These Should Not Require Saying

[marjaerwin]

1. Anti-immigrant laws are anti-human.

2. Anti-immigrant laws are also racist.

3. Therefore anti-immigrant slurs are racial slurs.

4. And, in any case, calling people "illegals," "defectives," "undesirables," or "Untermenschen" is dehumanizing and paves the way for murder.

(I think that's why the anti-immigrant movement uses those terms; many of them want murder, many of them want genocide. Certainly all too many of them are members of neo-Nazi organizations or have close ties with such.)

Comments

ummm....

[mike agorizmus gogulski (from livejournal.com)]

I'm totally with you on 1, 2 and 4, Marja, but 3 is bogus.

Your logic equates to:

A nickel is a coin

A nickel is made of silver

Therefore, coins are made of silver.

Apparently these things DO require saying, but they should not.

[marjaerwin]

It does require a wide definition of "racial slur." I don't think the narrower definitions - such as those which restrict "racism" to systems of domination on the basis of race per se, when race per se does not exist - and restrict "racial slur" to the same can't-really-exist category - make much sense.

It does require the assumption that any anti-immigrant movement supports anti-immigrant practices which are as racist as anti-immigrant laws.

But the anti-immigrant movement uses the it's-not-a-narrowly-construed-racial-slur argument to avoid criticism for being deeply racist and anti-human.

I am still pissed because, last July, while I was preparing for a trip, I ran into one of the local papers which put one of those slurs in the headline of the lead article. But people refuse to admit the paper is racist.

[mike agorizmus gogulski (from livejournal.com)]

I agree completely that anti-immigrant slurs are racial slurs. I'm just pointing out that the logic of "1, 2, therefore 3" is incorrect. That doesn't mean 3 without the "therefore" is incorrect.

Sorry for being overly pedantic.