If you are white, racism is too easily ignored and forgiven, regarded as of burning concern only to the ethnic minorities, and therefore of relatively marginal significance.
Interpretation
Racism is often overlooked by those who are not affected by it, making it seem less important.
In this quote, Martin Jacques highlights the disconnect between racial privilege and the lived experiences of ethnic minorities. He emphasizes that individuals who are not racially marginalized may easily become indifferent to the issues of racism, viewing them as concerns that do not directly affect their lives, which leads to a trivialization of profound societal injustices.
In practice
In a discussion about social justice at a community event.
The era when the United States was the dominant global power is steadily coming to an end, and it must find a way of acknowledging this and framing its ambitions and interests accordingly. Instead of claiming the right to continuing primacy in east Asia, for example, it should seek to share that primacy with China.
For 200 years, the West has been so dominant in the world that it's not really needed to understand other cultures, other civilizations. Because, at the end of the day, it could, if necessary by force, get its own way.
We still insist, by and large, in thinking that we can understand China by simply drawing on Western experience, looking at it through Western eyes, using Western concepts. If you want to know why we unerringly seem to get China wrong... this is the reason.
Just six years into the 21st century, one can say this is not shaping up to be anything like an American century. Rather, the U.S. seems much more likely to be faced with a very different kind of future: how to manage its own imperial decline.
While the West has enjoyed overwhelming global power, its moral preachings have been legitimised, and in effect enforced, by that power. But as that power begins to ebb, then the morality of its actions will be the subject of growing scrutiny and challenge.
For 200 years, the dominant powers have also been the colonial powers: the European countries, the U.S. and Japan. They have never been required to pay their dues for what they did to those whom they possessed and treated with contempt.
Any time I claimed to be white, that would be unacceptable. It just doesn't make sense in people's minds. If I'm white, how can I walk through a department store and still have people scared that I'm going to rob them? Which, that can still happen.
The paradox of vengefulness is that it makes men dependent upon those who have harmed them, believing that their release from pain will come only when their tormentors suffer.
It is not man who is the enemy of the human species. It is the irrational; it is the spiritual when it is divorced from the material; from the lesson in one beating heart or one bleeding vein.
It takes billions of years to create a human being. And it takes only a few seconds to die.
When you are aware of space, you are not really aware of anything, except awareness itself - the inner space of consciousness. Through you, the universe is becoming aware of itself! Just as space enables all things to exist and just as without silence there could be no sound, you would not exist without the vital formless dimension that is the essence of who you are.
Imagination magnifies small objects with fantastic exaggeration until they fill our soul, and with bold insolence cuts down great things to its own size, as when speaking of God.
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