Image impact

[asterroc]

Having a very interesting conversation with Foxtrot comparing a couple of images. Rather than recreating the discussion here, I'll post the two images and see what y'all think of them.



Edit: Some people weren't seeing the proper image on the left before. I replaced it with a different version of the image, should work now.

Comments

[sammka.livejournal.com]

1) I still don't think that your father could actually be called racist in the proper sense unless he's biased against Germans who, say, were living in America already in 1930. Or even people whose parents moved to America afterward, and who were raised American and are culturally American. Otherwise I would call it a bias against the people living in the country of Germany, or maybe are culturally German.

Then again there was also a certain kind of anti-German racism in Europe that was different. After WWII, Czechoslovakia expelled most ethnic Germans from the country (as did a number of other countries), and in the wake of the war there was widespread violence against Czechs who had German or Austrian surnames. This, as far as I can tell, never quite existed in the same way in America. We honestly can't even tell the difference, visually, between Germans and non-Germans, nor are we even that good at telling German surnames from Dutch. We probably had prejudice against German speakers, though. People with "Aryan" features are just as likely, or more, to be Norse or Swedish or Swiss (and there are plenty of dark-haired Germans). I guess it's almost as hard for me to conceive of American racism against Germans as it is for me to conceive of American racism against Nigerians - we wouldn't know the difference between a Nigerian and any other North African.

2) I think the same source claimed Jews weren't "white" until a while into the 20th Century, but are now (except, of course, for sephardic Jews, who look African or Arabic). Arabs used to be considered "caucasian" but clearly are not currently considered "white." They seem to have turned into a racial category in people's minds.

[seekingferret.livejournal.com]

I don't think it's particularly useful to distinguish between racism and other forms of bigotry. When you qualify by saying that bias against Germans in Germany isn't racist, you make it sound like it's not as bad as racism because it's only xenophobic.

[sammka.livejournal.com]

I do think that racism is in fact worse. For one thing, Germans do in fact share a culture, and for another, we were in fact at war with Germany, so it's a little bit hard for there not to be some anti-German sentiment. I don't think that the kind of anti-German xenophobia common in the US during WWII was as essentializing, for example. They focused on German culture rather than Germans' natures. And to be fair, it's not bigoted to say that German culture was really fucked up during the Third Reich.

Second, look at the effects: during WWII, America rounded up and imprisoned every ethnically Japanese person (and, I think, many other Asians) in America, including citizens whose families had been living in the US for generations. They didn't round up and imprison Herbert Hoover, or any other ethnic Germans in the US. The prejudice against Japanese was completely different because it had to do with race: people were more likely to think that Japanese were somehow fundamentally, naturally different, and more likely to claim that they just "couldn't tell" the difference among Japanese people in some fundamental way (I mean, just think how silly it is to imprison Japanese people who were born here because, among other things, people couldn't tell the difference between them and newly-landed spies).

It's also different because the xenophobia against Germans was completely tied to the war: people were actually quite pro-German until WWI, and in the inter-war period they were also relatively pro-German; people in the US were praising Hitler's leadership almost right until we declared war on Germany. We elected an ethnically German president in 1928. Nobody made a big deal out of the fact that he was German. It basically didn't matter in any way. After WWII, American hostility to Germans lingered for maybe a few decades and has since almost completely evaporated except for a few tasteless jokes. In terms of the scale of social oppression that American anti-German sentiment caused, it's just nowhere near the kinds of pervasive, centuries-long discrimination based on physical features that I'd refer to as "racism."