Unpopular Opinion
Welcome to the Unpopular Opinion community!
How voting works:
Vote the opposite of the norm.
If you agree that the opinion is unpopular give it an arrow up. If it's something that's widely accepted, give it an arrow down.
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Tag your post, if possible (not required)
- If your post is a "General" unpopular opinion, start the subject with [GENERAL].
- If it is a Lemmy-specific unpopular opinion, start it with [LEMMY].
Rules:
1. NO POLITICS
Politics is everywhere. Let's make this about [general] and [lemmy] - specific topics, and keep politics out of it.
2. Be civil.
Disagreements happen, but that doesn’t provide the right to personally attack others. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Please also refrain from gatekeeping others' opinions.
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4. Shitposts and memes are allowed but...
Only until they prove to be a problem. They can and will be removed at moderator discretion.
5. No trolling.
This shouldn't need an explanation. If your post or comment is made just to get a rise with no real value, it will be removed. You do this too often, you will get a vacation to touch grass, away from this community for 1 or more days. Repeat offenses will result in a perma-ban.
Instance-wide rules always apply. https://legal.lemmy.world/tos/
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Being of mixed race, I have experienced racism everywhere. Western society certainly has no monopoly on it.
For me, western racism involved a lot of schoolyard bullying. I don't remember coming home with a black eye while I was enrolled in the Japanese school system. But there, it was more of an exclusionary racism with people talking shit behind your back. In some sense, this could be worse in that there is a systematic component to it as opposed to a few worthless individuals using any pretext to go after anyone they can pick on.
Otoh when Trump got elected, we learned just how many closet racists there are in the west and how alarmingly quickly they could get organized. I think in general, racists are in the minority and I've met many more wonderful people everywhere I've gone. But when they reach positions of power and influence is when you've got a problem.
Yeah, the reality is that people will take any demographic, apply a stereotype, and act superior to that group based on the stereotype. People all across the world do it and it really has nothing to do with race or whatever demographic is in question. It's just people wanting to feel superior. If anything, I think places like America have come a long way in overcoming racism, but that's because we're so diverse that this behavior is rampant. So we're forced to address it and do so very regularly.
But there's a bunch of forms that this takes, overtly using hate speech, being fearful of a people, even complimenting someone but at the same time putting them in a box. Like "Hey, you people are really good at running" can mean "I admit you're good at that thing. But that's it. And if you're not, what good are you?"
Each culture has its own flavor and it can even be self-defeating. I hear South Americans talk shit about each other a lot, for example.
Yeah I agree with you there. Take those schoolyard bullies. They might've beaten me up over race, but they also beat up that other kid over there because he's short, or his socks don't match, or…anything really. I eventually worked out that it's the bullies who have all the issues, though coming home all black and blue didn't make it seem that way.