Quote:
Originally Posted by Elephant Walk
I'm sure the Spaniards who throw bananas onto the pitch and make monkey noises directed at black players at Nou Camp and elsewhere would love to hear that one.
I'd like an explanation.
Believe it or not, at the moment I've been having alot of racism directed towards me. In the country I live in (which 3/4ths of my ancestors came from) right now, I'm frequently being insulted because they think I'm one race (which is hated in this country) because I get darker in the sun then they do (the other 1/4th is seen as an even lighter skinned nation). They don't know any better. All that being said, I'm not sure how you can term it a "N. American construct."
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She means that the structure of racialized thinking as we know it today developed in North America. Some elements of that thought have been exported elsewhere. This is true. At the same time, there are many other places where racial relations have developed differently than in North America. Any study of Latin American slavery and racism would demonstrate this fact. To illustrate this you can read the sections comparing racism in the US and racism in Brazil on Wikipedia (which, incidentally, is not written by liberal academics):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_%2..._constructions
No one claimed racism did not exist outside North American. It certainly does. What is being argued is that there is more cultural/national variation to racism than you are admitting, and that the racism we know in the US was first developed in the North America in the 17th and 18th centuries. European people in the medieval period certainly did/said things that we would perceive as "racist" today, but it's not clear that they even had a concept of "race."