When I lived in Athens, Georgia, I had a Persian friend who been educated in Paris. I joked to her once about having been sorry she ever left Paris to end up here and she told me “No, I like it much better here.” I asked why and she said “In Paris, I got a lot of suspicion and dirty looks, because they could tell I was Iranian, even though I spoke fluent French. Here, that never happens.”
Granted, Athens is a college town and all that, but you run into plenty of Real Murkins at the Publix and the Winn Dixie. And they don’t, or at least didn’t, screw with her for being Persian, not the way Parisans did.
The story always made me feel proud of my country, that even in the supposedly backwards south there was less xenophobia than in Paris.
That’s why seeing conservative politicians and radio hosts stir up Islamophobia pisses me off so much. And why it pisses me off even more when sensible, moderate conservatives tell us that Real Murkins can’t help being nativist, that it’s all as American as apple pie.
birthmarker
Just for context, what was the year of this conversation? Just curious.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
Sensible, moderate conservatives are becoming Democrats. See ED Kain.
Will
I was told a similar story from my friend from Croatia. Western Europeans, for all their charms, are horrible toward people who come from the “wrong” countries.
DougJ
@birthmarker:
1999 or 2000
homerhk
pah! the French and particularly Parisians give everyone dirty looks – it’s how you know you’ve been accepted.
France actually has a history with Iran: Tehran was modelled on Paris, for example; the Ayatollah resided in Paris before returning back to Iran at the time of the revolution and many Iranians speak French.
Seriously, I lived in Paris for a year and it made me appreciate the UK that much more in terms of inclusiveness and tolerance. OTOH, I visited America soon after 9/11 and it was much much worse, imho.
beltane
Sensible, moderate conservatives wouldn’t object to a little innocent blood being shed if it put their party back into power. What could be more wholesome than a lynch mob or committing treason in defense of slavery.
Not to sound like Makato-Chen, but from an objective standpoint the RealAmerica these people want to return to happens to be one of the most desolate cultural wastelands imaginable.
Crashman
DougJ, they have to deal with a little intolerance and hate, or else how will they ever assimilate and wind up hating on the next group of newcomers?
/douchehat
djheru
Persians? They’re ok in my book. Not like those damned Iranians!
cleek
yes, Douthat is an idiot.
YankeeApologist
@DougJ:
Yeah . . . .that was about a year before Islamophobia really kicked into high gear, if I remember correctly.
But seriously, Doug, that’s not really the bottom line. The fact of the matter is that stupidity only seems so widespread because it’s so LOUD. Rush Limbaugh screaming into a microphone and Krauthammer spilling a lot of wasted ink is unfortunate, but the fact of the matter is that there are a lot of people out there that are reasonable and relatively good-hearted.
I have friends that are Muslim, gay, black – the works (and yes, I know that’s the old liberal cliche, but it is for a reason), and while I have been present for a lot of hate spewed in their general direction, it is outweighed immensely by the opposite.
birthmarker
@DougJ: I just wonder if she would be so comfortable now. I hope so. I live in the deep south and I have a lot of admiration for women I see in the head shawls. I don’t know if I would be brave enough.
Uloborus
Yeah, about 10-15 years ago I was in a job with a number of darker skinned immigrants – in Kentucky of all places – and they were emphatic that they faced less discrimination in the US than anywhere else they’d lived, particularly Europe.
The US has a streak of racism that is being disgustingly stoked by powerful interests right now, but we don’t have a monopoly on it. We’re not even one of the top contenders.
Which is why I exactly share your sentiment, Doug. This behavior infuriates me.
beltane
I think it was Charlane Hunter-Gault who said that the only time she was ever spat at was in Paris, by a man who mistook her for an Arab. When he realized she was an African-American, he was effusive in his apologies. Weird.
