From: "Alison Croggon" <[log in to unmask]>
>I don't want to get into any heated arguments or insults - but I can't
> understand why the racism isn't obvious. As I said, I don't know the
> context of the remark. It's racist because it implies that a
> "primitive" man is inalienably primitive: even if he adopts the
> manners and outward veneer cultivation of a white man, he will still
> be in his essential being a black man, a "cannibal", and thus
> inferior, primitive and inimical to "progress".
Um ... Are canniibals necessarily black? As far as I'm aware, the extremely rare documented instances of cannibalism tend to involve whites (the Andes plane crash) and the two paradigmatic examples of cannibalism, Sawney Bean and Sweeney Todd, are both Brits, one from outside Edinburgh and the other from London.
(Then there's Pasolini, with his Italian cannibals ... )
But this is breaking a butterfly upon a wheel ...
Robin
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