The OP is probably being down voted for the racist dogwhistle in their comment.
“Renoux indicates that Japanese media, magazines in particular, often depict Paris as a place where most people on the street look like "stick-thin" models and most women dress in high fashion brands such as Louis Vuitton.”
Your personal biases made you assume the previous commenter strictly implied race/color.
Was what OP said, so I think it’s reasonable to assume they weren’t talking about size.
By the way, why do you assume bsaul read the article then?
(I'm not saying bsaul didn't, but you are assuming bsaul did and ivanbakel didn't read the article.)
What would you "expect" the French to look like, that they do not look like in Paris (while cities in Europe are all much more non-white than the countryside, which for the commenter does not have the same problem)? This is a dogwhistle.
More to the point - dogwhistles are meant to give subtexts with plausible deniability. That you can find an alternative meaning for them is precisely their intent. It is not a compelling argument to claim that the original commenter was, in fact, innocent - you should instead be able to absolve them beyond all doubt.
And clearly that isn't possible here.
The fact that other people immediate jumped to "melting pots" and "cultural erasure" doesn't indicate that that's what the original comment was referring to.
> More to the point - dogwhistles are meant to give subtexts with plausible deniability. That you can find an alternative meaning for them is precisely their intent.
Human communication is difficult. The original comment wasn't specific and so it acted as a rorschach test. It isn't possible to know what the original poster meant without asking.
> It is not a compelling argument to claim that the original commenter was, in fact, innocent - you should instead be able to absolve them beyond all doubt.
No. It isn't possible to "absolve someone of all doubt" when the accusation is "vague racist dog whistle". You have to deal with uncertainty in these situations and your inability to do that, to understand that the meaning of a sentence as intended by the author is almost always partially undefined and open to interpretation, is seriously disturbing.
The linked article says:
> Renoux indicates that Japanese media, magazines in particular, often depict Paris as a place where most people on the street look like "stick-thin" models and most women dress in high fashion brands such as Louis Vuitton.
So when OP said he wasn’t talking about size, presumably in reference to that, I read it as a dog whistle too. Especially given the whole “great replacement” conspiracy out there and Trump’s “Paris isn’t Paris anymore.” The whole point of a dog whistle is plausible deniability though, so who knows for sure.
Interesting. I have not been to Europe so did not have that context, but thank you very much for explaining.
It could be referring to race, but the fact that you "can't imagine" what else it could refer to says a lot about you and nothing at all about the original poster.
The very Wikipedia article we happen to be discussing contains "...Renoux indicates that Japanese media, magazines in particular, often depict Paris as a place where most people on the street look like "stick-thin" models and most women dress in high fashion brands such as Louis Vuitton...".
Having been to Paris myself, all of these are true.
Are you familiar with the concept of confirmation bias? Look hard enough for something and you'll see it ... whether it's there or not.
Therefore, there is some sort of signal that we're picking up on. That signal, almost by definition, is the aforementioned dogwhistle.
It isn't quite the right tone to not be somewhat obvious. Since it is intentional, it doesn't matter "how bad" it was: It's the conscious attempt to insult/denigrate/hurt that itself becomes the problem.
At the point where you're professing sadness for Paris' dead culture in reference to the immigrant population, it's no longer a dogwhistle. It's just blatantly obvious standard-issue racism.
Also most of the people in the Banlieus are third-generation French. Thinking of them as "non-Europeans" is another big fat racist standard. And also part of the reason these people are having a difficult time succeeding in France.
>It's just blatantly obvious standard-issue racism.
No, it isn't. There have been entire neighborhoods in e.g. Harlem that have been gentrified out of their cultural heritage. Is lamenting that fact racist? I for one think it's sad, that a culture that was distinctly black is now gone forever - and it's not racist to say this. Now, Harlem is likely a bad example because it's a place in America, where we are supposed to be a melting pot and this kind of thing happens all the time. I don't have enough experience in Europe to give a more pertinent example, but again I still don't think it's at all bad to lament the fact that there's been some cultural turnover - especially when it happens on a very short timeline. That seems perfectly normal.
There is nothing racist in saying that importing vast numbers of people from a different culture into another will radically change the culture native to that area. Quite the contrary, it's absolute fantasy to try and pretend it does not.
I understand that the concept may be completely foreign to someone who has grown up in modern America, but it's a rising issue amongst Europeans to the extent that the EU has created a position titled "VP for Protecting Our European Way of Life" in the midst of Europeans getting continually more aggrieved over the cultural changes happening with mass migration and worse - the cultural changes expected of them to facilitate that mass migration.
If we can't get past the hand-wringing and proclamations of "racist!" every time someone infers anything remotely negative about immigration, especially mass migration as Europe has encountered, then I can guarantee you there are very dark times ahead.
There are positives and negatives to migration, to bang the drums happily when discussing the positives and then sticking one's fingers in one's ears, closing one's eyes and lashing out when the negatives are brought up is a very dangerous game to play, and that is on any topic, not constrained to migration.
You do not need to be from Japan to feel that way when visiting Paris either. And I do not see anything wrong with pointing that out.