Biff Longbotham
And yet… there is a long and notable list of black artists of various stripes that found those Parisian cheese eaters much more tolerant and accommodating to them than their countrymen were back here in the land of the free.
sukabi
your mistake is in thinking Douchehat is a moderate, sensible conservative…. what he is, is a shallow, repressed, shell of a man that is frightened by his own shadow and is being used to polish the turd of a movement that is trying to take this country down the toilet.
he’s a useful idiot for the moment, as he’s not quite as blindingly racist as the rest of the bunch… in other words, he can write a couple of paragraphs without calling Obama the “n” word, or a terrorist, and he hasn’t demanded his birth certificate…. yet.
Martin
Welcome to the new McCarthyism, centerpiece of the 2010 midterm elections. I wonder how far they’ll try and take it this time.
Bnut
I used to love visiting Athens. Great music, good food and drink, a nice campus. But a lot of homeless people for a random southern college town. Never understood that one.
Dork
Persians are radioactive. In a few years, literally.
JWeidner
Perhaps it is time to revive the nickname “Know-Nothing-Party”. Certainly seems applicable…
georgia pig
@Bnut: Athens has been a magnet for street folks because its an island of liberality in a red sea, kind of like Austin on a small scale.
stuckinred
Things are generally cool here but Madison, Oglethorpe and lilly white Oconee County, not so much. As Paul Braun. (These counties also are known to dump their homeless here)
morzer
@Will:
Some are, and some aren’t. Please don’t generalize in such an ignorant way.
beltane
@sukabi: Ross Douthat has earned the title of Prissiest Man Alive. It is hard to take anyone so obviously repressed very seriously. He would have made a fine monk, preferably one who has taken a vow of silence.
stuckinred
@georgia pig: As you probably know, we have a Jewish female mayor and the once and maybe future mayor is also a woman.
Punchy
@Bnut: Lots of homeless in college towns. They’re more liberal, younger, and a large percentage of transient population (e.g., college kids). All of which increases the handouts and acceptance of their presence.
Lawrence, KS had one of the highest levels of transient homeless, b/c the town got a rep for being insanely accepting of a large number of hobos, and very generous.
bobbo
I remember when I was in high school learning American history and feeling proud that we no longer lived in a place where people formed “Know Nothing” parties to bash immigrants, and that we had endured McCarthyism and ultimately rooted out such horrible demagogues from government, etc., etc. Then I grew up and learned that we never transcend this stuff, it just keeps coming back in different forms.
Dennis G.
So Dougj when did you live in Athens, GA? We may have covered this ground before.
I lived in Athens for quite a while. The first time was back in 1979-1981 and then again from 1985 through 1997. Back in the day, I was the Publisher of Flagpole, a publication I helped to create and grow. Perhaps we crossed paths.
Athens was an odd place with pockets of tolerance (Atlanta was similar) and yet it was also filled and surrounded by some pretty shifty folks. The history of Athens was something as well and we used to run in Flagpole these amazing stories of the reconstruction era written by the late great John Seawright.
Cheers
jacy
Racism is like one of those old filing cabinet skits from old movies/tv, where when you push in one drawer another one invariably pops open.
Racism is about it being publicly accepted to hate/feel superior to/blame someone, anyone. Since you can’t scream Nigger in public anymore, they slammed that drawer shut right quick, and the one marked Muslim popped open.
All that hate has got to go somewhere.
Funny to note that Orrin Hatch and other Mormons are defending the Cordoba House (Harry Reid and Mitt Romney being notable exceptions, but they’re all about re-election). I think the Mormons realize it’s only a matter of time till the white christianists turn on them. After all, there’s lots of drawers in that filing cabinet.
DougJ
@djheru:
Ha ha. She actually wasn’t so big on saying Persian rather than Iranian but she was ethnically Persian.
DougJ
@Dennis G.:
I was there 1998–2002.
I love the Flagpole. You really helped create it?
harlana
Athens, GA = Asheville, NC
Will
morzer,
I’m passing along my friend’s observations of living in the U.S. and Western Europe. From what she, and others, have said, the continent has a real problem with dealing with the “other.”
