Had a conversation with a guy I know tonight that really disturbed me. He said that he would choose to sit next to a white person on the bus over an Arab. He said that Arabic is vulgar and they are loud and smell bad. He said he was repulsed by Arabs. I told him it was racist. He said it was not. I asked if someone said the same about Jews would that be racist? Yes he said. But this is different. It's not just against a race in general. They are his enemy. I asked, "Are my students your enemy?" He was embarrassed. "Are my kids your enemy? My mom?" He was ashamed. He said, "Maybe not my enemy, but..."
"An Other?" I asked. He said yes. I said you only perpetuate this by othering them.
I said "If someone said to me, 'I would not sit next to a Jew,' I'd go after him for his racism. I'd tear him apart for it. You are saying that." I told him that he's better than that. He said it's normal. Everyone he knows thinks like that. I said it should not be normal and he should be ashamed of himself. Who knows how much he'll think about this after tonight. I can't stop thinking about it though. How can we find change in a society that is so thoroughly racist?
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Wow, that's pretty incredible. In my view, how does one ignore the fact that [his] statement is blatant racism? How can he not see that? Unfortunately, many people from that region I have had the opportunity to speak with echo those exact statements and it makes me sick.
However, according to some polls in the US, as many as 33% of white male democrats won't vote for Barack Obama because of his skin color. Wow! and we thought we had come so far.
Hopefully, the man you spoke with will go home and think about it. Cross our fingers, he might even dig deep and understand what you were saying. Keep asking the hard questions!
I have a personal fixation on the evil of the Militant Zionists (all of 'em: the crude, cruel, sadistic, illegal settler-thugs; the successive decades-long governments of whatever stripe, bent unrelentingly on cleansing the land of any but Jews; the hypocritical voting citizens who resolutely shield their eyes and minds from the actuality that they have collectively become the 21st Century's Nazis) in their thieving of Palestinians' water: precious, scarce-to-start-with water for bathing, cooking, eating, laundry, commerce, agricultural irrigation, and just plain splashing around in for fun. I would have asked this guy one question along the way: "Hypocrite! Don't you even give the remotest consideration to the concept that, if you weren't a thief of water, those Palestinian Arabs who "smell bad" might have the means to take better hygienic care of themselves -- their clothes, their bodies, their very essence which is soured and, yes, made to "smell bad" by your malicious, calculated plotting to besiege them and stress them out so badly as to cause them to go away and "cleanse" this land of them?"
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