Why Racism is Good and Why We Will All Come to Destroy Each Other

September 3, 2010

A good friend of mine once said that to me that westerners “respect Chinese culture, but will never come to accept it”. I believe that her statement is true and can in fact be broadened to assert that “people of one culture can come to respect, but may in fact never come to accept the culture of different people”. Just because us westerners are easy targets (in that we act directly and directness can be inferred as arrogance), doesn’t mean that we are always deserving of the vilification our white skins earn us (of course, there are many exploitative western bastards in China, may God piss on their graves). After all, we are just as guilty a party as any other race.

This may come to some surprise, however, I don’t find that westerners who believe that Chinese people are weird, complicated and have strange mannerisms are all that terribly racist, because, after all, the Chinese are saying the same things about us, just as anyone else would. It’s only natural that a bunch of people going to a new and foreign place, no matter what cultural orientation they may well be, would find the foreign land to be strange and exotic, because, in relation to their lived experiences, it is. Sure, we’re talking about racism, but it’s not serious, deep-seeded racism. Mild racism, the racism that dictates that foreign things are strange, is an unavoidable byproduct of human nature. The human brain simply cannot comprehend ethnical and cultural gradients, it must break our existence into pre-package archetypes like Asian, Caucasian, African and so forth, and then assign these classes attributes (read: stereotypes) based on shallow inferences.

For the brain to operate it needs to continue to break the world and all of its constituents (that includes people) into digestible chunks, understanding foreign culture therefore works against the brain’s natural process. The brain seeks to typecast and simplify, cross-cultural communication seeks to add depth and complexity. In the end, we were born to destroy each other.