Given the dispute that has broken out, I am closing this to allow people to cool down and give the forum mod a chance to deal with it before it spins further out of control. This dispute would be better handled in the Pit. The forum mod may reopen it or take further action.
Ok, I’ve reopened the thread so that discussion of the general topic can continue. But don’t engage in personal attacks on other posters in this thread. If you want to fight, take it to the Pit.
Yes, but not exactly in the same terms as Americans would, and, like anywhere else, it changes over time. My brother-in-law didn’t speak English until he started school, but I wouldn’t call him Italian, or Italian-Australian. I would say that he is Australian, and also that his family are Italians… and when he started school, he was probably just a Wog.
The main thing is that so many Australians have migrant parents, that it’s not a useful category, and “Italian-Australian” is not a useful label: it doesn’t make you ‘not Australian’, and it doesn’t make you ‘not Italian’ (anyway, your mother registered your Italian citizenship without telling you), so what does it say?
From this distance, Harris looks the same. She is identifiably American, born American, her color and Canada/Jamaica/India background are interesting and politically important, she’s an American.
We get a lot of American media, so what ever she is called in America, that’s what she will be called in Australia. If she was Australian, the labeling would be different.
In America, if you’re white, then anything more specific is entirely optional. Nobody really considers Italian-Americans and Irish-Americans separate ethnicities and that’s reflected by the fact that in any official statistical collection, they would just be “white.”
If you’re not white, whites people aren’t going to give you the option of not having an ethnicity. So you either accept whatever label white people choose to put on you or you fight to have a label that means something to you.
Obama is half Kenyan and half white. Harris is half Indian and half Jamaican. But you bet your ass that both of them were treated as “black” by the white people around them. That part is beyond their control.
It’s up to Harris to decide how much to talk about her Indian side, which, as it turns out, was fairly significant, given that her father was out of the picture early and she was raised among her Indian relatives.
Just to sum up, because she’s not white, she isn’t allowed by the white majority culture to be just plain “American,” like Italian-Americans and Irish-Americans, etc., are allowed to be.
She’s as American as anyone else born in the USA. The fact that she’s intelligent as well as attractive is good enough for me. She’s be a fine VP or even POTUS down the road.
Fine as in “of high quality,” or fine as in “ooh baby, she fine?” You better clarify before a fight breaks out.
Yes. that is the way American think of the term Asian-American. Which was kinda the point of this thread: Sen. Harris can use whatever term she likes but it was a calculated move, Im gueesing, to use the Asian-American label instead of Indian-American. I just wondered why. Again, there is no problem with that term, it’s actually sensible. It’s just that’s not the way it’s generally used in the US so it immediately stuck out to me. I think the campaign is maybe trying to get a little extra credit for trailblazing.
“Look! There’s Kamala! She gives great hope to all the African-American and Indian-American children. And also, cause some staffer had a crazy-great idea this morning, Kamala is now also a role model for Japanese, Chinese and Korean-Americans, too”
It seems strange the census form doesn’t have a ‘mixed ethnicity’ category. In the UK, we’d have:
Mixed/Multiple ethnic groups
- White and Black Caribbean
- White and Black African
- White and Asian
- Any other Mixed/Multiple ethnic background, please describe
(The above taken from the Office of National Statistics website.)
It occurs to me that she might have chosen to use an unexpected label precisely to prompt people to talk about it in more detail, both from the perspective of “any publicity is good publicity”, and to cause people to actually put some thought into their views of different races.
You don’t say.
Let’s not junior mod.
Colibri
If I recall correctly, the form allows you to check (“tick”) as many of the boxes as you want. So you can build your own mixed ethnicity.
But there’s also the fact that she’s got a lot of “firsts” in her basket. JFK had the “Catholic” label appended to his name everywhere in 1960 (and he wasn’t even the first Catholic candidate). Nobody even cares that Biden is Catholic, because that novelty has been shed.
Right, I was just trying to explain why, from an Australian point of view, we might seem to be unnecessarily requiring Harris to choose an ethnicity more specific than just “American.”
Your comment comes across as snarky and I would generally ignore but just in case… It’s not a naive comment - it’s important to reiterate what’s obvious to some and not others and create consensus. There are many people who don’t recognize they have biases at all.
It was snarky. Because Jesus Christ on a cracker, what have all the mass protests been about? What is the Other Thing that’s going on besides a pandemic and resulting economic crash? What is the biggest fattest fact about US history about? As far as I can tell, skin color is the defining problem of American culture. Of course there are those who won’t admit that if you held a knife to their throat but that is exactly why it is still true. Your comment came across as bizarrely tentative, like you just came to realize this surprising fact.
Good point. I would have to say yes. She is of high quality.
The census form asked you to “mark one or more boxes.” (cite) Is there a reason you felt uncomfortable marking multiple boxes?
You are correct! Interesting… even if I saw that I am not sure why I didn’t consider it as being an option for them or anyone else. Too bad there wasn’t an asterisk with a link to the page you cite for those needing help. At this point I am not even sure how I filled the form out for them. I wish I had a copy but they didn’t provide one at the end of the online process.
I think I saw it and approached it in genealogical terms and not emotional/associative terms. They are 50% single race Asian which is more than any other single race that I added to their DNA so… they are Asian. Maybe If there were a box for Eurasian I would have ticked that off.