IceForce said:
So okay, why is throwing a banana at someone considered a racist act?
It doesn't seem like you read the whole article. Towards the end of the article you start getting some info about a support movement using the hashtag #weareallmonkeys. People of darker skin are commonly associated with monkeys by racists. In other words, the article already told you why it's considered racist. You also get some brief mention on how common this form of racism, let alone explicit racism, can get in that environment, so we know enough to believe he wasn't just throwing something for the heck of it.
Maybe you did just missed the implication, I don't know. Perhaps, as others have said, this connection is disappearing from public consciousness and making it harder to recognize racism in this kind of form. Or maybe your personal hangups on race and society's focus on it and your need to express on that overtook your ability to notice this.
JoJo said:
I'm surprised so many people here don't know about the banana association, maybe it's more of the European thing than I thought. Could be seen as a good sign, that racist memes are beginning to drop out of the public consciousness, or equally perhaps we're becoming lax now racism has been 'solved'.
Honestly, when I see this lack of association from people, I feel like it shows people are getting less good at critical thinking. To be fair, I knew about the banana association vaguely. However, and I don't say this to brag, I have seen similar situations, both racist and not racist, in which I was able to make the connection without knowing about the historical use of said term or action. Maybe that's just some form of subconscious racism under the surface that I don't realize I have and it's making it easier. Honestly, I think it's more likely that I'm just used to a certain type of association logic due to the people I hang out with being generally good at it and thus we reinforce each other's competency at it.
Again, not to brag, we all have our faults. I just find it a little shocking people can't make the connection; you don't have to grow up in the heydays of racism to see it. As long as you know what racism is, you can connect the dots. Plus, there's what I said earlier about how the article implies why it's racist. It's probably me just being cynical especially since I have missed more obvious things. It's the context and constant political climate currently around this that makes it hard for me to believe, I guess.
JoJo said:
Mild racism? That's a bit of a stretch, IceForce probably just got the details mixed up, unlike the BBC article on this the Huffington post doesn't explicitly mention that it was two different players other than changing names at one point so it's easy to see how someone skim reading it would miss that.
The Huffington Post isn't a good source honestly. I used to read it and just gave up on it after a while. It feels very much like a mix between popular, social media blogger reporting, the kind prone to errors and superficiality, and real reporting and it just doesn't work. The people there often clickbait and they have supported pseudoscience on multiple occasions. It's good if you want to know about something that happened, but not good for any real analysis or detail beyond the superficial or a political bandwagon that spread via a viral meme or something. That's not saying much. I don't mind where they lean politically, but the way they express it makes it hard to tolerate. It's still better than a scandal tabloid or something I suppose.