Thursday 13 January 2011

The ugly side of Youtube...

Namely, this.

The video depicts a black extremist demanding to his listeners that all the black people of the world rise up and exterminate all the white people. He says this is "the solution to the problem," but what the problem is, either he doesn't say or the video isn't long enough to capture.
Not only is the video itself crazy and racist, the vast majority of comments are racially motivated too. There are whites who claim to hate blacks, and blacks who claim to hate whites, and most of the discourse is on the subject of whether the white "race" or the black "race" is more foul.
Yes, I am going to expand on why I put the word "race" in inverted commas. We'll come to that later.

This video is quite an old one, but there are many, more recent videos that say much of the same thing. Neo-Nazism in particular is popular among the dirty virtual backstreets of video hosting.
I think the main problem this illustrates is the fact that we, the Western world, are all too often unwilling to address the issue of racism head-on. We give our younger children vague principles about loving everyone, and occasionally link it specifically to not treating people differently because of the colour of their skin. But I think that when children grow into teenagers, we should re-address the issue more explicitly. We should accept that their are views out their like white supremacy, black supremacy, Nazism; not gloss over the details of what they believe; have open, uncensored discussion about the possibility that people could be in any way superior/inferior because of ethnic background; and reach the only conclusion rational debate on this subject can bring: no, there is no substantive difference between white and black people, only a change in the amount of melanin their bodies produce. Yes, humans are all equally valuable no matter what they happen to look or sound like, or where they happen to come from.

Now, onto the subject of race. The way I see it, racism isn't the view that one race is superior to another race- it's the view that different races exist at all. Race is a vague, insubstantive concept, which there has never been a specific, universal definition for. Most people today base it on skin colour; others in the past have expanded it to eye and hair colour. Some say "Caucasian, African and Asian races," others go further and say "Nordic, Saxon, Slav, Moor, Hutu, Tutsi".
There is no difference in the structure of the genome between any of these "races". They are not different species or sub-species. They all have the same needs, and, broadly speaking, the same desires. They do not need to be treated differently, so why categorise them?
It sounds fluffy/cheesey/whatever, but I don't care. It needs to be said.
There is one race. The human race.

As the cast of a certain love/hate disney film said:
We're all in this together.
Once we know that we are, we'll all be stars.

*commence dancing*

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