Caution: Discourse concerning Racism ITT.

[Ragnar4]

Today for work I took a survey concerning my "Diversity awareness". During the test, it got me thinking: Is it possible that the questions contained within this survey are just as racist as cultural hegemony.

Some of the questions were very close to:

1) During interoffice meetings I process all of my decisions through a filter which involves diversity and our potential impacts upon interoffice and extraoffice diversity.
(sometimes, never, every once in a while, ldo all the time)

2) I am willing to help someone diverse from me "get ahead" in the work place
(hah!, no, kinda, maybe, sure)

3) I understand that there are several types of diversity and can name at least 15 of them, along with describe why diversity is such a large impact to our company

(15? You sure?, Yes!, No, I wear a white robe on weekends and light crosses on fire)

*it is entirely possible that some portion of these questions were imbellished to increase humor.

--I really want that 2nd question to sink in. It's asking me if I'd go out of my way to help someone to get ahead in the workplace *because* he's culturally diverse from me. (I'm not even gonna bust out the: wait a fucking minute, I'm white, is he ever gonna help me? argument)

While i am 100% willing to argue that Cultural Hegemony is in fact about the most racist thing ever, I've had a belief concerning racism for a very long time. Racism is nothing more than borderism. You're on the other side of the border, I'm smarter than you because I'm on this side, you're dumber than me because you're on that side. You don't know how good we've got it over here, because you're over there. Poor you, you don't understand, but I know how you feel over there, I can help you. Instead of seeing it as racism, you see it as a sort of territoriality.

When focusing racism through this potential filter we see that by compartmentalizing humans through the guise of "celebration of ones own culture", that someone would draw a border around themselves due to their own race, creed, age, monetary income blah blah blah)

Celebration of culture is the exact opposite on the line spectrum from Cultural hegemony, but both seem to impact us by increasing racism either actively (Hegemony) or Passively (Territoriality).

What really bugs me, is that big business, as of right now, panders towards the celebration of culture to increase their own bottom line. "Buy this because your black, enroll in this because you're a mexican, Chinese? Have we got the account for you!"

So then it hit me:

Cliffsnotes: Big business encourages racism in order to sell more shit. We haven't come any farther than we were 50 years ago, we just pretend to be a little bit more sophisticated about it.

[Ragnar4]

also, I figure that:

"LOL, we have a black president" seems to be the most natural counter to the conclusion.

I'm talking about big business here. Something that Governmental lazzies faire practices ensure that we'll try not to meddle in until it's nearly too late. Remember we're also talking about widely accepted practices here. Not under the rug idealism. Entire marketing campaigns are built around celebration of culture and exclusion.