Is "colorblindness" good, or even possible?

Great Debates
61

[QUOTE=Zoe]
Oh. So you were talking only about blacks and whites when you wrote the following:
[/quote]

Yes! Why are you under the impression that I’m not? Do you think blacks are somehow immune to the “acting black” mode of thought? Let me disabuse you of that notion right now. They are not immune to it.

I’m not stereotyping Americans, just talking about my experiences with said group.

Why do you think I’m talking about you, Zoe? I don’t know you.

I don’t look for the worst. Go back and read how many times I’ve talked about giving people the benefit of the doubt. Obviously you’re having problems seperating the content of my posts from the overreactive thoughts swirling around in your brain.

It’s not that hard if you know someone’s family history.

Zoe with all due respect, I am completely dumbfounded by your ignorance in this subject. You talk a lot about your Southern background on this board, as well as your job as a teacher. How can you be so ignorant of such a key kernel of Southern American history? To not only reveal such ignorance by picking a fight with me, but to sit up here and actually deny (and with such asthma-inducing logic) that it existed as more than mere theory…it takes the spit out of my mouth, yes it does.

Go to a library or bookstore. Find the African Americans studies section. There are tons of books there detailing the historical accounts of folks that look as white as you. These folks were slaves, these folks were second-class citizens, these folks were sitting in the back of the bus and getting barred from “white” schools. These folks were black. They were labeled as such by society and so they saw themselves that way. Kind of like how it is now.

But before you go running off to Borders, do a quick read on Plessy versus Ferguson. Have you heard of this important ruling, Zoe? It gave Jim Crow segregation the constitutional feet it needed to stand on. Plessy perhaps more so than any other case exemplifies the insanity that was race in 19th century America. You might be interested to know this factoid:

bolding mine

So yes, Zoe, the one drop rule was enforced. It was enforced like a mother fucker, if you will. I imagine it must be sort of nice to have lived all the years of your life not knowing the ugliness of our history, but I invite you to step outside the Matrix and do some long overdue research.

What you asked doesn’t belong in General Debates because it has a factual answer that can not be disputed by anyone with even a passing familiarity with history.

62

For the curious, here’s a pic of Homer Plessy.

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[QUOTE=Zoe]
2. How could one drop of black blood be determined in a person? You made the claim that the one drop rule was enforced. How was that done?
[/QUOTE]
Here was one way.

Further info can be found at

and in this article, One Drop Rule, while not central to the essay, Lawrence Wright mentions several lawsuits in which the courts ruled based on the one drop rule.
(Generally it is based on genealogy.)

64

[QUOTE=gigi]

But to ask the question assumes the possibility. And assuming the possibility is based on race. I don’t think it’s saying anything good or bad about the potential harassee, it’s just saying something about how things work.
[/quote]

You are the person assuming things based on race. It’s the difference between asking “So, tell me about your life” and “So, you’ve been the victim of racial discrimination in America, haven’t you?”

And that’s the entire point. People are individuals, and if you don’t take the time to learn about them as individuals, you may instead assume that since they’re part of a group, you can commit the fallacy of division. Imagine asking a black person “So, you’ve been the victim of racial discrimination in America, haven’t you?” and finding out that they’ve spent all of their life in, Kenya and just got off a plane at Newark airport? Doesn’t it make more sense to find out about a person before drawing inferences about them?

Otherwise, what’s the difference between well intentioned race based pre-judging and more vile strains? If the only difference between, say, a ‘classical racist’ and our modern multiculturists is that they both assume they know things about a person because of their race/religion/ethnicity/culture… and the multiculturist believes a ‘positive’ stereotype and the racist believes a negative one? Then, they’re just two sides of the same coin. And the more we teach the ‘multicultural’ side of things, the more we feed into the overall dynamic.

After all, if someone deserves respect and is an interesting person because of their culture, why isn’t it valid to say that someone deserves disrespect and is a bad person because of their culture? As long as you (pl) legitimize judgment of people based on anything other than who they are, you (pl) shouldn’t be shocked to discover that people are being judged by things other than who they are.

