Skin Colour, Races and Racism

[Grazza]

Has anybody seen this article?

 

Parents "black up" baby to look like Balotelli

 

Seriously? How are the parents sick for doing that? I saw it and thought it was quite funny. I'm more offended at the fact they're being called sick for doing it. It's just a laugh! It's not as if they dressed their baby in a KKK outfit! Also, would it be equally as racist if a couple with darker skin put white chocolate over their baby and dressed them up as a white person? Somehow, I doubt it!

 

Guys, what are your thoughts on this?

 

I thought it was a bit out of order, just because it was a baby. I can understand older children wanting to dress up as Balotelli, but this just seemed a bit "off" to me.

[Rummy]

This! This is exactly what's wrong with modern perception of "racism"; we're fucking afraid of even acknowledging the fact that we look bloody different!

 

Look, if I'm going to dress up as someone with a different hair colour, I dye my hair or get a wig. The hair is a very distinguishing feature of a character, just like skin tone, and few people see a problem with dying one's hair. So since we have absolutely no problem with that, why is it suddenly a huge problem when it comes to skin tone? Because people are scaredy cats who are terrified of offending others by being politically incorrect, and because race is such a taboo topic that no one dares to go near it; the recently posted video with Samuel L. Jackson springs to mind.

 

In fact, why aren't these people objecting to tanning? Surely that's also racist, then?

 

The Diouf one I see no real problem with, he wants to be like somebody he likes and whilst some would question the 'blacking up' on the political correctness front, I think it was completely innocent really. Just a kid being a kid.

 

The Balotelli one though I'm not so sure about, it isn't done nearly the same. It's a baby smeared with chocolate and a sponge stuck to its head. That in my eyes is very, very, different to the kid dressing like Diouf.

 

The more I think about it, the less I think I'm cool on the baby one.

[Dannyboy-the-Dane]

Well, I would agree that it's most likely a pisstake, and we can discuss whether that's okay, but is it truly racist? To me it doesn't seem to be targetting his race/colour in particular, merely his general appearance. But is that enough to make it racist, would you say? It's actually an interesting question.

[Beast]

I get the whole fact that it's a baby and stuff but all I see is a pisstake of Balotelli and not the colour of his skin so I don't find it racist in the slightest. If someone dressed a baby up as Mr. T, would that be considered racist? Yeah, okay, it's not exactly the best facepaint job they did but it seems to me that they saw a baby with half of his face covered in chocolate and then they thought about it. Also, if this was on Facebook or something, maybe it was meant as a joke between family or friends. Either way, I think it's been blown out of proportion with The Sun calling them sick and stuff. Yeah, it's just a baby and I can see that, don't get me wrong, but all The Sun seemed to see was that there's a white baby being 'blacked up'. As I said in my previous post, would this have been blown out of proportion the same way if a black baby/child was 'whited up'?

 

I don't know what the point is behind it but I don't think it was meant as anything malicious at all. If it was, surely they'd have done something a bit better than dress their baby up as Balotelli and have written something other than "Why Always Me?" on his bib as well, right?

[Rummy]

Well, I would agree that it's most likely a pisstake, and we can discuss whether that's okay, but is it truly racist? To me it doesn't seem to be targetting his race/colour in particular, merely his general appearance. But is that enough to make it racist, would you say? It's actually an interesting question.

 

Good point indeed, I wasn't really saying it's racist. I think it's very crude and certainly liable to cause offense(merely by racial association), but I'm not sure it's racist per se. Ignorant maybe. Foundations of racism maybe. I don't know. I'd love to know a little more about the why really, it makes little sense to me even as a pisstake. Then again, I'm not really into league football and stuff anyway.

[Jonnas]

If a black dude looks like a Kinder Egg like Balotelli's head does, I'll make fun of it. I'm not really qualified to say how racist it is, but...

 

I make fun of pale Brits a lot more. They burn so easily in the sun, they're called "steaks" here in Portugal. In my family, I've heard them being referred as "milk bottles" when they're pale and "piglets" when they go all pink from the burns (the fact that many of these tourists are plump doesn't help)

 

So, I really should be asking most of you how racist it is to make fun of your white appearance like this.

[Rummy]

If a black dude looks like a Kinder Egg like Balotelli's head does, I'll make fun of it. I'm not really qualified to say how racist it is, but...

 

I make fun of pale Brits a lot more. They burn so easily in the sun, they're called "steaks" here in Portugal. In my family, I've heard them being referred as "milk bottles" when they're pale and "piglets" when they go all pink from the burns (the fact that many of these tourists are plump doesn't help)

 

So, I really should be asking most of you how racist it is to make fun of your white appearance like this.

