(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

[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.