[QUOTE=monstro]
But I think it’s human nature to see groups and peg individuals into those groups. Forming prejudices, IMHO, are also part and parcel of who humans are.
[/quote]

Some things are true, biological human nature, some things aren’t. As education can indeed modify if not totally eliminate the tendency to “see groups and peg individuals into those groups”, I see no reason for claiming that it’s an inexorable part of human nature. It is a side effect of categorical perception and a lack of linguistic training, but it’s certainly not impossible to overcome. Fighting ignorance and all that.
As for forming prejudices, I see no justification that that’s inexorably part of ‘human nature’ either. If you, personally, find yourself forming prejudices then that’s lamentable and I hope you have good luck overcoming that tendency. But I’ve seen no valid study that proves that group-based prejudicial thinking is somehow inherent in being human. (There are certain tendencies, like babies’ preference for facial symmetry, which indicate that some judgments are hardwired into us. But a judgment on attractiveness doesn’t have to translate into anything other than differing mating behaviors. )

As for stating that “everybody” has them, how the heck could you possibly know such a thing? Analyzing the thought patterns or not just most of humanity, but “everybody”? Every last individual in a billions-strong species? Come on, “everybody”?

[QUOTE=monstro]

So when someone says they are “colorblind” I always want to ask them what kind of drug they’re smoking. Because even if they don’t “see” race, they see gender, socioeconomic class, physical appearance, nationality, and a whole suite of other things.
[/quote]

Interesting, isn’t it? You have certain assumptions about people, and when someone tells you something about their own mind that differs from your pre-judging them, you have trouble believing what they tell you. And let’s say that someone notices physical appearance, SES, nationality, whatever… what’s to say that they’ll “see” those as anything other than tidbits?

If I notice that someone comes from a Caribbean culture or a Middle Eastern culture of a French Canadian culture, should any of that matter if I’m looking for the best person to x-ray welds at some factory somewhere? And if I’m looking for someone to be a friend/lover, shouldn’t personal compatibility on the individual level be more important than if their mom (or dad) cooked schwarma or spanakopita for them as a child?

[QUOTE=monstro]

I don’t know a person who would claim that they don’t see these things, but if we’re going to throw race out of the window, why not everything that divides us?
[/quote]

Why shouldn’t we throw out everything that doesn’t matter to a situation at hand? Do you think that we shouldn’t ideally be able to “throw race out the window”? Was King’s statement that we should be judged by the content of our character and not the color of our skin, just a pipe dream? Is that not the ideal, that in any and all situations, we are judged by who we are and not irrelevant minutiae?

[QUOTE=monstro]

But racism still exists, as does discrimination and racial disparities. Pretending that we can wave a magical wand and disappear these things just by wishing race away…that’s ludicrous. The labels are not the problem. So I think it’s a bit naive to demand people be colorblind.
[/quote]

That directly contradicts your claim that “it’s human nature to see groups and peg individuals into those groups. Forming prejudices, IMHO, are also part and parcel of who humans are.” Without the labels and the idea that the labels actually tell us anything about an individual person, prejudice becomes literally un-thinkable. The more people are conscious that groups are linguistic fictions, the less they’re able to act as if those groups were reified, and exemplars of those groups could be held as fungible.

[QUOTE=monstro]

I’m not burdeoned by my race. It doesn’t weigh heavy on my brain every hour of every day. But just like anything else associated with my identity (my gender, my looks, my educational background, my culture), it’s a factor that can influence interactions with people, and it would be silly for me to pretend that it doesn’t.
[/QUOTE]

Nobody asks that you pretend that it doesn’t currently play a role, the point is to change patterns of perception so that it won’t in the future play a role. Why should you be judged by your gender any more than by your race, or your eye color? Education has tremendous transformative power. Years ago, racism was not just accepted but largely unquestioned in many places in America. We’ve come a long way, even if we’re not done yet.

Why shouldn’t we go the rest of the way?

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“One drop” is a misnomer, of course. You couldn’t and still can’t test for “one drop” of black blood. In the Supreme Court case that you gave as an example, ywtf, Plessy was one-eighth black and seven eigths white. The law was only called the “one drop” rule. Plessy was not an example of someone who had only one drop of black blood.

Neither was the more current and still shameful 1986 case that Tom linked to in the Wright essay described below.

I was out there fighting ignorance before you were born, ywtf. If you have to suggest that I was ignorant of these things and did nothing about them, you shame only yourself. The two threads on the subject that you have participated in address my background.

As for picking a fight, our posts in both threads speak for themselves.

