{"id":2669,"date":"2003-02-14T12:37:10","date_gmt":"2003-02-14T07:07:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/alpha.ravikiran.com\/blog\/2003\/02\/14\/go-easy-on-the-racism\/"},"modified":"2003-02-14T12:37:10","modified_gmt":"2003-02-14T07:07:10","slug":"go-easy-on-the-racism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/vintage\/200302\/go-easy-on-the-racism\/","title":{"rendered":"Go easy on the &#8220;Racism&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Um.. no <a href=\"http:\/\/www.techrose.org\/filtercoffee\/20030201.html#21341\">Filtercoffee,<\/a> I don&#8217;t agree with this bandying about of the word &#8220;racist&#8221;  with gay (oops) abandon.<\/p>\n<p>Humour, taste and sacrilege are culture-specific. We Indians make ethnic jokes at each other. We stereotype Surds as dumb, South Indians as dark-skinned, Bengalis as loudmouths, lazy bums and over-intellectualisers.<\/p>\n<p>I think such jokes are <i>okay<\/i>. <\/p>\n<p>Every culture holds <i>some<\/i> things sacred. I disagree with Gandhiji on most counts, but I still wouldn&#8217;t pass over the sort of jokes about him  that were made by <a href=\"http:\/\/www.indiacause.com\/C17_Maxim_Gandhi.htm\">Maxim magazine<\/a> recently.  They were being <i>insensitve<\/i> not evil. For them, Gandhiji was just another pacifist to make fun of. They weren&#8217;t <i>sensitive <\/i> to the fact that Gandhiji was an icon to Indians. <\/p>\n<p>Similarly, racist jokes are not intrinsically offensive . They cause offence in the US only because it has a painful history of slavery and later racial discrimination. But I don&#8217;t see why we should misuse American sensitivity to charges of racism and load them with guilt for making <i>ethnic<\/i> jokes that would be completely acceptable in India.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Um.. no Filtercoffee, I don&#8217;t agree with this bandying about of the word &#8220;racist&#8221; with gay (oops) abandon. Humour, taste and sacrilege are culture-specific. We Indians make ethnic jokes at each other. We stereotype Surds as dumb, South Indians as dark-skinned, Bengalis as loudmouths, lazy bums and over-intellectualisers. I think such jokes are okay. Every [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2669"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2669"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2669\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2669"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2669"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2669"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}