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namman siggins

We need to talk about race

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You can, however, change the definition of whiteness.

I'm not a trans-racial contrarian but dropping simplistic assertions into a nuanced subject isn't a great first impression.

This is something that some people are aware of more than others. I'm ethnically Jewish, so I'm mostly considered white. I've been in situations where people considered me non-white because of that part of the circumstance of my birth. It's always very uncomfortable when that happens since, uh, I'm white.

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So what is caucasian heritage, exactly?  This whole section got me thinking about a friend of mine from college.  He is from Spain, and what most people would consider to be a person of color, but he told me that he and people from his country consider themselves caucasian.  Another friend most would consider black based on his appearance, considers himself latino, and another who is white considers himself black (his father is black).  As mangela mentioned, for some reason that I've never been able to fully understand, there is often a distinction made between being Jewish and White.  What I find insidious about this is that many of the opinions are coming from the viewpoint that whatever heritage a particular group selects from an individual must be their heritage, regardless of that individual's circumstances.  I think the transgender comparison is apt in this regard, in that it is a conclusion arrived at by the individual regardless of what the group determines their gender to be, but ultimately making this comparison misses the point.  Cultural identities are the product of a particular understanding of a particular part of history at a particular time in history as Gormongous described.  Though practically speaking, the assumed rigidity of these identities takes the place of considering the individual's circumstances, and seems to suggest there is one "correct" understanding of heritage whose conclusions are unassailable.  Given this, instead of making hard and fast rules one way or the other, shouldn't we consider the malleability of these categorizations?  This is, I believe, where the problem lies.  The french person mentioned above transforming his identity into a southerner seems fine, but Rachel Dolezal assuming an identity as a means of redressing some perceived wrong at the expense of others isn't.  I don't think it's acceptable to say this practice is absolutely wrong or right, but you have to consider the situation in which it occurred, and what the results of that are.

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It seems like French/ Southern are cultural distinctions, whereas Caucasian/ non-Caucasian Heritage distinguishes ancestral lineage, and Person of Color/ Not Color is, at least to many people, an issue of skin color. 

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As mangela mentioned, for some reason that I've never been able to fully understand, there is often a distinction made between being Jewish and White.

This used to be a useful distinction. Until about the 60s or 70s, there was a strong argument to be made that Jewish people weren't white. Race is a socially constructed identity, and the mechanism that constructs that identity is racism. The same reasons that currently apply to talking about Islamophobia as a racial matter used to be true for anti-Semitism and race. Anti-Semitism isn't a solved problem, but the Holocaust forced the world to confront that racism and address it, which it did slowly (Jewish applicants to academic programs in America were still treated horrendously -- see Emory's history of anti-Semitism in their dental program http://mobile.nytimes.com/2012/10/07/education/emory-confronts-legacy-of-bias-against-jews-in-dental-school.html) but surely.

I recommend reading Racecraft, which builds on some theories of race that I think originated with Frantz Fanon, who wrote about race in France in the context of French Algerians. It provides a really interesting context for thinking about the construction of racial identities.

 

EDIT: I also think it's useful to point out here that caucasian and white are not interchangeable. Even on census forms, there's Hispanic (Caucasian) and Hispanic (Non-caucasian). Also, Dzokhar Tsarnaev is caucasian -- he's from the Caucasus, and the correlation there should be obvious -- but treated as non-white.

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You got me. So let's try this again, this time with more nuance- what is a person of color? 

So are you just here to pull a "gotcha!" on everybody or what.

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Maybe there is some theoretical unicorn case of a person who can change their racial identity, but with Dolezal I don't think you can ignore the privilege, evidenced by suing Howard for discriminating against her for "being white." She "turned off her blackness" when it behooved her. I'm disappointed that the VF person didn't seem to ask her if she still identified as black when suing on the grounds of being white.

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http://www.newrepublic.com/article/122843/constitutionally-slavery-indeed-national-institution

But whether or not the words appear in the text of the Constitution, they dominate its spirit. Slavery was instrumental to the economic well being of not only the states in which it was pervasive, but also in the North. As such, slavery profoundly altered the four months of Constitutional debate, both with respect to obvious issues, such as how slaves would be counted for apportionment, and some more indirect, such as how often would the census be taken, or how a president would be elected. By the time the Constitution was signed on September 17, 1787, slavery had indeed become a national institution.

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The distinction for me, between being transgender being a real thing and "transracial" not being one, is that gender exists outside of a cultural context. There are societies with any number of genders or gendered identities, but there are none where there are no genders at all or only one. The duality or multiplicity is fundamental to it. Conversely, race has no reality outside of its social and historical context. It only exists as a mixture of physical appearance, blood lineage, and cultural context, which is codified into a single "thing" by implicit ingroup/outgroup dynamics. Racial identities have appeared, disappeared, changed throughout history, so they're very particular to a person or group's own experiences. They can't be manufactured or redacted, so to style yourself as another race from the one in which you are born and raised is basically to reject your own context and appropriate that of another culture, which I think is what makes it so disturbing to people.