**Fynn, if you are not a professional writer, you should be. You and Lawrence Wright, author of The New Yorker article that Tom linked to have some thinking in common. If you haven’t read the essay, it is very good and ends with this quote from then Chairman of the House Sub-committee on Census, Statistics, and Postal Personnel, Representative Thomas C. Sawyer, Democrat of Ohio:

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[QUOTE=Zoe]

**Fynn, if you are not a professional writer, you should be. You and Lawrence Wright, author of The New Yorker article that Tom linked to have some thinking in common. If you haven’t read the essay, it is very good and ends with this quote from then Chairman of the House Sub-committee on Census, Statistics, and Postal Personnel, Representative Thomas C. Sawyer, Democrat of Ohio:
[/QUOTE]

No disrespect intended, at all… but by “Fynn” are you referring to me, or are you perhaps using a nickname for another poster in this thread? I’ve looked through the thread, and I’m pretty sure that it’s just a typo and your compliment was directed towards me.

If that’s the case, then thank you very much. I really appreciate not only that you grok what I’m saying, but appreciate the manner in which I said it.
To be honest though, I’m not sure I’d make a very good professional writer. As it is, I’m a professional entertainer, storyteller, mentor, stand up comedian, orator, diagnostician and juggler, among other things. Which is to say I’m a teacher. :smiley:

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Yes, FinnAgain, I did mean you! My apologies for the misspelling of your name. I am notorious for doing that.

I’m not at alll surprised that you are a teacher. Lucky you! I miss being on the front lines. It’s heady stuff.

Your classes must be mind-stretching!

“Catch the joy as it flys.” – Wm. Blake

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[QUOTE=Zoe]
“One drop” is a misnomer, of course. You couldn’t and still can’t test for “one drop” of black blood. In the Supreme Court case that you gave as an example, ywtf, Plessy was one-eighth black and seven eigths white. The law was only called the “one drop” rule. Plessy was not an example of someone who had only one drop of black blood.
[/quote]

(Should be laughing or crying at this?)

If one-eighth isn’t a drop, what is Zoe? Have far do we have to dilute the Africanness before you’ll be satisfied that this rule was indeed enforced like you deny it was? You’ve essentially stated that it’s wrong to point to a persecuted, phenotypically white octoroon as proof of an applied one drop rule. So that raises an interesting question: What’s the lower limit for blackness for you?

Plessy looked as white as any white dude whose face is on American money (he and his family actually passed for white). That alone should be evidence that the one drop rule was enforced, regardless of the actual makeup of his family tree.

I don’t know if you are suffering from historical amnesia, ignorance, or denial, but regardless, I think it’s safe to say you are not qualifed to speak knowledgably about race in America.

Ignorant is the most charitable thing I could call you right now. Be glad that I’ve just stopped at that. The Pit is just a click away and if you keep on with the madness, I will not hestitate to go there.

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Thanks very much Zoe, I certainly hope so. When I was teaching at a small private school in New England, I was lucky enough to get away from NCLB hassles and design my own curriculum.

I was able to run weekly workshops that I titled “Fallacy Fridays” (for which, of course, the students were given Fallacy Friday Folders in which to keep their notes :D).
The first guiding principle I set down was that saying “I don’t know” is not only not a mark of weakness, it is the beginning of accurate perception and intellectual strength. Every week we added a new fallacy to their list, and, of course, worked with object lessons from the print/digital media (or Found Fallacies for Fridays :smiley: :D).

The exercises and lessons I ran had a wonderful impact, both on our discussion on literature and the students’ general quest to define their personal identities and their views of the world around them.

My favorite exercise that I ran, and the one that had the best results in my opinion, was something I called “Hefalumps and Woozles”. In this activity, I had the kids clear all the desks out of the center of the room while I drew two colums on the whiteboard; I labeled on “Hefalumps” and one “Woozles”. I then explained to the students that I would be describing the ideological positions that both the H’s and the W’s held as their official party platforms, and the students were to move to one side of the room or another depending on what they agreed with.

Of course, once we really got rolling, no two students agreed on all the issues, even if those two both started as H’s or W’s. Nobody could definitively predict whether or not someone would fall in the H camp or the W camp on one issue, simply based on their stance on another issue. Even students who agreed with the majority of the H or W positions had to admit that there was no firm way to guarantee that they would necessarily agree with any other beliefs that were termed H or W beliefs.

By the time the activity was finished and after they had reorganized their desks and sat back down, my class got into a great discussion about identity and labels. They actually gave me a standing ovation. (I’m still proud of that). Although, to be fair, I wasn’t quite as proud of that as I was when one of my student’s father related the story of how he was talking to his daughter about an issue, when she interrupted him to say “But dad, you can’t be sure of that. You’re basing it on an anecdotal fallacy and using a hasty generalization!”

Some days make it all worthwhile.

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I agree that people are individuals and should be treated as such.

