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Articles:
Society
When
Did Racism Become Acceptable?
Sunday, May 1, 2005
Please
note this article includes racial epithets used to make a
point. I am including them here verbatim in order to effectively
express my disdain at their casual use.
I'll
start off by answering the question I posed in the title:
September 11, 2001. I cannot state emphatically enough that
I do not condone the terrorist attacks that occurred on that
date. At the same time, I cannot ignore the blatant racism
that has surfaced since then, which seems to be propagated
by many people and accepted by even more.
Driving
the other day, I saw a bumper sticker on a pick-up truck that
read "Kill All the Ragheads". As most people probably
know, that is a derogatory term for Arabs and those of Arab
descent. I wish I could say that was the first ignorant anti-Arab
bumper sticker I ever saw. I see this sort of thing all the
time. I often overhear statements about "nuking those
camel jockeys" and how "sand niggers are monsters".
What
the hell is going on? After over two-hundred years of advancement
of civil rights and racial equality, after Stephen Douglas,
Abraham Lincoln, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., after the abolishment
of slavery, "3/5 of a person", and Jim Crow, after
the near-destruction of the KKK and neo-nazis, and after social
tolerance, acceptance, and promotion of our differences, why
is it suddenly okay to hate Arabs for being Arab? Because
a group of people who happened to be Arab attacked us?
After
the terrorist attack on the Federal building in Oklahoma City,
did everyone suddenly hate white male Americans? In that case,
people called the individual perpetrators of the crime "monsters".
In the case of the September 11 tragedy, many also appropriately
called the individuals "monsters". But many extended
that opinion to all Arabs, stereotyping them all as unthinking,
bloodthirsty animals that kill Americans for fun.
I've
personally met a number of Arabs, Arab-Americans, and even
Iraqi-Americans. I have a shocking report to those who believe
they are evil incarnate: they didn't try to kill me! This
may be surprising to some, but these are typical human beings.
They go to work, go to school, love their families and their
communities, pay their taxes, and are generally pleasant to
be around. They have hopes and dreams, and they don't center
around wiping the United States off the map.
Perhaps
I'm fortunate to live in proximity to cities like Dearborn,
Michigan and Toledo, Ohio, which have sizeable Arab populations.
That's right, some of them even like America enough to live
here. Maybe living with people fosters a sense of fraternity,
and living in isolation breeds ignorance.
Whatever
the case, some people hate Arabs. This is an outrageous example
of racism, to be sure. But why do people who don't overtly
hate Arabs accept public displays of such racism? If instead
of "Kill All The Ragheads", the bumper sticker read
"Kill All The Niggers", would people still tolerate
it?
Collective
fear stimulates herd instinct, and tends to produce ferocity
toward those who are not regarded as members of the herd.
--Bertrand Russell
If
we believe absurdities we shall commit atrocities. --Voltaire
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