The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #113211   Message #2423263
Posted By: Little Hawk
27-Aug-08 - 09:20 AM
Thread Name: The Weekly Walkabout (part 2.)
Subject: RE: The Weekly Walkabout (part 2.)
Culture is not necessarily based on race. Culture is based on old social customs. There is an American culture and a French culture and a Russian culture and a Danish culture, etc, and they are each based not on race, but on a long accumulated set of social customs and traditions.

Therefore I don't see that WAV can be depicted as racist. You can say that he's chauvinistic or defensive about his culture, but you can't say that he's a racist.

(Well, you can, but you'd just be engaging in a sort of rhetorical witchhunt if you did, given the fact that "racist" is a particularly charged word in today's dialogue.)

WAV is not objecting to the race of various immigrants, he is objecting to the fact that they may hold rather different cultural values, and that that causes changes in his culture which he doesn't care for.

People everywhere object to that sort of thing to some extent, depending on where, how, and in what way it manifests.

For example (and it's an extreme one), Canadians have objected strenuously to certain East Asian fathers killing their daughters over family issues that we would regard as the daughters merely expressing their own free will and choices in life. That's not a racial matter, it's a cultural matter. The Asian men who have done this violence to their daughters (or wives) apparently feel quite justified in doing it. Canadian society does not agree with their viewpoint on that.