anti_semitism stork daddy how could one ever hate the culture that brought us leopold bloom? 080414 ... Anna Livia Plurabelle But, technically, that would be Irish. Although ideas aren't usually the result of just one person... good ol' JJ was not just looking down on humanity, godlike, "paring his fingernails"... I don't see how people can justify racism in general. It's not just unethical, it's illogical. 080414 ... stork daddy you are precious. but also correct. 080414 ... . It is only slightly better to be non-racist yet unable to understand racists, than it is to be racist oneself. 080415 ... stork daddy about the ethics anyways. and the illogic of proceeding, no matter how logically, from false premises. and dot's point is well taken. 080415 ... epitome of incomprehensibility Understand? e_o_i/ALP inquires, four years later. I don't understand anybody or anything. Of course, I could be and have been racist too, not always intentionally. I didn't build the framework, but it's there; to answer the bit about "understanding" racism, xenophobia seems like a long-existing human behaviour, though the modern concept of "race" came from white European (non)science in the 18th and 19th centuries. It mixed in with already established hatred towards specific cultures, for example the anti-semitism coming out of the Christian middle ages. But if by "understand" you mean experience...? I haven't experienced it in a significant way, because I'm white (peach-tan would be more accurate) and have the so-called majority look of the place where I live. So I can't really say I understand racism as well as someone who's been a target of it. But "white" is also a tricky term - people of Spanish or Latino descent seem to be "white" in Canada and "non-white" in the States. Jewish people are usually "white" too, though skin colour wasn't as much the issue in that case. Again, I don't really understand anything. But what was I going to say before I started blath(er)ing? Ah yes. I don't know if the kids teasing my cousin were this, or if they just threw the penny at her to mock her for being poor (that is, Canada-poor); but I thought of this again while leafing through the subject of my last long written project, Ezra Pound's Guide to Kulchur, a guide for the "young man" who seeks to be both multi-kulchural AND racist, whaddabout that? (In the end, though, I'm glad I picked Pound. I was too much of a Joycean fangirl to write objectively about JJ. Now I have to get on with things and live real life.) 130914 what's it to you? who go blather from