However, science does not deal with individual phenomona. It’s based on generalizations based on observations of grouped individuals. Let’s say you’re an educator who’s been charged with addressing demographic disparities (gender, racial, cultural, etc.) in an elementary school. It is not helpful in the least to pretend that your children are all singular individuals with no commonalities. For one thing, it’s not pragmatic since you don’t have enough time to learn each individual child inside out and address all their idiosyncracies. So you must come up with a set of generalized solutions that will work well with the most kids. Treating kids individually often sets them up for failure.

A while back, I participated in a thread about problems in the “black community”. My recommendation was that the black community needs to become more cohesive and provide services for itself, rather than depending on the government or on outside entities. Someone responded that he felt like blacks should become more individualistic, rather than less, and drop the “community” stuff. Basically taking a “colorblind” perspective in regards to their identity. To me, though, that makes no sense. How can you go about fixing a supposedly “broken” culture by targeting individuals? If there’s a problem with the culture of “young black guys”, then that means we need to target this demographic. Not go after random people with penises.

Do you have a cite supporting your view that education makes us all lumpers rather than splitters? Because speaking from my personal experience, the opposite seems to be the case. As a child, blissfully ignorant, we only have a few words to describe color. It’s only when we’re grown up that we start “seeing” fuscia, taupe, canary and champagne. When it comes to ethnic groups, it is the ignorant person who thinks all Spanish-speaking people are the same. It takes a bit more sophistication to separate Cubans from Puerto Ricans and Mexicans from Spaniards. Since vocabulary comes with education, this makes sense.

Is language not a part of human nature? And do words not describe groups of similar objects? Therefore, does not the ability to speak necessitate the ability to see groups?

Only a stupid person would look at a shabbily dressed person and a person wearing a business suit and think that both have the same likelihood of being homeless. Only a stupid person would demand that a person be just as afraid of a big burly guy as they are of a little old lady. You don’t have to wish me “good luck” because I’m not naive enough to think that first impressions are automatically naughty, shameful, sinful things. I can consciously choose not to act on them (and I usually do), but simply having them does not make me a bad person.

I think it is a supremely dishonest person who says they don’t make assumptions about individuals upon meeting them.

Perhaps you can start with presenting us a cite for the “unnaturalness” of prejudice. Because I have never heard of a human society that doesn’t have this feature.

I know from my own personal experience that animals have prejudice. I used to work as a kennel attendant, and it wasn’t uncommon to encounter both female and male animals who were labeled as “DOES NOT LIKE MALES”. I also had a strange encounter with a German Sherpard who made me think he had a problem with my skin coloring.

I’m not behavioral psychologist, but it seems to me that most prejudice is the result of learning. Nine times out of ten, the dogs that had anti-male bias had been abused by men in the past. If you’re a human living in modern society, you are constantly bombarded with images of men being violent and aggressive–so it makes sense that a man in a dark alley would be scarier than a old lady in a dark alley. But what the hell do I know. I’m just a bullshitter with a laptop.

I know you have a real big problem with generalizations, but do you have to be so literal all the time?

What’s to say anything, FinnAgain?

Perhaps we should do a poll and ask Dopers if they ever prejudge people. I’m betting that “everyone” will say yes. If I’m wrong, you’ll have permanent bragging rights. Want to play?

No, it shouldn’t! However, what if I’m a principal of a school where all of the kids are Caribbean, and I’m in need of teachers. Should I assume that it won’t matter who I fill the faculty with, as long as I hire only good teachers? If a Caribbean teacher knocks on my door, should I use his background in my decision making?

Not if compatability means finding someone who knows what schwarma and spanakopita is. Not if I would like to practice Middle Eastern/Greek culture in my household and have children who identify as Middle Easterners/Greek.

I don’t know why you assume (are you prejudging me, Finn?) that I think race matters in every and all situations. Never have I said that.

In a perfect world, yes, I do think it would be ideal to throw out race identifiers. And in this world, I think we need avoid racial labels when being racial is inappropriate. But I don’t think race is so taboo that it is a topic to be avoided at all costs. That’s what happens when colorblindness is taken to an extreme.

I hope you can start reading what I wrote instead of painting me as some kind of race fanatic.

You want to wipe from our language the concepts of groups. You might as well wish from our consciousness meaningful language all together. I’m only being pragmatic when I say “groupless” language is a bizarre abstraction that’s never going to come about, so we might as well try to get along the way we are.

