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Comment by jacalata | Hacker News Reader

If you want to look for examples closer to home, try reading about the Mapucho.

Mapuches you mean?

Well, living in Chile, I've learnt that there's no racism here BUT:

-There's classism, a lot. Both from the lower classes to the upper and vice versa. There's also a lot of anger left from the various dictatorships that ruled in the eighties.

-In some countries, here included, there's also big prejudice against native cultures like the Mapuches. "They're all lazy drunkards".

These problems mostly stem from colonial times, where the Spanish didn't respect native culture and since the Europeans were seen as the "civilized, more advanced people", the aristocrats here did everything to imitate their lifestyle.

See also: mestizaje.

Sounds like you're describing racism to me?

To add (and replying to rco8786): I think this is not racism. Because ethnicity is not race, and almost everybody by now through mestizaje has native blood. The early colonial period might have a racist component with "sistema de castas" (Spaniard born in America = Criollo, Spaniard with Native = Mestizo, Spaniard with African slave = Mulato, so on).

But now race doesn't even matter because we are all almost the same genetically (it just happens that at least in Chile, the fair-haired blue-eyed people are the richest, but hate here is about wealth and politics rather than race itself).

Americans don't use the word "racism" literally. What would that even mean, unless we all walked around with DNA testing kits? Anything involving culture, ethnicity, national origin, any kind of xenophobia can be consider 'racism'.

Genetically, "races" don't exist; discrimination based on what you want to call ethnicity is exactly the problem

Different indigenous people can share almost the same blood but have vastly different ethnicities, because ethnicity is cultural. Check your history.

I'm a little unclear on what you are trying to say. Your first clause rephrases part of what I said.

Is it ok to prejudicially discriminate against someone because of your opinion of their culture?

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