 

I find it personally quite offensive.

[MoogleViper]

I think it's more that they've just splattered some chocolate on his face, that's more of an insult. The Diouf kid had clearly put some effort into emulating his idol, that's more like fancy dress. But splattering a bit of chocalate on a baby's face and saying "look, a black guy" is a bit wrong in my opinion.

 

If a black dude looks like a Kinder Egg like Balotelli's head does, I'll make fun of it. I'm not really qualified to say how racist it is, but...

 

I make fun of pale Brits a lot more. They burn so easily in the sun, they're called "steaks" here in Portugal. In my family, I've heard them being referred as "milk bottles" when they're pale and "piglets" when they go all pink from the burns (the fact that many of these tourists are plump doesn't help)

 

So, I really should be asking most of you how racist it is to make fun of your white appearance like this.

 

First a fagoot, now a racist. You just keep getting worse.

[Jonnas]

Yeah, I figured. That's what happens when most of our contact with Brits is made in Algarve. The Bifes/Steaks thing got pretty widespread, too, and it refers exclusively to British people.

[Beast]

I've been looking for this thread. Something funny happened today...

 

A customer asked me for help with a few shoes and, of course, I did my best but then she said "Wow, you have wonderful, chocolate skin", which made me laugh a little and I thanked her. She looked at me and then said "You're beautiful, you know..." and then started to hold my hand and stroke my arm! She then said how my skin felt soft and then she explained that she has a mixed race son and how she likes Jamaicans and how she can speak Patois and stuff. She asked me questions about me and my family and she said "Every family should have a mixed race child like you".

 

It was nice and she was friendly but at the same time, I had a Silence of the Lambs moment! haha.

[Fierce_LiNk]

I've been looking for this thread. Something funny happened today...

 

A customer asked me for help with a few shoes and, of course, I did my best but then she said "Wow, you have wonderful, chocolate skin", which made me laugh a little and I thanked her. She looked at me and then said "You're beautiful, you know..." and then started to hold my hand and stroke my arm! She then said how my skin felt soft and then she explained that she has a mixed race son and how she likes Jamaicans and how she can speak Patois and stuff. She asked me questions about me and my family and she said "Every family should have a mixed race child like you".

 

It was nice and she was friendly but at the same time, I had a Silence of the Lambs moment! haha.

 

That's sweet.

 

On the other end of the scale:

 

A teenager took a whiteboard pen and said he was drawing portraits for everyone. When it came to me, I received an image of a corner shop.

 

[Rummy]

I've been looking for this thread. Something funny happened today...

 

A customer asked me for help with a few shoes and, of course, I did my best but then she said "Wow, you have wonderful, chocolate skin", which made me laugh a little and I thanked her. She looked at me and then said "You're beautiful, you know..." and then started to hold my hand and stroke my arm! She then said how my skin felt soft and then she explained that she has a mixed race son and how she likes Jamaicans and how she can speak Patois and stuff. She asked me questions about me and my family and she said "Every family should have a mixed race child like you".

 

It was nice and she was friendly but at the same time, I had a Silence of the Lambs moment! haha.

 

Love and relationships thread is over there mate :p Seriously, woman sounds a bit mental!

 

I did get asked at work the other day 'Why are you so dark!?' which would normally be quite inappropriate, but actually totally wasn't.

 

 

(it wasn't because i went away for weekend, spent much in sun, and she's our resident african queen anyhow)

[Beast]

Sorry to bump this thread but I actually didn't know where else to put this as I would've put it in the Bad Stuff thread but then I remembered there being a thread about racism and since this post really is on the topic of that, I thought I'd bring it up.

 

This week, I have faced quite a bit of racism. More than I ever thought I'd face.

 

My first couple of experiences were from customers telling me to go back to my own country (even though my family's bloodlines go back in England to 1700s so stfu), told me to stop stealing their jobs (an elderly woman said this and I just said "Okay but don't you worry, your job of Countdown Watcher and Motormouth is still safe") and I even got told I'd be kicked out of England. Still, that's shit I could take and just silly comments.

 

But the one I'm about to tell you right now actually fucked with me for a few days and caused a right upset between my friends. For the relevance of the story, my friends are white and I'm the only mixed race one. For the story's sake, the woman is E, the two guys are T and M and the racist guy is R and Randomer is his friend:

 

So on the night of my birthday and I was on the Xbox talking to my friends when Randomer who knew R came on. My friends all sang happy birthday and R ( started singing "Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you, you look like a monk--" and M interrupted him by being loud and said "Don't!" and he didn't. Anyway, it was getting late so I said I was going to bed and said goodnight and that was that for me. Anyway, I wake up to a lot of texts from three of my friends asking if I was okay. I said of course I was fine, I thought nothing of it because I didn't know anything.