 

I understand this logic, but it seems to break down in the case of someone migrating to another country. Consider a black person raised in a country where they are the racial majority and do not experience discrimination: they're not "black" in the same way an African-American is, and if they were to move to America they would be changing their own context and acquiring that of a new culture. If race is purely a social construct then it varies by society, "South African black" is hugely different from "American black" (probably having more in common with "American white"), and the hypothetical African migrant has no more claim to the "American black" identity than Dolezal does.

 

I would like to figure out how to square the ideas that migration is okay (because of course it is) and what Dolezal did is not (because it's my gut reaction), but the only way I can make the logic work is to focus on the fact that Dolezal was deceptive about having the American black identity/experience/whatever it is. Am I totally off on this "race varies by society" premise?

 

Unrelated to the above:

 

Maybe there is some theoretical unicorn case of a person who can change their racial identity, but with Dolezal I don't think you can ignore the privilege, evidenced by suing Howard for discriminating against her for "being white." She "turned off her blackness" when it behooved her.

 

My understanding of the Dolezal interview was that she took a long time to come to the idea that she identified as black, and the lawsuit (presumably) happened before that, so she wasn't "turning off her blackness".

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So I've been kicking around a question that I want to put out there to see if there's an obvious answer: are racism and fear of the other equivalent? What does the Venn diagram of those two look like?

 

I ask this because if they are equivalent, that makes it a lot easier to explain why something like 'reverse racism' isn't racism, or why, say, arresting a Muslim kid for bringing a clock to school can necessarily have a racial component (because it's much easier to explain how fears compound).

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Mangela Lansbury, on 18 Sept 2015 - 20:09, said:

Anti-Semitism isn't a solved problem, but the Holocaust forced the world to confront that racism and address it, which it did slowly (Jewish applicants to academic programs in America were still treated horrendously -- see Emory's history of anti-Semitism in their dental program http://mobile.nytimes.com/2012/10/07/education/emory-confronts-legacy-of-bias-against-jews-in-dental-school.html) but surely.

I don't feel that this really is the case worldwide lately, unfortunately. Most of Eastern Europe and the Middle East is doing this bullshit again. Even Poland, where there's not actually any jews left, pretty much.

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You got me. So let's try this again, this time with more nuance- what is a person of color? 

So are you just here to pull a "gotcha!" on everybody or what.

how bout you start.


I've yet to find a satisfying definition for a 'person of color.' Its meaning may be clear in some contexts, but I don't think general conversations and open social commentaries are among those settings. The meanings I hear most commonly-
1) people without the physical characteristics which first appeared in western Europe, and
2) people who do (or would) experience racism under western white supremacy. (perhaps equivalent to #1)

I realize critiquing these at this point risks a straw-man argument, but it seems both allow someone to very easily transition, with sufficient body modification, into being 'of color.' (The earlier response, regarding Caucasian lineage, led to an unpleasingly simple conclusion.)  

It is hard to define the concepts we use to understand reality. Searching for and discovering their illogical implications is important if we wish to understand the errors in our perspective. If my looking for inconsistencies and contradictions is a "gotcha" move, it is only because we need to be gotten. 

Generalization and ambiguity are not without value, but in such an important subject I think clarity and precision should be required. 
 

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So I've been kicking around a question that I want to put out there to see if there's an obvious answer: are racism and fear of the other equivalent? What does the Venn diagram of those two look like?

I ask this because if they are equivalent, that makes it a lot easier to explain why something like 'reverse racism' isn't racism, or why, say, arresting a Muslim kid for bringing a clock to school can necessarily have a racial component (because it's much easier to explain how fears compound).

I would say racism is a type of "fear of the other", not necessarily something that intersects with it. There is a great article I can't find at the moment, which basically describes the fear of the other as a coalescing of a person's fears such that they target a group as their cause. For example we are afraid of death, loss of employment, disease, injury, loss of social status, etc, and rather than go through the process of handling these fears individually we are more likely to see these fears as a sundering of the self by the other. Rather than admit we are afraid of something we can't necessarily combat we blame someone or something. History is full of this from post civil war America blaming the newly freed slaves for their problems to the holocaust to islamophobia today.