Not everyone there, of course, but enough people with enough frequency that it becomes a very different experience living there than here. Much like not every Southerner in the ’50s was racist, but enough were to make it a very unpleasant place for black Americans.
DougJ
@sukabi:
The word “sensible” is almost always snark with me.
Marmot
@Martin:
Back in 1991 when the USSR fell, I remember wondering what the heck the Republicans would do without their precious enemy.
It took a little while, but they really have committed to hating on Muslims, rather than, say the Chinese. Gotta have an enemy — one that’s infiltrating America to secretly destroy it from the inside! There’s some weird social phobia attached to that thinking — I wish I knew the name for it.
stuckinred
@Dennis G.: Hi Dennis, I didn’t know that was you. You don’t know me but I’ve been here since 84 and see Pete and the crew at the FP quite a bit.
Paris
5 Teens Arrested In Connection With Violence (attacking a Sufi school and mosque in rural, upstate NY). Unfortunately, I know one of the teens personally. I would like to throttle about ten conservatives and a couple of democrats right now, along with the evil harpy Pam Geller and the other neo nazi haters.
stuckinred
@DougJ: Here’s a nice piece from the 20th anniversary of the Flagpole.
stuckinred
@harlana: We’re a good bit smaller than Asheville.
cmorenc
@DougJ
In the South, people (especially natives) tend strongly to be much more polite and civil face-to-face with everyone than in other regions (including with people of obvious foreign ethnic background). The nativist racism and ethnic prejudices come spilling out much more readily when it’s “just us” in the room, so to speak, or in an impersonal public forum rather than face to face.
Don’t assume from this that I’m saying here that the majority of whites in the south are still prejudiced – just that the substantial minority who are, tend to keep themselves restrained in face to face interactions and mainly let this stuff drool out among themselves (when the prejudice will be expressed directly) or when speaking impersonally in a public forum (when the prejudice will nearly always be expressed in dog-whistle code).
Kryptik
Christ, I went to high school at a CATHOLIC SCHOOL, in West Virginia, with three Muslims in my class alone (while that doesn’t seem like much, realize that my class was 60 across the whole grade), all from different backgrounds. One was from Eastern Europe (I forget which country exactly, but I believe it was Croatia), one from Jordan, one from Pakistan. Granted, it was Charleston, but Charleston is hardly as metro as some other places. And from what I could tell, none of them had issues living there going to school there, etc. Granted, our Theology teacher for most of high school was an outright hippie by most standards, but I credit him with helping me be as open minded religion-wise as I am.
So much like Doug here, I find myself infuriated with this kind of ginned up Islamophobia, for personal reasons such as that.
cleek
@Martin:
“Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Isslammic religion? Answer the question, Mr President!”
New Yorker
I’m with you on this Doug. I had some classmates from India in business school who spoke about how much more welcoming the US is to immigrants, and to them, the election of Barack Obama proved how much less racist the US is than Europe.
…and now we’re pissing that goodwill all away. Sigh…..
singfoom
It’s all about the other. These people don’t know anything about Islam. Everything they think they know is lies perpetrated on them by FOX news or other MSM outlets.
They just need an other to hate. This is pretty common in humans. It allows them to put their problems at the feet of someone else, rather than face themselves.
Someday perhaps this will change.
Just Some Fuckhead
The melting pot doesn’t work without a lot of heat.
comrade scott's agenda of rage
I live smack dab in the middle of red, rurl (un)Real ‘Murka (Central Misery). Yes, most everybody here is bigoted, get about as far away as Branson and look at anybody not born and raised within a 3 mile radius of their bumfuck little town as an “outsider”.
And yet, if the person in this story moved here, they wouldn’t experience *any* overt discrimination. Oh sure, everybody would talk behind her back, wouldn’t trust her as far as they could collectively throw her, etc., but she wouldn’t get dirty looks.
People here bend over backwards to avoid confrontation outside of bar fights so the experience would most likely be less hostile than encounters I’ve seen over the years in places like Rome.