 

So skip to the night time and I turn on my Xbox and join the party, all of my friends are telling R how they find him disgusting and sick and twisted. I said "Woah! What's going on here?" and at first, they all fell silent and said "Nothing, we're okay".

"Well, I think it's safe to say that everything isn't because I join a party and it's gone from screaming to calm in 1 second. Is it about me?"

 

They all hesitated but one of my friends started to cry and E told me that Randomer started talking about leaving the EU and he said, what she described to be, "the most horrific tirade of hate I've ever known" and it scared her. They won't tell me all of it but they said he said "I'm glad we're out of the EU so all the p**is and ni****s can go back home where they belong. Better yet, we should have a law where we can line up all of the black people and shoot them in the face. All black people have AIDs anyway so ridding them would make the world a better place".

 

(Obviously I don't think people who voted Leave are racists as I was going to vote Leave myself so please do not think this but that was the subject they were talking about...)

 

So I wasn't entirely sure why they were all arguing amongst themselves and I pointed that out and said "He's a disgusting twat, obviously, but why are you arguing with each other?"

She then said "Because R laughed at it and it wasn't an awkward laugh either, he genuinely found it funny. Everybody has had a go at him but I got deeply upset and offended and said "How dare you be friends with us and then talk and laugh at disgusting comments like that! If Darren heard you, he would be heart-broken!". I was just so upset and outraged that he could treat you like this"

 

So I had words with R and I said "Is this true?" and he admitted to agreeing with him about the subject. I said "Wow...that's actually fucked right up" and the more I thought of it, the more sick I felt. I found out a couple of weeks ago that he used to hang around a group of racists who beat up people of different skin colour but apparently he stopped talking to them. I said "You didn't just hang around with them racists, did you? You used to do it yourself..." and he admitted to doing it a couple of times.

 

I said "I'm actually disgusted right now. Do you know that things like that are mortifying? There are people out there who have to face little ignorant cunts like you every single day and you dare sit there and mock me and pretend to be my friend? How the fuck dare you! It's vile! It's fucking sick! I have no idea who you are and that's terrifying to me and the fact I've just found out you hang around with violent, racist thugs who go out of their way to beat up black and Asian people makes me want to vomit!". He put on this huge sob story nobody fell for.

 

I said "How would you like it if you were in a party with me and my black friends and I said I want to shoot all white people in the face? Doesn't sound nice, does it? And guess what, I'D be called the terrorist or the extremist for saying shit like that. It's racist people like you that's wrong with the world, dude, and it's people like you that should be called those words."

 

T is a great friend with a kind heart and R put on a fake act that nobody but him fell for. He said he was a changed man and whatnot. So I said "Okay, if you want to talk to me again, delete your racist friends from your life" and he said he'd do it. He did delete them from everything apparently and out of nowhere, he gets a text saying his racist friend is threatening to kill himself. So I said "Fucking bullshitter. I'm done with you, you absolute waster. Have a nice, racist life" and my friends did the same thing.

 

We were all talking about it yesterday and we were all saying how it felt so weird because we all thought we knew him and it turned out he was so hateful. It's really rattled me a lot though but it's also because I sort of went through some other racist thing with my best friend's sister (boyfriend has a huge part to play in that and it's too much to get into now).

 

Anyway, sorry for the long-winded story but I just wanted to tell someone else and you guys are close to me. I haven't even told my Dad because he would get so upset and angry and I don't want him to be hurt.

 

It's incredibly heart-breaking that it's 2016 and shit like this is still happening!

[Nolan]

Really sorry you went through that. It's funny just how close we can get to people we've never really met before and be great friends with them and not know them at all.

 

I work in a construction trade that's predominantly white and while they can all hold their opinions well enough to not get in trouble, a large majority are quite racist towards blacks. Most are outright hateful of any Muslims. (Yay for US middle eastern policies). It's a sad state and relatively representative of the US blue collar workforce. They are open to change only insofar as not getting themselves in trouble.

