You are correct, and I see the irony that you’re pointing out. Rand identifies me as a militant black poster frothing with all kinds of extreme racial politics. But if he saw me on the street, he probably wouldn’t know what stereotype to apply to me. The very fact that we have the notion of “passing” indicates that the dictates of race are arbitrary and man-made. The point flew right over his head.
Race is real. But only as real as any other social construct.
Word. 
Monstro, we all appreciate your standing up to Randy Rover like you have, but I think you should know… your web cam is broken.
Web cam not necessary, it is an easy mental picture…kinda like Disney’s Fantasia,
only with dancing penises.
Yep the law seems pretty stupid. Someone on another site posted a link to another story in FL. An old black man got into an argument with a 41 year old Iraq vet who was with his daughter in a park. They scuffled and the vet was shot and killed. The old black man was cuffed and there was an investigation but because of that law he went free.
The old gent left his home and crossed the street with a loaded weapon to confront someone who wasn’t doing anything to him. And yet it was somehow self defense.
Some crazy shit.
Yes.
And, no I don’t have very many black friends.
Here’s a relevant link. It would be wise to watch it and in case that address doesn’t work search: Tim Wise - The pathology of white privilege (YouTube)
Now to the OP. I completely agree. Nearly all my friends (who are white) bandy about the “N” word like it’s nothing. Except when they’re actually is a black person around, then they seem to know better.
Some friends use it just as a word but others have more deep seated racist views. When I point out that they shouldn’t use that word because it’s incredibly offensive and a direct reference to slavery I’ll usually get a response that goes. “I’m not racist. I like black people. It’s just I can’t stand…” And they usually have a comparison for white people too. And that is about as deep as their thinking on the subject goes.
Racism and stereotypes are alive and well, IMO
The difficulty though that I find is not to be a hypocrite. So if I don’t use the “N” word, I shouldn’t use “fag, slut, bitch…”
^ I’ve replaced most of my epithets with “racist”. Where I can’t find a suitably insulting adjective, I just describe someone as a racist. My friend that previously would have voted for the BNP has adopted it too, saying “don’t be a racist” if someone is being annoying. Of course, if widely adopted it’ll lose all its original potency as an accusation, but it also makes it easier to clamp down on other behaviour. For example, “don’t be homophobic” hasn’t achieved the same currency as “don’t be racist”, so one can describe homophobic language as racist.
You get annoyed a lot.
You have misunderstood everything ive said on the topic of race. I do not believe it is meaningful to say “this person is black/white” in some over-arching objective sense of those terms. I do, however, think it is OK for a researcher to separate people into groups for purposes of a study, and it doesn’t matted exactly how those groups are constructed as long as the criteria are explained.
Monstro, on the other hand, by discussing blacks that pass, seems to be saying that there is a realness to the person’s blackness that goes beyond anoter’s perceptions.
Y’all do know that monstro is of the female persuasion, right?
Just checking.
I don’t think he’s fishing for compliments, he’s pitting folks who assume he’s racist because he’s white.
I agree with everything except number 3.
I would add that it is annoying when people pretend that historical racism doesn’t have any present day manifestations that pose hurdles on blacks and American Indians that extend beyond socioeconomic factors.
I think that is silly. You can recognize race exists without being racist.
These people are somewhat rare but they travel in packs. As for the “plausible alternative explanation” comment. Some people put racism so far down the list of possibilities that you basically need an admission of racism before they will believe that racism was present. Of course racism exists. Its not as debilitiating as it used to be but its there.
I don’t. I think affirmative action (in education) is still an important part of developing the critical mass of middle class blacks that you need to break prejudices and create role models and hope for poor black youth. We’ve seen what happens when you eliminate race based affirmative action and replace it with socio-economic criteria, you see black enrollment at competitive colleges drop pretty sharply.
This is of course a silly position. The lines may be more blurred today than they have been in the past but I can certainly pick out the Asian kids in my kids pre-school. I am told that experts can do the same thing simply looking at DNA or skeletons.