In relation to the whole reverse racism thing, I think this is really just a construct used to justify unjustifiable actions. The kid was accused of bringing a bomb to school, but the school wasn't evacuated, bomb squad wasn't called, the " bomb" wasn't separated from people, and it rode back to the station in the car with the officers. When your actions aren't justifiable on their own you look to other, purposefully nebulous but seemingly unique concepts to justify them. Reverse racism or reverse discrimination sound like a real, separate thing to anyone who doesn't really want to recognize the meaning of those words. You can also see this with religious groups and same sex marriage, where they essentially contend that taking away their ability to discriminate is discrimination.

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I've yet to find a satisfying definition for a 'person of color.' Its meaning may be clear in some contexts, but I don't think general conversations and open social commentaries are among those settings. The meanings I hear most commonly-

1) people without the physical characteristics which first appeared in western Europe, and

2) people who do (or would) experience racism under western white supremacy. (perhaps equivalent to #1)

I realize critiquing these at this point risks a straw-man argument, but it seems both allow someone to very easily transition, with sufficient body modification, into being 'of color.' (The earlier response, regarding Caucasian lineage, led to an unpleasingly simple conclusion.)  

It is hard to define the concepts we use to understand reality. Searching for and discovering their illogical implications is important if we wish to understand the errors in our perspective. If my looking for inconsistencies and contradictions is a "gotcha" move, it is only because we need to be gotten. 

Generalization and ambiguity are not without value, but in such an important subject I think clarity and precision should be required. 

 

Sorry, I don't really understand what you're trying to say.

Can you explain why you find "someone who's not not Caucasian" to be unpleasingly simple?

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Can you explain why you find "someone who's not not Caucasian" to be unpleasingly simple?

I said that if person of color meant "not caucasian," then it was impossible by definition (for a person of Caucasian heritage to become a person of color,) given that one cannot change their heritage. 

I actually thought this was a pleasingly simple conclusion, given that definition. But I was told that "dropping simplistic assertions into a nuanced subject isn't a great first impression." 

(Aside from the transition discussion, I find that defining a 'person of color' as 'someone who is not caucasian' to be not very informative. Knowing that someone is caucasian tells me very little about them, as does knowing they are not.) 

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So I've been kicking around a question that I want to put out there to see if there's an obvious answer: are racism and fear of the other equivalent? What does the Venn diagram of those two look like?

 

I ask this because if they are equivalent, that makes it a lot easier to explain why something like 'reverse racism' isn't racism, or why, say, arresting a Muslim kid for bringing a clock to school can necessarily have a racial component (because it's much easier to explain how fears compound).

I think that racism is such a complicated thing that its hard to just give a simple answer.  There are different definitions depending on you source or if you're talking about a specific field of study or whatever.  It seems to be really easy to get into an argument of semantics on the issue...and I often think that a discussion of something like that almost needs to start with an agreement on or mutual understanding of terminology.  Is it prejudice plus power, is it an ideology that generalizes racial groups and espouses superiority for certain groups, is it a fear of or hostility toward people outside of your racial or ethnic group.  I tend to see it a having a somewhat contextual definition and when I use it I tend to lean towards one that incorporates power dynamics more (and I think that is the tendency in this conversation)...but I'm underqualified to really have a strong opinion on it definition-wise...I've got no real background in the social sciences, and as a white guy I've not been mistreated for racial reasons so I can't even use personal experience.  My general feeling is that fear of the other can be a component of it and that there's overlap but not all racism is necessarily defined as fear of the other and not all fear of the other is racism.

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The distinction for me, between being transgender being a real thing and "transracial" not being one, is that gender exists outside of a cultural context. There are societies with any number of genders or gendered identities, but there are none where there are no genders at all or only one. The duality or multiplicity is fundamental to it. Conversely, race has no reality outside of its social and historical context. It only exists as a mixture of physical appearance, blood lineage, and cultural context, which is codified into a single "thing" by implicit ingroup/outgroup dynamics. Racial identities have appeared, disappeared, changed throughout history, so they're very particular to a person or group's own experiences. They can't be manufactured or redacted, so to style yourself as another race from the one in which you are born and raised is basically to reject your own context and appropriate that of another culture, which I think is what makes it so disturbing to people. It's like claiming to be a member of the nobility, another cultural construct created by a mixture of superficial factors: you can have a strong love of the aristocratic lifestyle and a desire to be a part of it, but calling yourself a duke doesn't make you one and never will. It's just not a part of your own cultural experience.

 

I'm not trying to scream "reverse-racism!", but what about black people who have leveraged their ability to pass as white? I'm sure I've heard anectdotal historical cases of this. Maybe people have a problem with this too, but I get the impression that most people see it as a adaptive strategy in the face of oppression that some people have been capable of. Again, I don't have examples of this in recent memory, but if we treat it as a hypothetical, would the determining factor of whether or not it's acceptable for a black person to try to pass as white whether or not they believe themselves to be white (therefore rejecting their own context and appropriating that of another culture)?

