It’s a question I’ve been struggling with for a while: how do you respond to online racism? And I don’t mean trolls who use racism as a tool to infect. Trolls have their own logic and are often unapproachable . I mean people who discriminate directly (‘Moroccans don’t come into my business’) or indirectly advanced skills: make web pages come alive (‘Anyone who speaks broken Dutch, doesn’t come into my business’).
The question became topical again due to the Black Pete discussion and the reactions of some people to the selfie of some dark-skinned Orange players.
If you think discrimination in the
Netherlands is not that bad, read how our Orange heroes are being responded to: pic.twitter.com/3wLMypnXvF
— Hadewych Minis (@Hademini) November 15, 2014
One extreme response to this is to shout politically correct ‘This is racism!’ at every suspicious utterance. This is the most common way of doing it in the UK – I follow Adrian Hart ‘s analysis here . The official dogma there is that everyone is racist, consciously or unconsciously. Institutional racism exists and must be recognised as such. According to this dogma, every appearance of racism must be reported and vigorously combated. If too little racism is reported, for example in schools, an china numbers inspectorate comes along to provide training in recognising racism.
As a result of this approach
A almost everyone in the UK is hypersensitive to issues of race. Also, very many people feel an identity tied to content diversity is the strength of the npo their race, whether as victim (many members of ethnic minorities), as superior guardian (many members of the white elite), or as unrecognised victim (many members of the white working class).