I can find numerous examples of people getting along together while still recognizing the presence of groups (gender, cultural, racial, etc.). Do you know of people who don’t use a system of grouping AND have a functioning society? Because I can’t even imagine such a thing.

Some say it will go away when Jesus comes back. In other words, it will take some supernatural intervention for all colors to “bleed into one”. A beautiful thing it will be, but my lack of faith keeps me from believing. Again, am I such a neanderthal for thinking that humans are smart enough to challenge their own prejudices without having to overturn their entire language system and rewire (disable) their brains?

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Zoe, I’ve tried staying out of this because I respect you and you, but you are seriously misreading what she’s saying and being overly defensive. And I agree with you with the face about the “one-drop” rule thing. She can bullshit when she wants to ( :wink: ), but she did not invent that concept.

72

Sorry monstro before I address any of your claims about education, what are you basing your pedagogical claims on? Can you cite any research, at all, that says that treating students as individuals sets them up for failure, or is it just your bald assertion? Because all the research, from differentiated instruction to student centered teaching, and beyond, says the exact opposite. Do you know anything about how an average school works and how teachers become aware of their students’ individual traits? You do know that before you have a single student in your class, you should already have records for years of their education history, replete with teachers’ comments, evaluations, and testing results? You can and should have had a chance to talk with their former teachers, to meet with a team of their current teachers who work as a cohort to benefit their students?

In short, what is you claim that individualized instruction is not just impossible, but somehow detrimental?

As for your claims about linguistics and categorical perception, you’re drawing a distinction without a difference. Seeing all Hispanics as a fungible group is no different from dividing that into smaller groups and seeing Mexicans as fungible but different from Guatemalans, who are also fungible with each other.

What is it exactly you want a cite for? That students who learn about the fallacies of composition and division are able to avoid them? That categorical perception based on a weak Sapir/Whorf/Korzybski hypothesis is a reality, but can be modified? That if you teach children to see people as individuals, they’re capable of doing so?

As for your calling people stupid and dishonest, persuasive as such name calling is, you’re missing the point.
Even if you can determine that someone is most likely homeless, judging them on that basis is, simply, absurd. Just because someone is homeless doesn’t mean you can know a thing about them, other than the tautology that they don’t have a home and that there are certain other probabilities. Being more afraid of a big strong man may make more sense than being afraid of a little old lady, but that doesn’t mean that being afraid of the big guy makes any sense at all. Nor does a guy being big and strong tell you anything about him, or if you actually have a reason to fear him.

Nor do I have to prove that all societies do not have prejudice, you have committed the fallacy of shifting the burden of proof. You are the one making the claim, you are the one who has to support it. Proving a negative is generally a fool’s game, especially in this situation. Nor does your fallacy of anecdote or your fallacy of hasty generalization show that because some animals may appear, through a limited filter, to have prejudice, that such is the normal condition of animals and not an aberrant behavior. Or that such animal-level categorical perception would be human nature. That’s a bit like arguing that I’ve seen cats go into heat, so that must be human nature too.

As for you being confused as to why claiming that “everybody” is prejudiced matters versus claiming that “some but not all people are prejudiced”, I figured you’d understand the difference. But to belabor the obvious: if not “everybody” is prejudiced, then some people aren’t prejudiced, and thus prejudice is avoidable and not a universal condition.
As for your poll, aside from the fact that it would be unscientific by depending on the fallacies of biased sample and hasty generalization, I’m not sure why that would grant you bragging rights. Or, as you put ‘everyone’ in quotes, what in blue blazes you think it’d prove. I can guarantee you that at least one person would gainsay your silly accusation, if I took the time to post in a poll of that sort. But of course, b your own admission, you would be prejudiced and reject my claim out of hand as stupid or deceptive. And you would continue to ignore that, if not everybody is bigoted or prejudiced, then some people must, by logical necessity, not be prejudiced or bigoted. And again, by logical necessity, that by natural temperament, upbringing, or deliberate education (or a combination), it would be possible not to be a bigot and/or prejudiced.

As for you claiming that I have assumed that you think race is important in “every and all situations”, that’s simply your imagination. I have done no such thing.
I asked if you did not support making race something that was never an important factor. Acting as if the only alternative to the (instead of sometimes) is “every and all”, then you’ve committed the fallacy of false dichotomy.

Ironic, aint it, that by not reading what I wrote, you claimed in error that I’d painted you as some sort of “race fanatic” due to you claiming in error that I hadn’t read what you wrote? As I never said, implied or transmitted via Ouija board that you are a “race fanatic” or anything of the sort, your claims are pretty… strange.

