Racism in the Region

[dtkvictim]

I don't think culture is different from race. Race is a social construct. While there are some genetic markers that allow us to guestimate someone's lineage which is roughly correlated with race, the concept of race is something that is deeply social. I'd have trouble defining race differently from culture. 

I don't think it's possible to have a conversation without talking past each other without clarifying this point. Personally I prefer to use the word ethnicity to encompass the combination of genetic grouping and culture. It is a deeply social construct meaning that the amount that culture and genetics contributes to that group identity is up the members of the group, but it is still very real. Racism to me would be judging, making assumptions about, or discriminating against an individual based on their immutable genetic background. You have now prompted me to consider that racism intersects with culture, in that I think it would be racist to assume someones culture based on their phenotype, or to believe that all members of an ethnicity are stereotypical representations of their culture.

I see it "culture" often used as a defense against racism. "No, I'm not racist, I just think the CULTURE that Indian people grow up with encourages being rude and shoving on the bus"...because teenagers (or entitled adults) who grew up in Canadian culture never push to try to get to the front of the line. To me, I really don't think they are different.

I don't see your argument here. Do you consider shoving your way onto a train an action beyond critique? The behaviour is either genetic or cultural, and I certainly don't think it's genetic. If we can't critique culture, that we can't critique that behaviour.

Using Canadian culture as an excuse is a poor defense. Using the train example, we clearly sit somewhere in the middle of a spectrum between places like Japan and India. Am I supposed to accept both as equivalents, and movement in either direction as functionally irrelevant? I reject that idea, and I know which direction I would prefer Canadian culture develop towards.

And again, culture does not mean every individual within it is a stereotypical representation of it. It's about averages, and the outliers don't change that.

Even things which you would think are "cultural" or framed in a cultural way...like "honor killings". We call them that, but we don't call them that when white people do the same thing in Western countries for the same reasons. We just call it murder.

Most people are relatively blind to their own culture, yes. Doubly so for English speakers, Westerners, and North Americans whose culture (especially through media) has dominated globally for decades. That doesn't negate the existence of culture.

I know there are cultural differences, but I think it is very dangerous to ascribe specific internal traits to a group of any kind. To me, culture is more visible and communal. The CULTURE of Canada involves things like Canada day...a holiday where lots of celebrations happen, and people have different personal interpretations of and feelings about those communal events.

Now, if I'm reading this correctly (and I might not be), this is where I strongly disagree. Hardline advocates of multiculturalism often seem to take an offensively simplistic view of culture. Superficial visual representations of culture like song, food, and dance are indeed culture, but IMO are the least important aspects of it. It pains me that the number one defense you find online of multiculturalism is "but what about the food???". It tells me that either 1) they have such a superficial and ignorant understanding of culture that they think food really is the biggest difference between cultures, or 2) they have nothing good to say about other cultures that the only positive they can come up with is food (though it definitely is usually a positive!).

There are far more important aspects to culture, many or most of which are not visible. These are as fundamental as things like perception of space and time. Do you like when people aren't physically pressed against you in the grocery store line, accept LGBTQ+ people, bring their trash home instead of littering, show up to scheduled meetings at the scheduled time, believe in the scientific method as the supreme way of knowing, aid strangers in need of help, or prefer democracy over monarchy/theocracy? Then you have cultural preferences, and unless you think people are genetically predisposed to adhere to or not from these, then I don't think that's racist.

Maybe this is tangential to your OP, but I think a lot of what you're reading online is cultural critique, though it's no doubt mixed in with some racism.