I remember a few years back hearing about a black woman who was in the National Association of the Advancement of White People.
Before someone chimes in, the organization is NOT an analog to the NAACP.
While I’m loathe to link black Republicans/conservatives to the “race traitor” category (for instance, I think one can be against Affirmative Action and be radically pro-black at the same time), I’m not going to say there’s no such thing as a race traitor. For instance, it’s hard not to think that slaves who snitched on runaways or rebellions weren’t traitorous…even if their actions might be completely understandable from a self-preservation standpoint. The history of black Americans might be vastly different if it hadn’t been for these traitors.
I’ve mentioned it before and I will probably do so again, but there IS such a thing as race. It has nothing to do with intelligence or capability or moral worth, but the scientific concept does exist. Anthropologists are very uncomfortable with it, and tend to hide it these days, but it does exist and denotes certain extremely large human populations, all of which have interacted and interbred. There are only about four of them.
There is also such as thing as ethnicity, which is a much more complicated beast.
Now, I can’t imagine such as thing as a race traitor. or really even an ethnic traitor.
If you insist on putting all of humankind into 4 groups, there are going to be millions of people who just don’t fit. All the traditional races blend as a continuum into each other. For instance, if you travel from Beijing to Berlin, there is no one place where people suddenly stop looking Asian and suddenly look European. Unless, of course, you know where that place is and can cite it for us…
You can, of course, draw arbitrary lines anywhere in the world and call people on one side of line race A and people on the other side race B. But that is necessarily arbitrary.
I have no idea what this has to do in this thread, but when you do business with other countries, you must keep in mind that they will have official holidays on other days than you do. And that includes local or provincial holidays, even those you dislike for some bigoted reason. So too bad for you, Ugly American.
I don’t know, I would tend to think that if you were a slave in the antebellum South, and you ratted out your fellow slaves when they ran away and told the slave hunters where they were hiding even though there was no risk to you just to curry favor with the masters - I think it might be legitimate to call you a race traitor. However, “race” in that situation is just a convenient word for “group” - it’s not bad because you’re both black, it’s bad because you’re both slaves.
I know what you’re saying, but it totally depends on the values and agenda of that group. Is anyone here going to say that Admiral Canaris was anything but a hero for stonewalling Himmler and aiding the group that gave Colonel Staufffenburg the bomb to plant in the bunker on July 20, 1944? He was executed for treason, and in the strict definition of the word he was treasonous, but he’s one of my personal heroes for evaluating the situation on a moral basis and not rolling over for the groupthink around him.
I also drive around with a custom “Republican Against Bush” bumper sticker. I’m not going to blindly support something just because all these other people are.
So in the case of Lindh, I can call him a traitor, but more to the point, immoral (yes, I realize that starts another “No I’m not” “Are too” argument).
Gale was half Jewish, not half Black. His father was a Russian Jew who either converted or ceased to practice Judaism prior to marrying Gale’s mother. They raised their children as Christians.
You may be thinking of Leo Felton, who was convicted of conspiring to blow up Jewish and Black landmarks.
The idea that race is arbitrary or illusionary doesn’t stand up to any level of critical thinking.
Let’s look at a similar but less controversial concept: hair color. There are blondes, brunettes, and redheads. It’s a condition determined by genetics (leaving aside the issue of artificial coloring). There are many people who clearly belong to one of these groups and there are some people who don’t fit as precisely. There are some people who have stereotypical and unjustified beliefs about people based on their hair color.
All of these statements are also true about skin color. But virtually nobody goes around claiming that hair color doesn’t exist or is an illusionary or arbitrary concept or that we all have the same color hair.
The problem is that saying something silly like “race doesn’t exist” is because it destroys your credibility. When you go on to say something like “nobody is better or worse than somebody else because of their skin color” why should someone think your opinion on that is worth anything more than your other demonstratibly false opinion?
Which rather underlines why race IS arbitrary. Why not call blond haired, or red haired, or green eyed people “races” ? Or people with Rh positive blood ? Why are ‘blacks’ a race, but not any of the subgroups that compose them races ? We group some shared characteristics and/or ancestry together and call them a race; others we don’t. We could easily pick others, and ignore the present “races” the same way we do, say, RH positive blood for non-medical purposes.
