(no subject)

[charliesmum]

There was this PSA on when I was a little girl.

It was a boy and his grandpa fishing on a lake. The boy says to his grandfather 'What does prejudice mean?' cutely mangling the word.

Grandpa asks why the boy wants to know, and the boy responds by telling him his 'Jewish friend' Seth (or whatever, it was 30-some years ago) said he was prejudiced.

Grandpa gently tells the little boy that he is, indeed, prejudiced because otherwise he'd have just said 'my friend Seth'.

You'd think, with all that sort of touchy-feely post 'peace and love' mentality that I grew up with, the world would be a bit kinder now.

Yet we still have people saying things like 'I'm not racist. I have black friends'.

Sigh.

Comments

[brownkitty.livejournal.com]

Wait, we're not supposed to use physical descriptions when talking about our friends now?

[charliesmum.livejournal.com]

Well 'Jewish' as far as I know, isn't a physical description.

My tall friend could work.

The way I look at it, if I have to describe someone, I will, but if I just want to say 'my friend Darryl said something funny' I'm not going to say 'my black friend Darryl said something funny'. If I had to explain who Darryl was I might qualify the color of his skin so as to differentiate him from someone else.

[brownkitty.livejournal.com]

Jewish can be an ethnic type as well as a religious type.

I try and do things in a similar way to how you say you look at it.

I don't think that completely avoiding any racial descriptors is the right way to go about it. Or any descriptors, for that matter. If the description is relevant, I'll put it in and try and be respectful, and I admit that I fail sometimes as everyone does.

If you go to great lengths to mentioning race, or social group or handicap status or any one of a number of other descriptions, it seems to me an awful lot like implying that those descriptions are Something We Don't Talk About Because They're Shameful Things.

[charliesmum.livejournal.com]

If you go to great lengths to mentioning race, or social group or handicap status or any one of a number of other descriptions, it seems to me an awful lot like implying that those descriptions are Something We Don't Talk About Because They're Shameful Things.

I 100% agree with that comment.

[jfda.livejournal.com]

Exactly. Constantly mentioning a person's race, religion, sexual orientation, disability, etc., in irrelevant situations is a form of prejudice, but mentioning those in contexts where it's relevant certainly isn't.

Actually, in the PSA that charliesmum mentioned, Jewishness could be relevant, particularly if the boy had been specifically called anti-Semetic

[placeboweek.livejournal.com]

"Jewish" is definitely not a physical description. :)

Sometimes it's perfectly appropriate to say "my Jewish friend". It depends on the context. But most of the time, it's not relevant and it says something negative about the person saying it.

Also, I know who you are referring to with this quote, and he is a total asshole. All the words coming out of his mouth just reinforce the fact that he is racist and should quit being a judge and just curl up under a rock somewhere.

[finmagik.livejournal.com]

Some people didn't get the message then, don't get it now. And never will. That's sad.

[king-duncan.livejournal.com]

My friend Ken still uses, "see, you are prejudiced" as a punchline, when people start talking about race.

[jeffxandra.livejournal.com]

Actually, I would accuse the grandfather of being prejudiced.

He's the one who drew a negative conclusion about Seth based upon the adjective.

Maybe the boy has two friends named Seth who are physically very similar and this is how he differentiates them when they're not around. It's not like the boy is going to say "Proper Seth" and "Other Seth"

[crossbow1.livejournal.com]

Michael Moore wrote a rant that if you are white, no, you do not have black friends, you only have black acquaintances. He said it was impossible. I was really offended. No, I don't have a LOT of black friends, but one of my very closest friends is black. And I live in a state where the population is only 3% black.

I was briefly VERY racist against Indians, after I had a really traumatic lawsuit with a woman from Bangladesh. Not that I thought there was anything wrong with Indians, per se, but when I saw one I just felt angry. I knew it was wrong but it was a gut reaction. Got over it eventually. Good thing, since my roommate is of Indian descent.

[october31st.livejournal.com]

Saying Jewish in that case, as others have noted, helps clarify the context a bit. Just my two cents.

I did read an article yesterday about a justice of the peace in Louisiana who refuses to marry interracial couples (no, it is not from 1958). His quotes included something along the lines of, "I'm not racist. I have black friends, I have them over to my house, let them use my bathroom."

Let them use my bathroom? Man, what a radical civil rights champion.

[sixth-light.livejournal.com]

The best bit was that his reasoning was it was For The Children, because otherwise these couples would inevitably reproduce and then get divorced and their offspring would be ruined for life. To which there are three obvious objections:

1) If he's worried about divorce, he just shouldn't marry anyone
2) Not being married is not a contraceptive
3) Obama.

[charliesmum.livejournal.com]

Best comment ever.

I just saw someone quoted as saying '“Perhaps he’s worried the kids will grow up and be president,”

[jfda.livejournal.com]

From what I'd heard, he wasn't talking about divorce, just saying that interracial children don't fit in to either white or black culture.

Of course, given that marriage isn't necessary for reproduction, any reproduction-based argument seems pretty silly ...