Emily L. Hauser/ellaesther
This is an excellent excuse to post the following, from yesterday’s NY Times:
“I’m an American, I’m a Muslim, this is my faith, this is my voice.” http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/30/in-ad-american-muslims-seek-calmer-message/?src=twt&twt=nytimespolitics
I dare you to watch it without choking up.
cmorenc
@Belafon:
Yes, but not as quickly as people are peeling off from affiliation with both parties and becoming registered independents.
The GOP is, long and even medium term, dooming itself demographically with it’s hostile nativism and increasing extremism. The problem is that when the electorate wishes to express dissatisfaction, there are currently only two parties to choose from, and coupled with dissatisfaction over the country’s economic situation, this leaves many voters without any reasonably attractive choices to express their frustration. That’s exactly the type of opening the GOP hoped to short-term create and exploit in the 2010 elections by giving absolutely no cooperation with Obama and the democrats, and may wind up giving the GOP one final shot in 2010 (and perhaps in 2012 if things continue to deteriorate economically). Another four to six years of GOP control will be long enough for them to do immense damage, for their goal is to fiscally and structurally destroy any practical possibilities for progressive reform for the indefinite future, and weaken what is already in place so that it collapses.
georgia pig
BTW, I imagine your friend would have been viewed as a curiosity (rather than a threat) in Athens at that time, especially if she was attractive and didn’t dress traditionally, e.g., she didn’t wear a scarf. A lot of folks probably wouldn’t have known whether she was Pakistani, Indian or any of a variety of other ethnic groups that are not uncommon where you have a lot of graduate students. Even those that could discern that she was Iranian may assume she’s one of the diaspora that occurred after the revolution, i.e., a westernized Iranian.
Eric U.
this Islamiphobia doesn’t surprise me at all, unfortunately. My daughter told me about the time they were covering Islam in her honors social studies class, and the discussion had one of her Islamic classmates in tears. This is in a college town. And prior to that, my daughter had told me that Muslims want to cut our heads off. That’s when I knew I was a failure as a parent, which probably was obvious to everybody else much prior to that.
Martin
@Marmot: It’s much broader than Muslims, though. It’s kind of darkly interesting to me, to be honest.
There’s been some attempt to draw parallels between this and previous movements, but I think McCarthyism is probably the closest in that it was something of a vague catch-all to stop people that were deemed undesirable. Hardly any of the people that were called communists actually were communists, but they were gay, they were foreign, they spoke out, and so some powerful group slapped a label on them that was vague enough that they could deny any one charge.
We’ve got this amalgam of anti-Muslim, anti-Mexican, anti-gay, anti-black, anti-liberal folks that have come together under common cause, and each group can point to the other groups as evidence that they collectively don’t fit the label you’re trying to pin on them. See, they aren’t racist because even though some are busy shouting ‘nigger’ there’s a whole bunch that don’t give a fuck what race you are, so long as you don’t belong to that dirty Muslim religion, and so on.
I think Hitch got it pretty much right on. The white, christian, straight, in-social-power group is being threatened from many directions and they’re pushing back against all of them at once. That’s pretty much what was going on with McCarthyism. ‘Soçialism’ and ‘Sharia’ have together replaced ‘Communism’, but it’s all the same fear-of-a-non-white-planet bullshit.
Cat Lady
I’ve always loved that song. I think we’ve regressed since then. How can it be stated any more simply than different strokes for different folks? What did these “christians” hear when they were learning “Do to others as you want them to do to you.”?
Martin
@cleek: Isn’t that precisely what’s going on? I’m dying to see if this ‘Dunker‘ meme catches on. Maybe Obama will be proven to be a Mormon by the end of it.
daveNYC
Which makes the ADL coming out against the Cordoba Center all the more of a shock. To quote Chris Rock, “That train ain’t never late.”
DougJ
@Cat Lady:
I don’t think we’ve regressed since then on racial and religious tolerance. We’ve got a black president who won Virginia and North Carolina. Didn’t think I’d see that in my lifetime.
