# Do we overidentify race? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [December 19, 2008, 2:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-we-overidentify-race/477906 "2008-12-19T14:37:04Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 10\ **Page:** 7
**Author:** ![curlcoat](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/ea5d25/32.png) [@curlcoat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/curlcoat)\ **Post date:** [January 2, 2009, 5:04am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-we-overidentify-race/477906/121 "2009-01-02T05:04:15Z")
> [@tomndebb](#): > > Well, this is nothing but going around in circles, but for the readers at home i will explain it one more time: Showing again that you are only interested in showing you are right and I am wrong. > [@](#): > > It is not a lack of physical evidence; we have the papers. All the papers survived the past 150 years? They said on the Rose Parade this morning that they only just found a photograph of Helen Keller and her teacher, that up until they found this they thought that no photos survived. Despite the fact that there are 100’s of thousands of photos from that era, and before. Sounds very much like your assertion that simply because we have many papers from 150 years ago, there must have been no such thing as NINA The thing is - again - I neither believe nor disbelieve that NINA existed. It was a part of my past in story form at least, and it appears that it is a part of the past of many Irish families. I lean to belief that it existed because so many families think it did, but that is immaterial to this discussion The only thing significant about NINA in this discussion is that the descendents of the Irish of that era remember it, or think we do, yet it means zero to us now. If it existed back then, we got over it. If it didn’t, we thought it did and we still don’t carry it around with us today. Same with, for another example, the Japanese who were interned during the second war (at least they have proof). There may still be those looking for reparations for that, I don’t know, but it doesn’t color who they are now. > [@](#): > > As an analogy, we can determine where cars and trucks began replacing buggies and wagons because we can see a period in which wagons and buggies were advertised, then a period when cars and trucks began to be advertised, and finally a period when no buggies or wagons were advertised except as antiques. Would you suggest that the absence of ads for buggies and wagons in the 1950s and 1960s was simply a lack of evidence and that there were still just as many buggies and wagons exchanging hands? Doesn’t fit. You want to prove that NINA either didn’t exist or was so rare that it might as well have not existed. Wagons and buggies did exist, they just got fewer as time went on. Some still exist now, and are advertised. > [@](#): > > You would be on firmer ground regarding window signs because they could have all faded and been turned into kindling without any record that they had existed. Actually, I don’t believe I have ever specified what sort of NINA proof needed to be found. I don’t think I was aware that newspaper ads had NINA in them prior to this discussion because all I remember of what I was told way back when had to do with signs in windows. > [@](#): > > The bigotry that other groups have faced has been different in duration, in severity, in kind, and in how recent it has been to what blacks have suffered, so some portion of the black population is going to have have been less successful in overcoming it. Do you believe it made that much difference? As soon as all of the other minorities began to become accepted by the WASPs, they just started settling in, going to school, getting jobs, buying homes. There will always be some bigotry out there towards any given race or religion - there is still bigotry towards women even - but it is only the blacks that appear to be heavily affected by it, and are race conscious. > [@](#): > > Beyond that, of course, is the fact that most blacks are overcomiing those problems, yet you post as though nearly all blacks are still impaired in some way. I believe I was clear that I was talking about blacks of a certain age and income level, that I have known personally. I have also said that not all blacks that I have known have acted this way. > [@](#): > > While going on at length claming I have not read your comments, you then post this sort of thing that indicates that you have certainly not read mine. > I really doubt that qualified blacks are being routinely forced to take menial jobs, now. > I am not aware of any successful blacks being humiliated or robbed, with the approval of white society, today. > What I noted, however, was that history produces results. There is a segment of the population that lost the goals of education and success because they saw both traits failing to help their fellow people. > There is a culture of despair in many inner city neighborhoods that had its roots in the very recent past when such hostile actions were common. Then, either you or I was not clear. For one thing, what goes on in those inner city neighborhoods is influenced by things well beyond race, so we will set them aside. What I am having trouble believing is that a youngish (mid 20’s to late 30’s or so) black person from an upper lower class to low middle class upbringing, who recieved a full public school education and maybe some community college would have witnessed enough of the things you say above that it would color their whole outlook. _Those_ are the black people that I have worked with, who