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?
No by definition: races are not defined or related to countries’ borders. It might be chauvinistic, but not racist.
And in many situations it is possible to define the objective criterium of being “civilized”.
While it’s true that races aren’t defined by borders (if we even want to entertain the notion of races actually existing), the wrong meaning might absolutely be the intended one.
There are no different races in humans. The sooner we stop promoting this unscientific lie, the better.