Monday, February 4, 2008

When political correctness becomes prejudice and racist

We've had another so called honor killing in Sweden. A young girl was killed by two of her male relatives.

It angers me that idiots like that exist. And it angers me that Sweden is so useless in dealing with these kind of issues.

In Sweden, where everything is supposed to be politically correct, we sometimes shoot ourselves in the foot. In the urge to give people the right to their own culture, we instead become prejudice and racist. And we leave women that are victims to violence in the name of honor, to fend for themselves. They are put in another category than women born as Swedes.

Examples of how political correctness becomes racism:

1. The head master at a school decided that the kids were not allowed to wear Swedish football shirts, as it could offend people from other countries. Who is the one doing the offending? The head master of course, by assuming that people from other countries and/or cultures would have a problem with something like that. That is prejudice and racist to me.

2. Or the university class that said that they did not like calling themselves Swedes as that could offend and was excluding towards none Swedes. Calling yourself a Swede, or a woman, or a Northerner, or a student, or white is not a problem, if you ask me. That's one way we use to make sense of the world. The problems is rather what you do, say, think and how you act. That's were the problem in the exclusion process steps in.

3. Or, to get back to the subject, when Swedish politicians are assuming that honor violence and killing is a part of another culture and should therefore be more or less ignored.

The women being victims of this, would they say that it's a part of their culture, or rather that it's just a few people claiming that it is. Men that do not participate in this kind of behavior, would they say that it's a part of their culture, or rather that certain people just takes certain parts of the culture to the extreme, making it what it's not and never was.

Something needs to be done here.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Something is really wrong with the world when protecting delicate feelings becomes a higher priority than protecting precious lives.

Ellen R. Sheeley, Author
"Reclaiming Honor in Jordan"

Sandra said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Sandra said...

ERS, thanks for your comment. I checked out your book. Seems very interesting. WIll definitely read it. Looks like you've done good things on the subject.