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A Different Moral Universe

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See, for me – and this is a lifelong, unchanging conviction – a person who notices this kind of thing is a dipshit. Irrespective of whether he thinks “no persons of color = good” or “no persons of color = bad.” Because both positions irrevocably lead to bad, immoral actions. The ruling ideology we live under wants to turn us all into these dipshits. If seeing people as painted widgets doesn’t repel you, we live in different moral universes.

Of course, somebody who can come up with a verbal atrocity like “considered as being of color” is also an irredeemable idiot in addition to being a neoliberal dipshit, so there’s that.

10 responses to “A Different Moral Universe”

  1. Don Benham Avatar
    Don Benham

    Precisely- I agree completely!

    “Judge people not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”

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  2. Alex the Physicist Avatar
    Alex the Physicist

    Plus, Italy defies America’s racial categories. As Latin as Latin can be. Indisputably Mediterranean and shaped by the constant movement of people around that region over thousands of years. Indisputably European.

    The only appropriate response to the question “What race are Italians?” is an old man with olive skin shrugging dismissively before returning to his espresso. Or an old nana urging you to stop thinking about it and have something to eat.

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  3. xykademiqz Avatar
    xykademiqz

    I will never understand how/why so many people refuse to wrap their heads around the fact that in many countries around the world the population is racially homogeneous. Not because anyone is particularly vile or racist, but because that’s who lives there and has lived there for centuries, and there haven’t been massive waves of immigration that have changed the racial composition of the populace. Where I am from you would be really hard pressed to find a single Black person who’s not a tourist passing through or a staff member of an African embassy. They just don’t live there. As a result, it will be impossible to find them on the national soccer team. FFS.

    Or actually I do understand this refusal to recognize basic geographical facts.by media. What I don’t understand is why so many private citizens go along and participate in this faux outrage. This reminds me of the whole social media hullaballoo over little girls Russian ballerinas putting dark makeup on their faces for some performance; this type of makeup has no racial connotations in Russia and the adult ballet troupe has used that same type of makeup for the same performance for many years. The US and UK problems are not everybody’s problems, but I suppose the whole world has to go along as if they are.

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    1. Alex the Physicist Avatar
      Alex the Physicist

      Americans think diversity and intergroup conflict must always be about skin tone. Because they’ve never heard of the Middle East, Eastern Europe, Northern Ireland, Catalonia, the Basque Country, Rwanda, Myanmar, Afghanistan, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, or, well, anywhere else.

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    2. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      That’s really the most ridiculous part. Americans engage in the most blatant cultural colonialism as they scream loudly about the evils of cultural colonialism. I love this country but somebody needs to tell its people they are not the center of the world.

      I was really angry about the story of the Russian ballerinas. There was serfdom in Russia until 1861! There’s no need to project American problems on Russia. People there have their own history. Things have a different meaning.

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  4. GSW Avatar
    GSW

    “a person who notices this kind of thing is a dipshit…”

    Sometimes yes, sometimes no.

    Consider the case of Egyptian professional football/soccer and Egypt’s 10 million strong minority of Coptic Orthodox Christians.

    https://daraj.com/en/69821/

    Coptic appeals to FIFA, with its numerous “Stop Racism” campaigns, have met with stony silence. In contrast, need it be said that FIFA has been not at all shy about its support for George Floyd BLM protestors in football?

    https://www.fifa.com/about-fifa/organisation/media-releases/stop-racism-stop-violence

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  5. Avi Avatar
    Avi

    “somebody needs to tell [American] people they are not the center of the world.”

    Somebody needs to tell Americans to stop projecting their idea of the world – basically a replica of America – onto the rest of the world.
    Writing from Italy, not a football/soccer fan, and yes, Italy’s team is made up of men that look like the vast majority of Italians, go figure…
    The fact that so many (?) people from the liberal West deem it strange that a country should be made up of a homogeneous population in terms of ethnic origin, language and/or religion is a form of alienation.
    While the US, like every other state in North and South America, is founded on the principle of immigration, most other countries around the world are not. Personally, I do not no want to see Europeans end up on reservations.

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    1. random reader Avatar
      random reader

      Immigration is a matter of perspective – how far in the past you are going? While “my kind of people” have been residing in the area I am from for ~15 centuries (give or take one), someone else was definitely living there before. No clue what really happened to them and I do not particularly care. It is hard to get worked up about what your (great)^60 grandfathers were doing so long ago. But yes, Europe, as it is today, is not built on the principle of immigration. That does not stop some politicians from trying…

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    2. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      This obsession with how people look and how many different varieties of physical appearance you have available is supermarket mentality. “Do you only have this one brand? How about something organic? Or something more exotic?” It’s pathetic. And the whole world has to play along.

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  6. Avi Avatar
    Avi

    @ random reader

    I’m afraid you’re barking up the wrong tree. Italian Jew here, my family (mother’s side) has been in Italy since the early sixteenth century (as proven by a patent from a Gonzaga duke allowing one of my forefathers to settle in his duchy as a money-changer originally from Germany).
    Migration is a human phenomenon as old as mankind, but genome research attests to the fact that the vast majority of peoples – at least in Europe – are homogeneous autochthonous populations. It is interesting to see how different the haplogroups of people in Tuscany are still quite distinct from those of other Italians, eerily reminiscent of the non-Italic population of Tuscany in ancient times, the Etruscans.
    There are very few native black Italians at the moment, most were either adopted as infants from African countries (in particular Zaire-Congo) or they are descendants of people from Eritrea, a former Italian colony. The rest are first-generation citizens, ie born in Italy of non-Italian citizens. Will there be more in the future? Who knows, who cares? There is such a variety of types in Italy, from the blonde, blue-eyed, tall Veneto people, to the olive-skinned and dark-haired and not so tall Sicilians, among whom may also be found tall, blonde, fair-skinned types from Normandy.
    I’m not denying the fact that people have come and gone through history, and especially so in Italy, a country at the crossroads of the Mediterranean, but the kind of society arising in a country like the US is a totally anomalous experience for most people in the world. Assimilating newcomers takes at least a couple of generations, and can only be done on certain conditions.
    Mass immigration is as traumatic an event for the immigrants as for the autochthonous populations receiving them, there are winners and losers, and cultures that took centuries or millennia to develop may be overwhelmed and collapse in a matter of years: in densely populated areas such as Europe, it is simply not sustainable.
    I’ll repeat it, it is not racist to want Europe to stay European, in the same way that most Chinese want China to stay Chinese, the Japanese the same for their country, the Somalis, the Chadians, the Algerians, the Palestinians, the Afghans and the Finns and so on. As something like 95% of Italians are white, it is no surprise that the Italian team is all white. It would have been surprising if there had been two or three or more people of color on it, since it would have been disproportionate compared to the national population. But even in that case it would have been fine, there are, thank God, no racial quotas in Italy, in football or in any other areas of endeavour.
    Americans have another take on this, but theirs is a totally different history, and a short one at that, which I respect but which I do not want to have foisted on me and my country.

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A conservative literary critic and college professor

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