I think we have regressed, though, in some kind of class/socioeconomic way, though. Everyday people meant someone who was regular and decent even if they didn’t have a lot of money. Real Murkin, when said by Douthat or Beck, means a nasty, intolerant idiot. I hate the way the media encourages people to embrace the worst in themselves.
qwerty42
@Bnut: Not much industry and there is a continuing suspicion that the po-lice in neighboring towns/counties drop their homeless off in Athens. Re: discrimination: I’d say with all the international students and faculty, Athens itself has moved beyond the “sleepy Southern town” it was. Doesn’t mean the prejudice has gone away (though it is certainly on the wane), but it is less frequent. If you miss it, you can always drive 15-20 miles down the road, and there it is.
@Dennis G.: John Seawright’s articles were great!
cleek
@cmorenc:
i wish i believed that.
but, human nature being what it is, i honestly don’t think we’re going to run out of bigots, now or in the future.
Alwhite
We have been friends with a Palestinian family that came to “liberal” Minnesota 35 years ago. The amount of glares & abuse they get is a very good barometer of current state of American conflict in the Middle East. At the moment they can be very uncomfortable just trying to buy groceries.
Rick Taylor
@Emily L. Hauser/ellaesther:
That’s an excellent piece. I expect an ugly response from conservatives. I hope to be proven wrong.
cleek
@Martin:
i was thinking more like Congressional hearings where Buford T. Nativist (R-SC) demands that Obama take an oath on the Bible while an array of high-speed cameras watches for signs of crossed fingers or smoke coming out of Obama’s eye-sockets.
schrodinger's cat
@DougJ: Apparently its not religion but media that is the opium of the masses.
DougJ
@schrodinger’s cat:
In this case, yes. I don’t see much of this wave being stirred up by religious leaders. The ADL and Southern Baptists have said some crazy things here, but I don’t see that many religious leaders disgracing themselves here.
kommrade reproductive vigor
Dear Sir,
Using terms such as “sensible” and/or “moderate to describe Ross Douchehat places a great strain on the fabric of reality.
To prevent the known universe from folding up like a paper fan, please refrain from doing so in the future.
Sincerely,
The Overseers
Martin
@Eric U.: I have to say, as much as I generally loathe living in the OC, this is the most multicultural place I’ve lived outside of NYC, and it doesn’t carry the historical ethnic tension baggage that NYC has. It’s been great for my kids. There’s a big Persian community here, Korean, Chinese, Pakistani, Indian, Saudi/Arab, lots of spanish speakers from every country south of Texas. Not as many African-Americans, though, but some. It’s quite safe to be openly gay here as well, so they have friends with two dads or two moms. None of this stuff even registers with them, to an embarrassing degree sometimes. My son has some friends who are Korean and some who and Chinese. He often gets a toy or something from Korea or China and is curious what the writing says so we suggest he ask his friend to translate it. He can never remember which kid speaks which language.
In 3rd grade they do a lesson where they write about their first ancestor that came to the US, why they came to the US, and they make a doll of the person in period dress and make a presentation. ⅔ of their classmates wrote about either their mom or dad and most of the rest wrote about their grandparents – rather gripping stories in many cases. The kids like mine that had to go back 150 years were quite the novelty in class. It was really quite cool to see just how proud these kids and their parents were to be in the US.
Cat Lady
@DougJ:
I think the hollowing out of the middle class has led to less tolerance of all kinds, as the middle class dream dies. When the rising tide raised your boat you didn’t mind your neighbor’s boat rising, but it’s ugly on the way down. White privilege is asserting its claim on the crumbs, to mix metaphors. All those fat white people on scooters need a lot of crumbs. I don’t think it really matters who steps up to lead the scooter brigade.
Martin
@cleek: Well, if the GOP wins the House, I think we can count on a scene not too far removed from that.
Nylund
I moved to Texas, found it a little too conservative. My best friend grew up here (he’s French). He came back to Texas for Thanksgiving and invited me to join his family. His relatives (all actually raised in France) subjected me to the most excruciating 2 hours of Fox fueled racism I had ever encountered! I was thoroughly surprised, although I refuse to paint a whole country with a single brush.
