Out of Context #1: A study

This is a random comment to a post (well not really that random, but still fairly random...) from a fairly well known blog in the blogbloggybog world (no idea, just made that shit up, deal with it). It is only tangentially connected to the topic of the original post and provoked from a long chain of back and forth. An association chain in essence.

I present this here as Out-of-Context #1. It is an experiment in which I would hope (unlikely as it is given the popularity of this blog) to see what people 'think' the context is or just what they think in general about this lifted excerpt from a random place on the Internet.(No fair googling either.)

This is supposed to be a reply to Antinous but for whatever reason the reply button is missing from any comments at this level in the thread (just a fluke or more disqus BS?)

I like watermelon! And Palestine is still Fried Chicken (because it sure as hell isn't a nation-state).

The racism is all in the context. As for 'rice burners' I would have to say that in this context it is not racist. Now when some Harley rider sneers at you and says 'nice rice burner' it could be construed as racist but you would still have to construe that. It's not as if anybody said it like 'fuckin, *****, ***, *****-***, rice burner' where the asterisks represent actual racist terms.

More to the point, where you say 'watermelon' should be conflated as a racist remark (against black people?) I would have to say 'cheese and wine' should be conflated as a homophobic remark. Do you see how silly it is to call out words that actually are things that exist in their own right, are not inherently racist and are only contextually connected to X-ism.

In contrast saying that 'all black people like watermelon' IS racist because it is used in a stereotypical or prejudicial context; not because watermelon is involved.

4 months ago in reply to                            3 Likes

Also, I find it odd that blogger's infrastructure thinks that the words "blog" and "blogger" are both misspelled.