I’m also curious as to whether or not your claims about linguistics are based on anything more than your claims on pedagogy? Recognizing the cognitive effects of the weak Sapir/Whorf/Korzybski hypothesis means that language can no longer be meaningful? Recognizing that groups are abstractions, and recognizing the applicability of the words “reify” and “fungible” will make language be no longer meaningful?
You sure as sunshine need a big ol’ cite for that.

It again says a lot that, by your own admission, you can’t even imagine a society that doesn’t divide people among arbitrary groups. That you view some sort of existential dilemma to a society functioning if we actually had to interact with other people as individuals. Nor am I sure what type of data could even touch such a powerful prejudice. What would even count? And why is society the only useful unit that should be analyzed if individuals or communities can make it work?

Your position is a bit like someone 300 years ago saying that they couldn’t even “imagine” a society where everybody was equal before the law and nobody was a second class citizen, and could those who disagree please give examples of entire societies that had acted with proper egalitarianism and/or legal equality.

And it’s interesting that you close your argument by talking about miracles and how not understanding the linguistic issues involved is somehow neanderthalic or that correctly perceiving things as they are, instead of reifying abstract generalizations, somehow “disables” a person’s brain.

Can you offer anything substantive?

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[QUOTE=FinnAgain]
Your position is a bit like someone 300 years ago saying that they couldn’t even “imagine” a society where everybody was equal before the law and nobody was a second class citizen, and could those who disagree please give examples of entire societies that had acted with proper egalitarianism and/or legal equality.
[/QUOTE]
Well, here it is 300 years later and we still cannot point to a society where everyone was equal before the law and no one was treated as a second class citizen. :smiley:

(Obviously, we are better off and closer than we were 300 years ago.)

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Heh. Well, I won’t quibble about how close any societies are to treating their citizens as legal equals, but I certainly agree that we’re better off now than 300 years ago. And I think we’ll continue improving.

I have great faith in progress, and I have seen the transformative power of education. Personally I would wager that by changing how our young people are thinking, we can have a ‘critical mass’ to radically change the nation (if not the world) in say, three generations? Five tops? We’ve already seen a significant change in attitudes since the civil rights struggle.

I’m in this for the long haul.
I’m planting sequoias, not carrots.

75

I’m not bothering responding to the rest of your post, because frankly you have a hostile, overly pedantic tone in your posts that I find exhausting and irritating. Additionally, we’ve argued about this topic in the past. I’m not in the mood for a rerun performance where we both end up calling each other idiots and blaming the other of not reading what’s been written. I’m also not interested in playing the “cite!” game for every picuanye statement, no matter what the greater point is. So you win.

But I did want to address the above. You had asked me why we shouldn’t throw out everything that doesn’t matter to the situation at hand, as if I have said anything to make you think I would believe otherwise. I’m all for leaving extraneous information out of a discussion. I don’t think it does anyone any good to make race (or gender or class or anything else) an issue when there’s no evidence or good reason to make it one. The questions that you directed at me would have only been asked, IMHO, if you were assuming I was some kind of fanatic who thinks race matters all the time. What am I going to say? MLK was wrong?

To go back to the OP…
Honestly, as long as people treat each other fairly, I don’t think we should we should get worked up about perceptions either way. If I view myself as a black woman scientist American cat lover and I make a conscious decision not to make unwarranted assumptions about people of other identities and I’m deliberate about treating everyone fairly, I’m essentially working in just as “colorblind” a way someone who identifies him/herself as “Person” and sees other people as “just people.” I’m just not making any statements about what I do and do not see. I guess a related question of the OP is whether people have to be colorblind in the absolute literal sense for us to all get along and be a harmonious society. I don’t think so. I think believing that we do is making the problem out to be more insurmountable than it actually is.

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[QUOTE=FinnAgain]
It again says a lot that, by your own admission, you can’t even imagine a society that doesn’t divide people among arbitrary groups. That you view some sort of existential dilemma to a society functioning if we actually had to interact with other people as individuals.
[/quote]

Yeah, she is so craaaaaazy for having this opinion.

If history has told us anything, it’s that people love putting themselves into groups and judging each other on the basis on those group memberships.

Race/ethnicity.
Religion.
Gender.
Sexual orientation.
Geography.
Political affiliation.
Class.
Sports teams.

Take your pick. Even when people are put in articially created groups they are known to exhibit competitive, discriminatory, and prejudicial behavors.

