>>This is sort of inverted racism<<
I don't think it's racism so much as classism. The upper classes have always looked down at those who engage in manual labor and menial labor, regardless of whether it's those in their own country or in others. It's worst in countries that have permanent upper classes and permanent lower classes.
Not quite so bad in the US because we tend to sort of go up and down classes between generations and even within generations.
But it's endemic in our chattering classes. James Carville called Paula Jones, Clinton's accuser, "trailer park trash" - said if you dragged a hundred dollar bill through a trailer park she's what you'd catch. And nobody around him batted an eye, which tells you that this is how they think of the lower classes, which she indisputably belonged to. This made her a fit object for their contempt.
There is something similar involved in laughing at countries with funny names, in my opinion a form of classism, not racism. Some countries (France, Germany) are higher up the social scale and Eastern European countries are lower down the social scale. France has great wine and painters and Germany great philosophers and composers and what did Estonia ever do, haw haw.
I believe that the reason Europeans (some, anyway) don't care about the Iraqi people isn't their color, which is white, and some even authentically pale white (not too many blue-eyed blonds, though), but because they are part of the Great Unwashed.
Did you ever notice that before the Iron Curtain fell, we saved all the "better" countries, the ones whose people were socially acceptable, and let the Soviets have the ones whose people were not socially acceptable? Coincidence?
I admit to being a bit sensitive about this. I am part Croatian, and my German-Irish grandmother always said my Croatian grandfather was Austrian, when she liked him (Croatia was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire when his parents emigrated), and she called him a hunky when she didn't like him. ("Hunky" is a derogatory term for Eastern Europeans, who were persona non grata for many years in the US. Poles are also looked down on. People still tell Polish jokes, the butt of the joke being a "dumb Polack.") |