[Londragon]

Sorry you had to go through all that @Animal. I tell myself its the minority of people, but they do really make me question the future of the UK. My wife, being Chinese, suffered a few times in the UK, always verbal, but every time intimidatingly scary and hateful, and all because of deep seated ignorance. When I hear UK politicians talking about the successful nature of Britain's multicultural society I sincerely question it, as I saw a different view of it. After moving to a predominantly Chinese speaking country (Taiwan) I see a far better and more peaceful integration of Aboriginal Taiwanese, Han Chinese, Hakkanese, White ex-Pats, Thai, Filipino, Muslim, Christian, (enter religion or race here). Everybody just mixes and gets on with it.

[Dannyboy-the-Dane]

Jesus, that's crazy, Animal. Glad he's out of your lives. I'm sorry you had to experience that; hell, I'm infuriated that racism is blossoming so much these days - I thought we were moving in the right direction.

[Falcon_BlizZACK]

As for increased racism post-Brexit... The rhetoric was bubbling in the pot ever since the 'campaign' against "political correctness" - when people were being offended for not having the right to offend people (even though they did).

 

In 2016, I'm fed up with trying to "convince" people not to be racist. I personally see racists as cowards - people who can't face their fears. And people have a right to be this.

 

I find the older I get, the more purposefully aloof I am to people who are not in my circle.

 

(A small point for people to realise about this thread title is that we are not different races - I always flinch when people use it).

[Nolan]

 

(A small point for people to realise about this thread title is that we are not different races - I always flinch when people use it).

 

True that. We're all the human race, but humans seem to like to put things in neat little boxes and categories and for some reason develop the us vs them mentality while we're at it.

 

On a similar note of wrong terms. African American. A wholly widespread and often incorrect term to refer to black Americans (whom should just be called Americans imo and not identified by their skin). I've been chastised before for calling someone black instead of African American.

 

Le sigh.

[MoogleViper]

My girlfriend is black (mixed race, black and white) and I've noticed racism when walking down the street with her, from both black and white people (admittedly only men).

 

From white men it's always been a shout from a car as they drive passed.

 

From black men we often get dirty looks as we walk by holding hands (I used to have this with my previous girlfriend, Arabic, from middle eastern men). For me it seems like they're directing the dirty looks at me, but my gf thinks they're at her. Can't remember her exact reasoning but something to do with hownkixed race/light skinned black women are viewed by black men.

 

Not really sure what the point of my post is, just thought I'd throw out my experiences.

 

On a similar note of wrong terms. African American. A wholly widespread and often incorrect term to refer to black Americans (whom should just be called Americans imo and not identified by their skin). I've been chastised before for calling someone black instead of African American.

 

In this country you have to refer to black people as British African American.

[bob]

I love it when Americans refer to Africans as African American.

[Nolan]

 

 

 

In this country you have to refer to black people as British African American.

That makes absolutely no sense. To me it would only make sense if the person was literally of citizenship in 3 countries, one of which being within Africa. But eh what do I know.

I love it when Americans refer to Africans as African American.

Haven't witnessed that myself, but I'm sure it happens.

[Falcon_BlizZACK]

I've been chastised before for calling someone black instead of African American.

 

Le sigh.

 

This is why a f---ing hate people - there always an over-sensitive numpty getting anal about things.

 

My girlfriend is black (mixed race, black and white) and I've noticed racism when walking down the street with her, from both black and white people (admittedly only men).

 

From white men it's always been a shout from a car as they drive passed.

 

From black men we often get dirty looks as we walk by holding hands (I used to have this with my previous girlfriend, Arabic, from middle eastern men). For me it seems like they're directing the dirty looks at me, but my gf thinks they're at her. Can't remember her exact reasoning but something to do with hownkixed race/light skinned black women are viewed by black men.

 

 

I wouldn't read too much into things and I don't think its healthy to believe in generic reasoning ie "Black men think of mixed-race women like this...".

 

Me and my gf get stares even here in London - for those that don't know I am a brutish Black Brit* and my gf is a small typical scandi, very blonde and green eyes. Shes short and I am tall... theres just so many reasons why people would stare - sometimes its annoying so Ive spoken out at times, most don't seem to be aware.

 

If people are hurling abuse at you though, that shit needs to be reported.

 

(* In the past on forums, I haven't usually been up for disclosing my ethnicity because I notice a slight 'distance' that it sometimes creates - DGAF now though)

[bob]

 

(* In the past on forums, I haven't usually been up for disclosing my ethnicity because I notice a slight 'distance' that it sometimes creates - DGAF now though)

 

I feel like I knew that already...

 

...maybe it was the photo you posted in the User Photos thread.

[Falcon_BlizZACK]

I feel like I knew that already...

 

...maybe it was the photo you posted in the User Photos thread.

 

EDIT: You mean this?

 

Edited July 1, 2016 by King_V

[bob]

That's the one.