. As always this stuff gets fuzzy and complicated)
I'm not saying we can't disapprove of other cultures behaviour, but it's very important to try to understand what's really going on rather than having a simplistic knee-jerk response based on limited information. And if we want to work to change other people's society (and that's a pretty problematic thing to do, so it's important to think hard about our motives), we should do so by supporting those within the society working towards our goal rather than coming in from the outside and messing everything up. And really, shouldn't we be working to fix the injustices we perpetuate before telling off other people for theirs?
This is discussed further within the context of religion and atheism Towards an Intersectionality of Atheism and Race.
no subject
If I were to look for an analogy, I would say it would be akin to saying something like "it's very simple: there is a luminiferous ether" but "sometimes what we think is the ether isn't, and sometimes what we think isn't the ether is, and the things that fill the roles of realising the ether may change randomly and at any moment depending on what I decide." The most obvious conclusion to draw from someone who proposed this would be "there is no ether."
The thing is, most scientific theories are like that to some extent, and the fact that it's flawed doesn't mean it's not the best description so far. Most of the alternative explanations I've heard about how racism works ("It's just individual bad eggs" or "Really, black people control everything now") match up even more shoddily to reality.
Also, my first thought would be: that person does not understand what they're talking about. And that's pretty much the issue here: I'm still very much figuring out what I think, and do not have an arts student brain so find it a bit tricky sometimes. I used to not post about race for this reason, but people seem to enjoy my posts on the whole and it leads to less issues where people suddenly realise what my opinions are mid-conversation.
Something I tend to blur, though, is the difference between widely-agreed upon anti-racist principles and my own opinions. Assuming that the wikipedia page on "virtue ethics" gives the gist of what you're talking about, I tend to place more emphasis on the consequences of actions (though I don't think they're all that matters!), but I'm sure you could figure out a way to frame the same basic ideas in a more virtue ethics-y way. I mean, I guess I think you should work from the motive of considering what effect your actions have :)