A key component to social psychology is group dynamics. It is well documented that not only our human’s tendencies to form groups natural to us as social animals, but that these tendencies tend to produce favortism, bias, and discrimination.

To argue otherwise is not “having faith in progress”. It’s denying science and reality. Or maybe you have some cites to support your views on the ridiculousness of monstro’s position. We are in GD, after all.

77

[QUOTE=monstro]

But I did want to address the above. You had asked me why we shouldn’t throw out everything that doesn’t matter to the situation at hand, as if I have said
anything to make you think I would believe otherwise.
[/quote]

Yes, as if:

In fact, part of the above was the specific quote I was responding to when I asked you the question. So it was asking for you to clarify your position as to whether we should ‘throw race out the window’ along with all the other minutae that doesn’t make up the content of someone’s character, only their circumstances and/or accidents of birth.

That or I was implying that you were racial fanatic, I suppose. :eek:

78

And as long as I’m at it, face… you have already shown that engaging you in this thread is folly.
You’ve have continually and rather unpalatably insulted Zoe (an upstanding and sincere Doper who has not only spent much of her life in service of racial equality but believes strongly in the justice of that cause), up to and including describing her views as “madness” and engaging in the absurd spectacle of threatening to Pit someone, as if such silly little threats mattered.
So no, I’m not going to dignify this with any back and forth, I’m only going to point out how your argument is flimsy and fallacious. Then I’m done.

[QUOTE=you with the face]

Take your pick. Even when people are put in articially created groups they are known to exhibit competitive, discriminatory, and prejudicial behavors.
[/quote]

:rolleyes:
Competitiveness: I can’t see what point you’re making, as your cite only has an abstract, and you didn’t provide anything beyond an abstract. But I could pay 30 bucks to read your cite. Sweet deal.

They were two experiments. Am I to understand that they were two experiments that permit statistically valid generalizations, without committing the fallacies of biased sample or hasty generalization? If order to be making generalizations about all the civilizations on the planet, those two studies were scientifically valid, and thus had 1000+ randomly selected individuals in each society being generalized about? Or at least 1000+ randomly selected people from our society in order to generalize about that one?
No?

Quite frankly as you have only provided a paragraph-long blurb, I’m not going to try to draw any conclusions from it or to analyze how the authors use terms like “social categories” and “social category diversity”. And of course, as the abstract doesn’t even contain the research data itself, I’m left with a rather uninspiringly vague blurb, with nothing worth reading in it. Why you cited it is beyond me, and I’ve already given it more attention that it deserves.
Moving on.

Discrimination: *your own cite undercuts your point and supports mine. *

Tendencies are not universalities. Things that aren’t universalities allow other possibilities. Yes, racism, bigotry and prejudice exist. Rather unsurprisingly. Yes, it is possible not to be a racist, a bigot, or prejudiced. Rather unsurprisingly.
So yes, again, nobody has argued that such sloppy modes of thinking don’t exist, but those who argue that they have to exist in any possible society, don’t have a leg to stand on.
Further, your cite again deals with experiments that cannot be validly extrapolated to a larger population with scientific validity. And one example soundly contradicts your point and supports mine. Page 259 describes an experiment in which group membership carried no benefits of drawbacks. And they , as a result “failed to detect an ingroup bias in the control condition” and that the act itself of dividing the people into two groups “could have suggested that differential consequences might befall each as a group as a whole, which would lead to (weak) intergroup differentiation.”

Which is unsurprising, and my point. Being divided up into artifical groups and then being treated as if you were fungible yields negative consequences.
Zero for two, face.

Prejudice: you cited the same exact link as you used for “discrimation”, which as already pointed out, cuts the legs out from under your argument and supports mine. I’m not sure if this is an accident or if you meant to post the same link twice, but i really don’t care. The objections to its first use hold true for its second.
Zero for three.

Then of course, you add a Wikipedia link. Yay!
And even the wiki cite says depending on what types of schemas people have, their perceptions are influenced. They mention a specific schema (a stereotype) that would lead people to be bigoted against blacks. Applying rather basic logic then, alternate schemas would lead people to have non-bigoted behavior.
And yet again, even your wiki site undercuts your argument and supports mine.

A tendency is not universal. A large extent is not a universality. “To a large extent” does not mean universally or inexorably.
And those who don’t define themselves by membership in a “particular group”, if they understand that groups are mere abstractions most often based on the fallacy of composition, and membership based on the fallacy of division, will not exhibit that tendency. And thus, would not lead to an us-them dynamic. And yet again, your own cite only says that such behavior is frequently something that leads to bigotry. Frequently does not mean always. Obviously.