have acted as if they are still being oppressed and have to fight for every advantage. _Those_ are the ones that insisted they be called African-Americans and not blacks, who had posters of Africa in their cubes or wore African style clothes. And \*those \* were the ones that pulled out the race card any time they thought it might work. > [@](#): > > Partly, this is because some small segment of the black population would prefer to game the system by lodging such complaints. Partly, this is because it remains true to a certain extent. It will always remain true to a certain extent, just as it is for women, Jews and anyone else that someone wants to be bigoted against. > [@](#): > > If you are simply going to ignore history and its actual effects on people, we are simply going to go round and round forever. > We’re wasting electrons. I really don’t care either way. It is obvious that you have not had the (years and years worth of) experiences that I have had, and it appears that you think that any minority should be excused due to being able to remember past bad history. Its up to you if you want to waste any more electrons. ---
**Author:** ![tomndebb](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/b9e5f3/32.png) [@tomndebb](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tomndebb)\ **Post date:** [January 2, 2009, 5:19am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-we-overidentify-race/477906/122 "2009-01-02T05:19:57Z")
> [@spike404](#): > > “..The mistake was in claiming that today’s Italians are the actual descendants of the Romans whom you (erroneously) claim enslaved the Germanic tribes…” > > Very astute! Exactly what I was trying to convey! > > A goodly number, if not the majority, of today’s Americans are descendants of immigrants that arrived AFTER the abolition of slavery! Why should they feel any guilt, or responsibility? > > I just wish that ~12% of the population, would stop committing ~50-60% of violent crimes. On the other hand, I wish that you would stop posting error-ridden straw man arguments that serve no purpose but to let you make nasty insinuations against other people. = = = > [@curlcoat](#): > > Showing again that you are only interested in showing you are right and I am wrong. Well, that seems a reasonable position. 😉 This merry-go-round is neither profitable nor interesting. ---
**Author:** ![Chief\_Pedant](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/a6a055/32.png) [@Chief\_Pedant](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chief_Pedant)\ **Post date:** [January 2, 2009, 4:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-we-overidentify-race/477906/123 "2009-01-02T16:14:48Z")
> [@tomndebb](#): > > I have no idea what the answer to your second question might be and am not sure I could figure out an answer to it. (I don’t belive that standardized tests work all that well in our society and I have absolutely no faith in their ability to create accurate cross-cultural comparisons.) > > As to your first point, it would seem to me that the history of blacks “all over the owrld” has been pretty similar, beyond which, I do not know what a “rank-order” is. > > If someone wished to make an issue of test scores among blacks in Sweden, I would want to know how many of those people are first or second generation. This is an important question, given that the overwhelming majority of Swedish blacks are recent immigrants from Somalia and Eritrea who had a multi-generational disruption of the educational process in the midst of civil war and who landed in industrial cities in Sweden just as an economic downturn placed them into an unemployed category. In addition, we might want to compare the scores of blacks to the scores of Arabs, Iranians, Bulgarians, and Serbs who are recent immigrants. (I have noticed that several stories headlining the problems of “black” Swedes wind up discussing all the other immigrant groups in the details of the stories, as though Arabs, Iranians, and refugees from Southeast Europe could all be treateds as “black” for the purposes of the articles. > Beyond that, blacks in all the European countries such as Britain and France, as well as Sweden, tend to be recent immigrants or second generation. Are the troubles associated with them really any different than the troubles that many immigrant groups have suffered in their first couple of generations in the U.S.? Polish and Italian immigration to the U.S. was curtailed before 1920, yet there continued to be an accepted belief in the innate stupidity of Poles and the innate criminality of Italians well into the 1960s and even later. Asians are, (in the mythology of people like J. P. Rushton), smarter than Europeans, on average, yet I continually encounter stories of the serious problems in the U.S. Hmong communities–a situation that I would tend to attribute to the fact that they are recent immigrants who have had to emigrate twice, (first to Thailand, then to the U.S.), in the last generation. > > As to black problems “all over the world,” I would note that there really are relatively few places where they actually live in the world and most of those places have parallel histories: they are in Africa, where their entire cultures were seriously disrupted for over 100 years, (sometimes for as long as 400 years), they are scattered around the Caribbean in island nations where colonial policies kept them under employed and under educated until recently, when those nations were “set free” with no industries or resources to create wealth, or they are in places such as the U.S. or Brazil where they were, by culture or by law relegated to the