I would have thought it was fairly obvious that just because something or someone is not powerful enough to have _the desired_ deleterious effects on others does not change whether it is racism or not. americanfront will not have much effect on what happens in the US I suspect, but that doesn't mean they aren't racist. One Nation is in a pretty poor state at the moment, but that doesn't mean they aren't racist. et cetera...
this has got to be one of the strangest ways of defining what is or is not racism I've heard for a while. if someone has no ability to give effect to their racism does that mean they aren't racist?
it's silly to have to point this out.
if you actually mean that the US is in a stronger _global_ position viz. Japan (though Dennis may contend that one, and I would be inclined to take that contention seriously), then that's an argument for being _more active_ on the issues of US racism _for you_, but it's not an argument for deciding the priorities of others, and it isn't an argument for why anyone (even those in the US) should solder their definitions/perceptions to those commonly accepted in the US.
the majority of the world's population might be violently or distantly affected by the racism of the US, but they are also adversely (and directly) affected by the racism in their own countries or that of colonial/postcolonial countries to which they were/are attached, like Korea and Japan, Papua new guinea and australia, etc, as well as that against indigenous people's stripped of their lands, and so on. in this context, anti-americanism is regularly code for a staunch nationalism which, if peddled via notions of the nation as family, is racist, and it's target is not in the first instance americans but rather those inside (say) Japan who are deemed as not sufficiently 'japanese'. iwabuchi's article (which I posted an excerpt of) is worth reading if only make clear the complexity of the imaginary relation b/n Japan and the US.
I wouldn't expect anyone in the US to comprehend this really, but I would expect you not to pretend that you understand it - how could you? if you did pretend to understand it, then it would tend perhaps to slide neatly into patriotism. but calling it ethnocentrism, as if this is really distinct from racism is not really grasping its significance. the US is not really the world, though it likes to think it's so. and even when it is tagged as the privileged object of certain practices and discourses, it doesn't always mean they are talking about you. there's a kind of narcissism at work here that thinks because the US is a global power it must be the generic case for establishing definitions, though perhaps the problem is simply that there are standard definitions in the US which themselves are the result of the dominance of certain politics.
btw, prejudice means to pre-judge - racism involves prejudice, but prejudice can include such banalities as thinking that all academics are intelligent. I thought this was obvious too.
I'll read the Young excerpt, so later kelley...
Angela --- rcollins at netlink.com.au
Chaz wrote:
>racism = prejudice + power.
kelley wrote:
>i think we need to make an important distinction here. if the japanese
>think americans smell bad because they eat butter what consequences does
>that have for the individual and collective lives of americans? does it
>harm them? how so? i'd call this ethnocentrism, though charles had
>another word for it, though i don't recall. the point is that such a
>belief doesn't necessarily have a deleterious effect on an american's or
>americans' [as a group] lives. this is because there aren't any powerful
>social institutions and practices that intersect in complex ways with other
>beliefs and practices which systematically and systemically diminish the
>lives of americans.