I too had a few Persian friends in grad school. I remember talking to one (this was back in 2003, when invading Iraq was about to happen). My Persian friend actually spoke fairly highly of W. He said that for as awful as he thought he was for a US president, it still beat what he had back home in Iran. He really loved America. Then, he said, “of course, if the US bombs my home town in Iran, I’ll bomb the nearest gov’t building I can find.”
El Cid
@DougJ: I think it’s certainly possible to regress in racial and religious tolerance in a very, very short time period. It doesn’t take generational change to have a dangerous shitstorm stirred up in a few weeks or months time. The effects of which may or may not be long-lasting, but they can still be real. Thankfully, we’re running a giant national experiment on that right now.
schrodinger's cat
@kommrade reproductive vigor: He is as nasty as any mouth breather, he just has better manners and a vocabulary and a NYT column. This adds a veneer of respectability to his hate speech that’s all.
ETA: He = Ross Douthat
Martin
@Cat Lady: I agree. I think so long as the WASPs had enough income and job prestige to maintain social status against the other groups, that they felt safe enough and generally kept quiet. But as they naturally lose social ground to these other populations and lose the means to prop up that social status through spending (here in SoCal HELOCs were key to improving a lagging social status by making conspicuous purchases) then I think that sense of safety is being lost. They truly do feel as though the American Dream is no longer theirs.
Of course, it was never really theirs to begin with – they only had better odds of winning that lottery because they uniformly denied it to so many others.
Objective Scrutator
I live in a Wingnut Mecca, Knoxville TN, where the University of Tennessee has a very large percentage of conservatives. I know several people who are very welcoming of blacks/gays/whatnot when they are talking with them, and when they are out of earshot they’ll make racial jokes/homophobic jokes/etc. (although these are never directed at anyone in particular). I feel as though these ‘jokes’ are coming from people who were originally bigots, but then realized that the ‘Other’ isn’t going to hurt them, so they almost come off as self-mockery over their previous prejudices.
One of my roommates is gay, and the other one is a pretty hardcore military-style Southern Baptist (minus, y’know, the prohibitions on God-ordained sex, drugs, and alcohol). My conservative roommate is very friendly towards my gay roommate, though, even buying him chicken soup when he got sick.
It’s amazing what exposure towards someone different than you (provided that both people are polite) can do towards your worldview.
williamc
As I’m currently planning on spending my labor day weekend/following vacation week in Athens, this is right up my alley. Apparently DougJ and I were in town at the same time (transferred to Georgia in 1998 and graduated from there in 2002), and now its got me wondering if we knew each other….hmmm…anyways, my Persian in Athens story revolves around 9/11. As I was an undergrad on 9/11, it really wasn’t that bad a day for us. We were far away from the action, and school was canceled for a couple of days, so of course, we binge drank. The four of us went to Sam’s Club, bought 6 six-packs of corona, and drank all day. One of my Persian girlfriends got so wasted that she tried to talk all of us into going downtown with her dressed in a burka just so she could fuck with people, because she knew as soon as she saw the video that there would be anti-muslim/anti-brown people anger out and about. And in her drunken ranting she starts screaming about how even if people don’t hate Allah right now, give it 5 or 10 years and they’ll be burning down mosques.
And looks like she was spot on.
Cat Lady
@Objective Scrutator:
You love me, you hate me, you know me and then
You can’t figure out the bag I’m in
wilfred
At least it’s out in the open. I must have written the phrase “anti-muslim bigotry is the last socially acceptable form of bigotry” hundreds of times in various places these past 10 years. Nice to see I was right.
Now all we need is some national level politician take a public stand the way that he/she surely would if the anti-phobia were directed at someone who really mattered.
There are sins of omission, too, no?
HyperIon
@Cat Lady: You love me, you hate me, you know me and then
You can’t figure out the bag I’m in
I got it. Good one.
Dennis G.