status of second class citizens. It is not as though there was a country in Africa that escaped the long hand of European or Arab domination and then failed on their own. There is no location in the Americas where blacks freely immigrated and established their own nation in a resource rich region and still failed. > > Given that the black situation in the U.S. is improving about one generation after the majority of negative pressures were finally removed, I would say that environmental situations will explain most apparent deficits. Thanks for your comments. As you are aware, my own position is that success in the modern world in a free society is more related to the average IQ of a given population (or individual) than it is to any other single factor. And of course, as you point out, various sub-populations have had markedly different success rates. Choosing so large a cohort as “black” or “asian” does become less meaningful, and it loses relevance the larger and more loosely defined (against a common genetic pool) a given cohort becomes. With immigrant populations there is an increased complexity of trying to sort out the problem, of course. If the Hmong are highly successful relative to other cohorts in their original homelands and do poorly here, it makes sense to attribute at least part of their difficulty to the processes of translating homelands. I certainly hope that I am wrong and you are right in attributing lack of equal success to factors other than inherent (inherited) differences in populations. While I have not personally been convinced that such differences are not real and not genetic, it’s certainly true that our struggle toward a just world will be substantially ameliorated if it turns out that population differences are not as immutable as the pessimistic among us believe. Regardless of which of us turns out to be correct in the nature/nurture debate, perhaps our US pot (at least) will eventually melt to the extent that the concept of any genetic ancestry which allows for race or population groupings is completely effaced. It will become more difficult for those over-obsessed with identifying race when it cannot be identified at all. ---
**Author:** ![curlcoat](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/ea5d25/32.png) [@curlcoat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/curlcoat)\ **Post date:** [January 3, 2009, 3:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-we-overidentify-race/477906/124 "2009-01-03T03:08:43Z")
> [@tomndebb](#): > > Well, that seems a reasonable position. 😉 Only to you. > [@](#): > > This merry-go-round is neither profitable nor interesting. Well, _that’s_ true! ---
**Author:** ![spike404](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/aeb1de/32.png) [@spike404](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/spike404)\ **Post date:** [January 3, 2009, 3:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-we-overidentify-race/477906/125 "2009-01-03T03:15:58Z")
“…On the other hand, I wish that you would stop posting error-ridden straw man arguments that serve no purpose but to let you make nasty insinuations against other people…” Point out the errors, if you please. Or, will you revert to the “racist, bigot, narrow-minded, right-winger, etcetera”, accusations? ---
**Author:** ![tomndebb](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/b9e5f3/32.png) [@tomndebb](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tomndebb)\ **Post date:** [January 3, 2009, 3:43am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-we-overidentify-race/477906/126 "2009-01-03T03:43:37Z")
> [@spike404](#): > > Point out the errors, if you please. Why? You have already demonstrated that you are more interested in drive-by quips and slogans than discussion. It is not worth my time to compose an actual rebuttal to your nonsense only to have you reply with a short line attempting to change the subject. > [@spike404](#): > > Or, will you revert to the “racist, bigot, narrow-minded, right-winger, etcetera”, accusations? Name-calling is not encouraged in this Forum and I have no intention to initiate that activity, here. Besides, I have no evidence that you actually are a “rightwinger” or anything else. ---
**Author:** ![Clothahump](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/51bf81/32.png) [@Clothahump](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Clothahump)\ **Post date:** [January 4, 2009, 8:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-we-overidentify-race/477906/127 "2009-01-04T20:08:58Z")
> [@curlcoat](#): > > The whole whatever-American thing is stupid IMO. I am almost purebred Irish, but since my ancestors have been here for at least three generations, I am “just” an American. (Actually, because I grew up near the Canadian border, I identify myself as from the States or a Statesider.) I have never met an “African”-American who was actually born anywhere but in the US, and of the ones I knew well enough, their parents save one were born here too - that one was born in the Phillipines. > > I would never consider calling myself Irish-American because all that does is further divide up the country. Who cares if Barack is “purebred” black? Who cares what color he is at all? I really think the militant black folks need to get over themselves and quit trying to be separate but equal. The only A-A issues are the ones they bring on themselves. Very well stated. If someone is born in America or naturalized as an American, then they should refer to themselves as American. No hyphen needed. We used to be a melting pot. Now we’re a “salad bowl”, and that is helping to destroy our American culture and society. ---
