An actual argument I recently saw:
Person B: “Any site which contains slurs against trans people in its sign up process is unreliable” (was referring to k!wifarms)
Person A: “Slurs aren’t considered bad in most countries”
Person B: “That doesn’t justify their usage. For example, conversion therapy isn’t considered bad or banned in most countries, that doesn’t mean conversion therapy is justified or good.”
Person A: “What are you talking about? Conversion therapy is banned in most countries”
Person B: “Shows a diagram showing that conversion therapy is only banned in a handful of countries”
Person A: “I mean in most civilized countries”
I’ve seen lots of other people refer to countries as civilized or uncivilized in similar contexts. Is this generally considered to be racist?
Context matters. Always. One person can use a word and it will be not racist, another can use the same term and it will be racist. You should ask the person what they define as “civilized”. Their reasoning is your answer.
The context was provided here and the comment was, frankly, uncivilized. Race isn’t directly involved but there’s a deep legacy of racist attitudes expressed in terms like “uncivilized savages” that this comment unfortunately treads near. Obi Wan Kenobi taking about blasters being uncivilized does not.
So I agree context matters, but I don’t care what they were thinking - It’s a badly chosen word for this situation. Does it make the person a racist? Not on its own. But it does make me wonder what kind of person makes this sort of slip in 2025. And if someone wants to go out of their way to defend this usage of the word, I REALLY wonder about THAT person. Racist? Who knows, but it’s very poor judgment.
Someone can say the word “negro” in a respectful tone with all the best intentions but yeah, they should still just plain find another way to say it.
Exactly! I’m sick of people being labelled as racist because they’ve said some keyword that someone has decided makes them racist, even when their intents and opinions are clearly not racist.
Saying it’s “uncivilised” to publicly beat someone to death because they <insert whatever>, cannot be racist, because you’re not concerned with “race” in any way. Going further and saying that a country that allows such practices is uncivilised is, again, inherently not racist, because the reason for calling them uncivilised has nothing to do with the “race” of the people involved.