Racism…Is It a Right, or Not?
Ok, this could sound as old news, since I’ll be talking about something that happened last year, yet, it’s not the actual happening that I want to bring up, it’s the repercussions that followed.
But first,to introduce the topic,I’ll talk about something from my childhood…
I had a colleague from Kenya that I went to middle school with, he believed that Racism was good, but discrimination was bad!!!!!!
He said :” As a black person, I have the right not to befriend and socialise with white people, but, I should treat them with utter grace and respect, and not to discriminate against them in any aspect of life”.
This -as he said- would be racism, yet, it’s not discrimination, which he believed was his right!!!!!
Last year, one of the stars of my all time favourite sitcom Seinfeld, Micheal Richards “Kramer” verbally assaulted a group of African Americans at a comedy club in Los Angeles, calling them the N-word and cursing them with all inappropriate words!.
The following is the video of Richards committing the verbal assault picked up from you tube…
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UomfLKQr57U[/youtube]
The Today Show hosted 2 gentlemen who were the direct target of Richards’ rather disgusting racist tirade and their lawyer, as they were trying to sue Richards for verbally assaulting them.
The host of the show Matt Lauer questioned the legal status of the case, claiming that Richards merely practised his freedom of expression that America enjoys.
Following is the piece from that interview also posted on You Tube..
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSyx4lvBBlg[/youtube]
As disgusting as Richards’ racist comments were, I believe ,people should not be sued for merely verbally assaulting someone, as that would ultimately limit the margin of freedom of expression in any society, such things should certainly be denounced, and people committing such things should be marked and outkasted by society, yet there shouldn’t be any legal remedy for suing them, as long as they don’t physically hurt anyone.
I wonder what you guys think of it!
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I agree. But it doesn’t mean you have to stick around and pay for someone to degrade and belittle you.
I agree with you Mohammad, if we did sue everyone who utters racists comments.. believe me.. we would end up suing a hell of alot of people!
there is freedom of expression, and there is also freedom from consequences. read this: http://www.reappropriate.com/?p=690 from that link:
“This misguided interpretation of the First Amendment is motivated primarily by privilege: a privilege that states that one need never consider the oppressed minority community victimized by one’s speech; that one will never be the victim of similar oppression based on one’s own race, ethnicity or gender; that one has the unabashed right to appropriate, misinterpret or disrespect a foreign culture or tradition; that one is never hurting real people just like oneself; that the victims of one’s actions are less important than one’s own interests; that the targets of one’s hatespeech should “suck it up and dealâ€; that one need not treat an Other with basic respect and dignity. This misguided interpretation is based on a narcisstic, â€meâ€-centred outlook of the world, that conveniently white-washes the interests of all non-mainstream minorities who cannot afford to pretend that the law will always protects the basic human rights that mainstream Americans take for granted.”
Thank you Nadia for your commen,I certainly don’t think thatr people who get exposed to a racist tirade should just “suck it up and deal with it”, yet, I don’t imprisoning or fining people for merely expressing their thoughts -regardless of how disgusting those thoughts are- is quite the solution.
There should be a moral punishment for those people and I repeat what I said in my post here, societies should make a collective effort to mark those people and outkast them.
Racism is the most abject stupidity imaginable. As the great philosopher Ayn Rand put it:
Racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism. It is the notion of ascribing moral, social or political significance to a man’s genetic lineage — the notion that a man’s intellectual and characterological traits are produced and transmitted by his internal body chemistry. Which means, in practice, that a man is to be judged, not by his own character and actions, but by the characters and actions of a collective of ancestors.
One thing to keep in mind is that emotional pain can easily be greater than physical pain. I really do not believe that people should just deal with these problems by always turning the other cheek. Some people really do get offended. As horrible as his comments were, some form of compensation is due other than an apology on national TV, because what we see in this video isn’t just expressing thoughts, it’s pure and simple racial discrimination. Which really sucks because Kramer was my favourite character (used to be anyway). Although I do agree that suing a person is abit stupid because it’s just giving the impression that money can fix anything even emotional pain (which is most certainly not true).