It's all the same.

Racism. For some it's a bad habit and for others a reason to violence. It is just about the biggest taboo in the Western World thanks in part to a large shift in social paradigms during the 1960s and 70s, and today is rightfully (I believe) condemned for being fucking ludicrous. This has led to major awareness of racially-motivated crimes, where a crime's primary motivation is the victim's skin colour or cultural background. Often this means the perpetrator has made an assumption about a person based on generalised ideas they hold about certain types of aesthetic; it is the primal ability of pattern recognition gone, at its worst, wildly awry.

But when did the emancipatory dream turn into one of those nightmares where running is difficult because it's like trying to move through deep water? Where does the boundary for racism begin? Social equality was a liberal ideal, yet it sometimes seems to have turned into a bastard child of conservatism in which merely the mention of skin colour can be seen seen as a racist act.

This thread provides some interesting examples.

A thread that is begun by Acne Caeser and in the fifth reply is turned into "debate" about racism. F U Murad (a "BLACK female") posts to say that she finds the 'topic to be a bit offensive' and asks Acne Ceaser to stop generalising whilst "refering" to skin colour inside quotation marks to indicate her "ironic" use of the terms. The thing is, though, that she doesn't explain why she finds the thread offensive until the half way down the second page. In this she reasons that it 'was not necessarily the use of the word black' but in fact a sentence lifted from another user's post, yet this appears to contradict her initial post where she specifically mentions 'your topic' as the culprit.

This is clearly a little confusing. Why would someone rage at the initial poster when it was another person's words that ruffled her? It seems, to me, to be an attempt to backpedal after a slightly earlier post in which F U Murad makes the exact mistake that she attacked Acne Caeser for: assumption via generlisation.

By saying she takes offence at Acne Caeser's post she is saying that she takes offence at his apparently generalised assumption of black people's skin. Undoubtedly because acne is a specifically skin-related condition it adds a certain amount of shadow to the matter. Several posts later Murad asks Caeser if he is 'an african american?' and in his reply Caeser indicates that he does not come from the USA (and later says he is 'in North Europe'). There is a sudden moment of realisation, then, when it dawns on Murad that she has just fallen into her own fire - she has made an assumption (that Caeser is American) based on some sort of generalisation about the users of the site.

Furthermore, on top on making the mistake she was trying to suppress, she has taken it one step further by inciting a sense of hostility. Thus she has now become the aggressor and when this dawns on her it seems she tries to minize any collateral damage through retrofitting her initial statement. Unfortunately for her the board contains evidence of her train of thought and allows for alternative interpretations.

What it says to me is the garbled nature of ideals, both at a personal level and at a social level. Murad has adopted the major rhetoric of liberalism - the emancipation of all peoples - yet used it to justify a distinctly conservative viewpoint, in which people's beliefs ought to adhere to what is good and necessary for them. Yet this conservative-inflected-anti-racist attitude seems dangerously commonplace amongst people that think being liberal is telling people what they cannot think. Because it is chic to be considered liberal, yet the liberalism on display is so weighed down with conservatism, the term has been pulled into a predicament.

On the one hand it is talked about as being a state of harmony where people can get on with their shit without having to worry that what they look like is going to get them fired or beaten up, and that sounds fucking great. But on the other hand, how that has actually manifested is people not being able to get on with their shit because they are constantly looking for racism, and on finding it use it as a reason to anger; this too is pattern recognition gone wildly awry.

Perhaps Murad grew up in a particularly hostile area in which racism did often occur, but then it is surely be folly to generalise that to every person you ever communicate with. That would just make life fucking tedious and tiring.