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Did I just walk onto the wrong message board?
Paranoidwriter, can you really not see how patronising, condescending and potentially terrifying your 'racist roleplay' is?
You're proposing to conduct an educational lesson on the huge damage caused by hate speech by er, performing hate speech.
Nesh has this covered I think, in suggesting that to 'really' make this strategy work, you need to take your (presumably white? white people aren't the only racists, y'know, but in this case I'm assuming white) racist intercolutor and yourself into a pub in Brixton or Toxteth, or a cafe in Southall or Rusholme.
And just in case this sounds like an endorsement, even then I'm not suggesting you single out an individual on the basis of hir ethnicity as to use, as Nesh puts it, as an Everymanority and then sit close to this person and engineer a racist conversation.
In doing that, you're making your unconsenting stoodge bear responsibility for your companion's racism. If not, why should ze have to be affected by it. This is at the root of what I find most disturbing about your posts and much of this thread.
Rest assured PW that I'm not only talking to you, I'm also horrified by the idea that
a case of your friends just running up and down the thing shouting about 'pooves' and such in general [...] I'm guessing the former, while not so good, would be just about borderline forgiveable, in the sense that it probably wasn't ruining anyone's evening
Both of these chains of thought seem to be reverting to that vile age-old chestnut that the responsibility for the bigotry doesn't lie entirely with the individual, but also with the group that provokes it, who have to somehow play along/are implicated
In the case of Canal Street, the gayers appear to invite the attention by, goddammit, hanging out on balconies of gay bars, in the gay quarter. Alex seems to assume that they're just waiting for homophobic hetties to shout abuse and complete the punchline to their joke.
Actually, as 'nesh points out, 'even' in a gay quarter, mob-handled uses of hatespeech are hardly the stuff of giggles.
I find it astonishing that it's assumed that anecdotally observed gay male behaviour in a gay male area/bar is assumed to be meaningless unless 'completed' by a homophobic straight male response.
In both cases this is rubbish, and offensive rubbish at that.
While I'm all for, and often have on here argued for, being sympathetic to people attempting to overcome their own prejudices. (And have benefited hugely in the past from people making this effort for me), to assume compliance/codependance is arrogance of the first order.
In the final analysis, bigotry is the problem of the person who holds those views, and expecting the object of that bigotry to 'help out'/assuming that it's invited is compounding that bigotry to the nth degree. |
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), or out of a desire to challenge bigotry, is a very different matter for those can be pretty sure that they aren't ever going to be the focus of it.