I know you are correct, but I can't help but feel like there's been a resurgence - at least in the US. Or maybe not a resurgence, but at least they don't feel like they have to hide their feelings and beliefs as much anymore. There's plenty of examples of white supremacists marching about openly in the US.
Thanks for pointing that out, however I disagree that not talking helps.
I see how it goes in Portugal and the few European countries I lived in, including having experienced myself xenophobism in first hand in some of those countries, and stop talking isn't how it gets sorted out.
What is your end game? If you want something to eventually disappear, then it must eventually disappear from common discourse. Otherwise society keeps fanning the embers of hatred.
The greatest rise in the use of racism has been among people using it to divide and to attack political groups and persons. In a manner similar to calling people "fascists", calling people "racists" is a tried and true way to smear someone with little risk to oneself.
There are openly racist white supremacists and that's how it should be - they are allowed to voice their opinions (thanks to free speech). They aren't a significant minority and they know their day has passed. Best to let such movements die out.
Actor Morgan Freeman said, in answer to a question about how to get rid of racism, “Stop talking about it.”
It may be too handy and too easy to use racism as a political weapon for some to let go of. For others it may be a crutch they never needed yet perhaps are unwilling to lay down.
Talking to some younger liberals today you'd thing that they actually lived and personally experienced the US's periods of racial turmoil (all the way back to the Civil War and to the establishment of the original 13 colonies). Their outrage is fresh and full-blown. But that suffering was done by their ancestors (the black ones, in particular) not by them. And remember that the Civil War alone in the United States cost many, many white lives: 698,000 by one estimate - most of whom were white.
Sorry, no. To make clear your subtext: Morgan Freeman being Black does not somehow immunize him from having a really bad take.
Racism is also facilitated by people pointing to the crack pots and saying, we swear we're not like them... oh, also wear this band for your safety... so we know how to easily identify you.
Open racists do not scare me. Plus, I am 100% sure we have very different definitions of what is an open racist. Worse, having that discussion is tiring and ultimately pointless semantics that slows down the actual discussion of important issues.
What scares me is this milquetoast won't everyone just calm down and we really need to turn the temp down and agree to talk...
This while the mid-tier of Side-A is re-posting gas chamber memes, playing the victim card, and calling everything they don't like porn. And Side-B, ever the dutiful neo-liberal centrists, lean into the characterization that they are the resistant or some s-star-star-t because it gives them the tingles.
It is the same everything is normal cosplay over and over again. I am tired of having to, again, entertain the rational suggestion that "racism is a crutch" of the next person in costume that fancies themselves an iconoclast because they are brave enough to say they don't like seeing the homeless in SF.
