honorentheos wrote:If that were my argument I might feel quite devastated by that rebuttal. Shame, really.
Your argument is that condemning racist mocking as racist collapses important distinctions between racist acts that you describe as not-racist via an idiosyncratic definition of racist and racist acts you think are more serious. This collapse robs us of the the rhetorical ability to address more serious acts of racism. I merely applied that to another form of racism that isn't as severe as some other kinds of racism. Don't fret, though, as what the Convington teens did is somewhat worse than telling racist jokes.
Since this argument is quite clearly false on its face, but it is unclear which faulty assumption you are choosing to base it on, it's hard to point out the specific flaw in your reasoning.
Again, if you want to rest your exoneration of the Convington teens on the idea that racial taunts of a Native American aren't that big of a deal, then understand that not everyone agrees with you. I think that's bad. Even lots of defenders of them are off in Shades-esque la-la land where the teens were actually being totes respectful and further video helps clarify their respectful, rather than offensive behavior.
What's weird to me is you started out by complaining of comparing their behavior to doing a bojangles mocking to a black person, but your subsequent reasoning has 100% defended that just the same. You've decided what matters here is the intent to express racial contempt, so you've taken off the table a great deal of racist behavior. And if someone were to call you an Indian Giver for doing that, that'd be fine, because people generally didn't use the phrase to express racial contempt.