@DougJ:
Yep. It was back in 1987 when I worked at Java Copies and Printing (I think GO was/is there now–next to The Grit) .
Flagpole was an effort by two club owners, a guitar store and a record store to bypass the advertising costs and editorial errors of the two local papers. At Java we made the first year or so of issues which came out sporadically. I left Java in late 1988 and started to publish Flagpole. It grew into the publication you knew when you were in Athens and that is still going today.
There are many stories and details in all of that, but Athens was home for quite a big part of my life.
Cheers
Dennis G.
@stuckinred:
Say hey to Pete for me.
Cheers
Mnemosyne
@Nylund:
I have a theory about that, because (in my experience) it’s not at all uncommon for recent immigrants to become extremely racist towards African-Americans.
I think that our culture is even more steeped in racism that we realize, but that those of us who were born/raised from a young age here have learned to block it out. People who arrive here from other countries don’t have those filters, so they buy all of the stuff they see in the media and in popular culture as The Truth whereas most of us are able to dismiss it as bullshit (at least on a conscious level — things still pop up unconsciously).
Frank
Yet another Republican in strong support for the mosque/community center.:
In an interview with the local Fox affiliate in Salt Lake City, Hatch stated his support and past work for religious freedom. “So, if the Muslims own that property, that private property, and they want to build a mosque there, they should have the right to do so,” said Hatch. He also discussed his past experiences dealing with discrimination against the construction of Mormon temples — and when his late friend Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-MA) helped him to resolve just such a dispute in Boston.
http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/08/republican-orrin-hatch-stands-up-for-cordoba-house-video.php?ref=fpblg
Where the hell are the cowardly Democrats? Somehow I doubt people like Wiener and Schumer really would mind if the mosque is not built.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@cleek:
The definition of “white people” is incredibly elastic (just ask Irish Catholics, to take just one example), and thus the hate borg will find a way to expand so as to maintain the size it has more or less always had in the US – large enough to be the dominant minority group, but small enough to be “threatened” by the others. One of the most disillusioning things about the current wave of Islamophobia is the alacrity with which it has been embraced by the ADL and other groups who are only one or two generations removed from having been targets of similar prejudice in the past.
numbskull
@Bnut: It’s warm and the students tip.
Hippie Killer
Persian? Was she 700 years old?
Delia
I don’t want to start something else, but in Paris people will spit on you for speaking French with the wrong accent — including, say, one from southern France.
And here’s a story from the dawn of time. You know how in the supermarket everybody samples a grape to see how sweet they are before they buy them? Well, in West LA during the Iranian Revolution, an Iranian student was arrested and charged with shoplifting for doing just that. It happened at the market near UCLA’s married student housing. You know, the liberal part of town. It was in the papers, on TV. Don’t remember how it all turned out.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Hippie Killer:
Here’s a revolting thought: when the war with Iran comes, all our Persian cats will be renamed as Freedom Felines.
DougJ
@kommrade reproductive vigor:
If you outlaw snark, then only outlaws will snark.
Frank
@Delia:
Couldn’t you say this about a lot of places? By the way, I was in Paris and I spoke with a terrible accent. Nobody spat at me during the month I was there.
sparky
@wilfred: i suspect that what will be required first is some sort of sacrifice. a human one, naturally, and preferably one that is young and photographs well.
Mnemosyne
@Delia:
It’s kind of odd to say, but in France the racism seems to be very country-based and not strictly race-based. I heard an African-American woman writer on NPR one time who was living in France and said that, as her French got better, she was actually treated worse because people thought she was from one of the Francophone countries in Africa. As long as people realized she was an American, everything was fine and she was treated well even though (obviously) her race didn’t change at all.
Jack Bauer
France is pretty xenophobic, that’s an obvious generalization I know… but the far right politicians in Europe have the decency to form their own parties and are explicit in their political aims. In the US, far right resentment finds a home in the GOP, and there it is poked and manipulated in a very cynical way.
Also, we have an actual history with fascism and that didn’t disappear after WW2.