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?
Words are words.
But there’re differences between the social structures, economic level and common cultures of some countries when compared to others.
And some of these aspects in some of these countries are worse than in others and they are expected to become better in the future, which implies there is a progression going on and different countries are in different points in this progression path.