Nor am I even going to touch on whether or not the wiki authors were accurately describing research when they claim that there is a “natural tendency”, whatever the heck that is as opposed to an “unnatural tendency”, towards a certain behavior.

So, to sum up, your cites say that there are certain tendencies which are not absolute, so in the same way that monstro’s argument was eviscerated by the fact that not everybody was bigoted, so is yours. If not everybody is a bigot, then it’s possible to not be a bigot. And if it’s possible, as your own cites say, to not be a bigot due to choosing a non-bigoted ideology, then the proper ideology will lead to less bigotry.
QED.

As for being my responsibility to disprove an unsupported argument that monstro made (and you helped undercut), nope. Still not my responsibility to disprove a negative or to allow the fallacy of shifting the burden of proof.
A great big ol’ “blah” upon your claims of denying science or reality.

Now feel free to get upset and me and threaten to Pit me too, while you’re at it. I’ve already showed the quality of your argument and I’m bored with it. Adios.

79

<snip>

In the human body, which contains about six quarts of blood, one-eighth would be about three cups – not one drop. That’s why I said that the “one drop” rule is a misnomer (meaning that it is poorly named.)

For there to be truly only one drop of black blood in a descendent of an American slave would be a scientific impossibility. I’ll bet you can do the math in your head.

Have far do we have to dilute the Africanness before you’ll be satisfied that this rule was indeed enforced like you deny it was?

Where have I ever denied that the so called one drop rule has been used against people? Point it out. That should be easy for you to do since you have made such an important claim. The government certainly has enforced this law as far as they have been able to. They’ve just not been able to get it down to determining “one drop” of black blood.

Each year at some point I had to turn in a report classifying the number of students that I had by race. (That was when I first noticed that I didn’t think of them by race.) It annoyed me that students who had mixed fathers and white (?) mothers were classified as black. It as a matter of integrity. I balked.

I am not a scientist. But I have read recently that some scientists are saying that DNA is showing that it doesn’t make much sense to classify human being according to race. I did see a program on television that showed a group of young people who had their DNA tested and they were matched with the person in the group that they had the most DNA in common with. The pairs did not match up racially.

So I have no lower limit for blackness and no upper limit for blackness. I believe in the basic unity of all people and I live in a neighborhood that reflects that.

His children would have been closer at one and a half cups. But that’s still quite a bit more than “one drop.” The law was enforced despite the fact that they had considerably more than one drop.

No, you weren’t safe in saying that on this particular issue. Since monstro was not clear on what I was saying either, I will assume that I had not made myself clear. After this post, I hope that you will finally understand that:

  1. I KNOW that the badly named “One Drop Rule” was indeed enforced and
  2. None of the cases presented were examples of people having ONLY one drop of black blood.

You can take your personal insults wherever you would like to take them. There you may continue to claim that I am ignorant and mad to your heart’s content. I desire only to make my beliefs and background clear. I do not want my motives, thinking, and past actions misrepresented.

When I graduated, my college was ranked second only to Stanford in the preparation of teachers for the classroom and for research in education. You don’t realize how weak your particular accusations are in light of my preparation both before and during college. But I think that I explained that in the other thread and maybe you have forgotten already. I know that it is hard to put those times into perspective when you haven’t lived through them.

monstro, the respect is very mutual, as always. That’s not going to go away.

On the other hand, I have five fingers…

80

[QUOTE=Zoe]
I’ll bet you can do the math in your head.
[/quote]

Sure. But I doubt you can say the same. To interpret the one drop rule in literal terms, to deny that this rule was enforced from that foolishly literal standpoint, and to doggedly insist that the name is a misnomer when the spirit of the rule was quite in line with the literal meaning tells me a lot about your thinking skills. And I’m not impressed at all.

Okay, so since apparently our conversation is going down the road of “you’re deliberating misunderstanding me, you big ole meanie”, I feel a headache coming on. You denied the one drop rule had been enforced when you wrote this in post 49:

What could you possibly mean by this, if you WEREN’T saying the rule wasn’t enforced.

Yes I made the “claim” that it was enforced. Supported that “claim” by citing a very famous legal case. But you said it wasn’t good enough because 1/8th is too large to be a dr–…let me stop myself before the stupidity breaks my keyboard.

The sad thing is, I used to respect you too. Even came to your defense when the board piled on you and called you stupid a while ago. Now I’m not so sure I should have done that.

I’m finished.