**Author:** ![DSeid](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dseid/32/20194_2.png) [@DSeid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DSeid)\ **Post date:** [January 4, 2009, 11:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-we-overidentify-race/477906/128 "2009-01-04T23:18:06Z")
> [@Clothahump](#): > > If someone is born in America or naturalized as an American, then they should refer to themselves as American. No hyphen needed. > > We used to be a melting pot. Now we’re a “salad bowl”, and that is helping to destroy our American culture and society. Despite the fact that thread has become totally devolved otherwise, your on-op comment deserves a response. Were we ever a “melting pot” **Clothahump**? Documentation of “hyphenated Americans” going back over a hundred years has been provided already. I posit that we have always been more of a hodgepodge stew than a melting pot (or a salad bowl): a blending of bits and pieces each contributing to each other and taking from each other while still each retaining some of what makes them each special and unique - the whole being all the better for the variety of the flavors. That variety and mixing up of unique bits resulted in new and unexpected ideas - a cultural creativity that has in fact always been the bit that is most quintessentially American culture and society. Lose that sense of individual bits bumping up against each other and you destroy American culture and society - not preserve it. ---
**Author:** ![Enola\_Gay](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/3ab097/32.png) [@Enola\_Gay](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Enola_Gay)\ **Post date:** [January 5, 2009, 7:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-we-overidentify-race/477906/129 "2009-01-05T19:07:58Z")
> [@Chief\_Pedant](#): > > In the absence of evidence otherwise, though, I suggest that the notion that our “current situation” (by which I assume you mean the relative underperformance of blacks in the US) is primarily a result of past sins is a popular one without any substantive underpinning. I am amazed at how popular this notion seems to be on this board. It makes me question whether those who hold this view have ever really studied American slavery. If I were to design a sociology experiment that would completely destroy a people, here is what I would do: Capture them from their homes and take them to a foreign land where they would have no rights and would become slaves. Rape them, beat them, forbid them from learning anything – force them to abide by all of my rules or they suffer the consequences. Add to that the unfathomable psychological toll of watching their children and grandchildren suffer this same fate. Have them watch their children be sold, never to be seen again, tortured, raped, beaten, humiliated, branded, lynched and they are powerless to do anything about it. Generation after generation after generation of this violent conditioning. Then set them “free” and see how long it takes for them to get their shit together. Throw in the KKK and some racist laws to hold them back a little more. How long do you think it would take for this group to start leading productive lives? I am pretty impressed that we (as a nation) did exactly this and just a few generations later, 75% of black americans have overcome poverty. We have Supreme Court justices who are black, Secretaries of State, doctors, lawyers, even our next first lady is the descendant of slaves. To say that American blacks have not overcome their horrific past is simply untrue. IMO the fact that they have come so far in such a short period of time, in spite of all the obstacles, is a testament to the human spirit. ---
**Author:** ![dedmonwakin](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/f4b2a3/32.png) [@dedmonwakin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dedmonwakin)\ **Post date:** [January 6, 2009, 8:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-we-overidentify-race/477906/130 "2009-01-06T20:48:04Z")
I believe America over emphasizes on race. Not of just blacks but any race. I’m mixed as well like the growing population of America. Since adulthood, I’ve had the worst trouble filling out official and government documents that ask what race I am. I’ve never really understood why anyone cares, although people have tried to explain it as logically as it can be done. Twenty years later it still goes over my head. My father is black and mother is Thai/Chinese. I honestly get offended when assumed that I am just black. I often times get frustrated that it should matter at all, because I am American, first and foremost. To me the proper thing for anyone to ask FIRST, is “What nationality am I?” That to me seems appropriate. I can then proudly say," I’m an American" This has typically been my reply even when asked what race I am since I understood what racism was in middle school. Unfortunately sometimes I get a comment back that I am African-American. Needless to say, things don’t go well after that. Don’t get me wrong, being called African-American isn’t as offensive as it seems in the above statement. It’s the context in which it was used. I state that I am an American and the reply back in correction to my answer is, you mean African-American, as if to exclude me from being an actual full blooded American. To me encouraging definitions, a specific races’ accomplishments and the media, divide a people that should at least in America, have equality. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-we-overidentify-race/477906.md?page=6)