Unfortunately though this kind of stuff is not just appealing to Tories at the minute. Some recent polling showed just what we’ve become (or maybe just kidded ourselves that it had largely gone away) as 34% of Leave voters admitted, note admitted, to being racially prejudiced. Then we had the survey that showed that 24% of the electorate said they’d be likely to vote for a party who were anti Islam and anti immigration. So a quarter of our electorate sit up when these dog whistles are blown. This is what decades of drip, drip right wing press articles create i suppose.
Unfortunately it's not a new development:
Distrust of the other has always been there. I expect this constant third to also be there when polling other countries. It's some kind of archaic in-built defence instinct. We can be thankful we (here on this thread) don't have it, life is much richer without racism.
Repeat after me "Islam is not a Race"
Repeat after me.
A race is a grouping of humans based on shared physical or social qualities into categories generally viewed as distinct by society.
As Nr-25 says (is that a Prisoner reference?), race as a construct is arguably a social one. i.e. there's only one race: the human race, the rest are arbitrary groupings. So being racist means classifying someone negative because of their arbitrary social grouping, or indeed caste: (skin colour, hair/facial-features, accent or even,
arguably, non-physical tell-tale signs like religion, class, politics, nationality).
If you classify race as only pertaining to physical attributes (which you may do, there's no right or wrong answer) then Kevin's statement is fine, in that context. But the thing about the
"Islam is not a race" retort is it's become a worn-out debate manoeuvre. Kevin, you just posted that without replying to any specific post, so it's not clear what your argument specifically is. I'm a critic of Islam and not for simple reasons, so I reject being called an Islamophobe or racist. I recognise the majority of Muslims (just as the majority of any other folk, even Tory-voters!) as being good, kind people who love life and respect others.
But there are other kinds of Islam-critics out there who believe all Muslims are by their association to Islam a negative influence. Or worse, that all Arabic-looking peoples are a negative influence because they are probably Muslims. This is when it becomes prejudice, or indeed racist.
I believe we as a society (including the media & government) should be able to discuss Islam's influence in the West more openly, but this shouldn't open a door for the prejudiced or racist factions, as the debate becomes poisonous very quickly (as we've seen). On the other side, if debate is shut down because of too sensitive a fear of it becoming poisonous, it breeds resentment (as we've also seen). This is an important point to understand as some of the resentful may feel spoken to by some of the poisonous. This leads to what we're experiencing in Europe & US now: an increase in the influence of Far Right philosophies. This way, there's little chance of improving the ratio of racial-prejudice in society.
It's a massive minefield, to say the least. Too many people (on all sides) bull-doze their way through without balancing their thoughts properly, the cautious analytical few have no chance to pick up all those flying china pieces.
I guess it's just part of life. Change is slow. Cultural globalisation is new. I advocate, for want of a better term, racial-mixing, of all kinds, especially the social-taboo kinds (i.e. Muslim women feeling free to make family with non-Muslim men). It's a sign of positive social progress. There's hope, as it wasn't too long ago that any kind of black/white-pairing was social taboo, thank all yer gods that's no longer the case!
