Yours truly suddenly saw a pedestrian with a big home made sign on his back, taking part in a one person demonstration. The sign read something like, "Against M (the swedish conservative party) and racism!". Such nice demonstrations must be supported so I leaned out through the window and cheered loudly - heeeeya, nice one!
The reply from the taxi driver came fast as a shark,
-There´s no such thing as racism!
Caught by surprise I had to ask what he meant and he went on,
-I´m telling you man, racism doesn´t exist, only jealousy. Socialistic jealousy!
As you might understand this was a logical step a bit too heavy to follow and it didn´t become easier either. After some more q & a it was perfectly clear to us all that we had to deal with a logical mastermind here. It´s not easy to understand someone who can put racism against jealousy and then ask if a former student of mine (who served as an example in our discussion as one who definitely had racist ideas and was pretty outspoken about it) wasn´t a worse human being, compared to James Brown...
Whoaaa! James Brown suddenly got to serve as an example of a person who wasn´t a evil guy OR a racist. This made him a better person than my former student and it was obvious that being the best person alive was the goal here. Swedes in general were very highly ranked by our driver, only telling the truth, never expressing racist ideas... When I tried to tell him that I do think that I´ve heard some swedes say both racist and jealous things, it didn´t impress at all. Also tried to argue that you can be both a racist and a jealous person at the same time, that I didn´t see the versus deal between these two phenomenas.
Still, according to our lovely driver, racism didn´t exist. I wonder if he skipped all the history classes in school? Of course jealousy can be a reason to express racist ideas (even though I would say that fear of unknown ideas/rituals/behaviour would be a more common reason) but that doesn´t make these ideas any less racist, right? And you didn´t really get the feeling that he was debating on a semantic level either, he was just very convinced about this idea. Weird indeed.
Well, a taxi ride is always an opportunity to learn something new. This one will not be forgotten easily!
Guess what party he supported?