 

 

It also bothers me that people ignore the ways in which Dolezal profited from her "black" identity, because that makes it less easy to see how her choices were more just racial appropriation on a scale so massive that we lack the language to understand it fully.

 

I didn't pay much attention to the story when it came out, I was still freaking out about how people were seeing a blue&black dress when I saw a white&gold one. I know that she was involved in teh NAACP, but I didn't assume that was profitable.

Does Dolezal's profit from presenting herself as a black woman make it easier for you to think that it is unacceptable? Would this be a non-story if Dolezal just lived as a black woman in a Northern Virginia townhouse and worked as an registered nurse?

 

I understand this logic, but it seems to break down in the case of someone migrating to another country. Consider a black person raised in a country where they are the racial majority and do not experience discrimination: they're not "black" in the same way an African-American is, and if they were to move to America they would be changing their own context and acquiring that of a new culture. If race is purely a social construct then it varies by society, "South African black" is hugely different from "American black" (probably having more in common with "American white"), and the hypothetical African migrant has no more claim to the "American black" identity than Dolezal does.

 

I've been thinking about the hypothetical you cite here. I think the difference may be that when a person with dark pigmented skin and typical african body-traits comes to the United States, there is an understanding that the totality of american race-circumstances is about to be imposed on them. So they are involuntarily entering the context due to how they look rather than purposely changing their body's appearance.

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-Clyde, I recommend you read the article I posted in the Share Articles topic about Korla.

People passing had to believe in what's they were passing as: it was then only way it would. You had to give up your old life and family to do so too. It sucked, but you're trying to survive and find a niche in a world that hates you. And power to you if you can find something that can alleviate that hate and use it to your own good.

This happened/happens a lot with Jewish, blacks and other immigrants or groups of people oppressed. It really shows the fluidly of identity and how one can adapt.

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It's unacceptable. I don't care how guilty you feel, you can't just move into an oppressed group and claim to be one of them. You can't, for the most part.

Now there are people who grew up in black culture, who aren't black, but view themselves as black. That's a bit trickier and I think a bit more accepting, due to the immersion of the experience. Tho, there's always a chance that people accepting them can easily reject or show them that they are outsiders no matter long you lived in it.

 

With Dolezal I know where I stand, with the second issue I talked about, idk.

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-Clyde, I recommend you read the article I posted in the Share Articles topic about Korla.

I'm having difficulty finding it, can I get a direct link?

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It's the best way to not treat them as refugees, but as a faceless horde getting ready to pillage white Europe. Frustrating but not surprising.

At least the Austrians are doing something and are taking of them. Well, the citizens are, not the government.

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I'm not trying to scream "reverse-racism!", but what about black people who have leveraged their ability to pass as white? I'm sure I've heard anectdotal historical cases of this. Maybe people have a problem with this too, but I get the impression that most people see it as a adaptive strategy in the face of oppression that some people have been capable of. Again, I don't have examples of this in recent memory, but if we treat it as a hypothetical, would the determining factor of whether or not it's acceptable for a black person to try to pass as white whether or not they believe themselves to be white (therefore rejecting their own context and appropriating that of another culture)?

 

 

Now there are people who grew up in black culture, who aren't black, but view themselves as black. That's a bit trickier and I think a bit more accepting, due to the immersion of the experience. Tho, there's always a chance that people accepting them can easily reject or show them that they are outsiders no matter long you lived in it.

 

With Dolezal I know where I stand, with the second issue I talked about, idk.

 

To a degree, this describes me.  I'm 3/4 Chinese and 1/4 Japanese but I was born in and have lived my entire life in the United States.  I grew up in middle class suburbia.  By and large, this meant that I was one of, if not the ONLY, non-White kid.  Until around the time I left for college, I would often think of myself as White because that's the environment I grew up in.  It's what I knew, it's what I saw, and it's what everyone who wasn't related to me was.  I never experienced any overt racism or hardship due to my race growing up so my considering myself White wasn't an act of self preservation.  In a way I was conditioned to think like that.  In the logical sense I knew that I was Asian, but in a personal sense there were often times where I'd have to remind myself that I was in fact not White. 

 

I've never actively tried to pass myself as anything other than Asian, but I also don't advertise it (apart from my forum name.  A while ago I actually changed my Steam name to remove the reference to my being Asian).  There have been times where people have assumed I was White (or at the very least did not suspect I was Asian) based on my voice and first name, neither of which makes it apparent that I am Asian as I have an American accent and a common first name.  If I would have been asked, I wouldn't say I was anything other than what I am, but I fully admit there are times where it's easier to let the other party assume and not challenge those assumptions unless necessary.

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