I thought it was something like DNA clustering. I also think that anthropologists can tell race by looking at skeletons.
Gamerunknown that’s goofy enough it might work!
The part with the elephants, or the part with the brooms and the buckets of water? Either way, I think I’ve just had a childhood memory ruined by the dope.
Again.
There is a realness beyond other people’s perceptions. It’s called “self-identity” and it is in some ways just as important as perception.
Assuming that you are open to learning and not just trying to get under my skin, I will explain what I mean.
I have an ambiguous racial appearance. I can look like the black woman that I self-identify as, some “type” of Hispanic (depending on the geographic origins of the eye beholding me, I can “look” like every combination of mulatto/mestizo you can name), Middle Eastern, Native American, Pacific Islander, or all of the above, mixed together. What I “am” to the person perceiving me depends on where we are (when I lived in multi-cultural northern New Jersey, I was any and everything but when I lived in Atlanta, I was just another black person), if I’m speaking (I don’t speak with AAVE typically, but my voice can carry a noticable blaccent), what my hair looks like (I wear it short and naturally curly, which gives me a different look than when it was long and straightened), and even who I am standing next to at the time.
So what race am I? If race is all about someone else’s perception, then how would I identify myself racially? If I’m filling out a form that asks me to identify my race, should I go out on the street and conduct a survey, asking people for their perceptions? Or should I put down what I self-identify as?
My father is a “passable” black man. What this means is that he not only has an ambiguous racial appearance, but he can do what I cannot do–he can be perceived as white (not Hispanic white, but white white). But he has never considered himself a white person. Why? Because his parents are not white. They were both visibly black (or at least decidedly non-white). He grew up in an all black-neighborhood, attended the AME church down the street, hung out on the corners with all his black friends, and was identified as such when around the black and white folk who knew him. That fact that sometimes he finds himself mistaken as “white” does not mean that he is a white dude. It means that he has an ambiguous racial appearance. But his identity is “black”. Which means that as soon as people realize that this is how he self-identifies, their perception switches from “this is a white man” to “this is a light-skinned black man”. Just like when people see me and I let them know that I am a black woman, they will switch from, “this is a Latina” to “this is a light-skinned black American”. My experience is not of a Latina’s or whatever other label I might resemble. It is of a black woman brought up in the urban south. Experience shapes self-identity. Other people’s perceptions shape experience.
Hopefully, for most people this switching of perception isn’t a problem. But some people–who we usually call racists–do not like that this can happen and will often change their behavior along with their perceptions. This reality highlights the importance of self-identify AND perception. Neither are “real” in any objective sense, but they are very real in the context of human interactions and life outcomes. My father is at higher risk for having undiagnosed prostate cancer than a white dude because of his cultural milieu. But statistics about the prevalence of melanoma in black people should not inform him about his own risks–a fact that I’m constantly nagging him about when he sunbathes.
To reiterate, none of my personal story negates the “realness” of race. It simply underscores its complexity and the fact that there is nothing biological about it.
I hope I haven’t wasted my time giving you respect you haven’t earned.
I think one of the biggest issues in this discussion, and other people have mentioned it, too, is that race has different meanings in different contexts. For example, in the OP, “race” is a social and historical construct, created from some accidents* of history, and today assigned to people based on a few characteristics (skin color, hair type, cultural affiliation) that are of little biological relevance.
On the other hand, doing genetic research, I often have to deal with “race”. In those cases, what I’m really concerned about is clusters of genetic similarity. As has been said many times, Americans of white European descent have allele frequencies more in common with each other than with Americans of Chinese or African descent.
In many cases, because of the data available, we are forced to use the information provided, which is almost always a subject’s self identified “race”. So, if Monstro was in one of our studies and called herself African American on that day, she would be grouped with the other African Americans for the purposes of the study. Her nuanced views on her own race wouldn’t really come into it. It would be great if we could do a full genetic ancestry panel on all of our subjects, and group them based on scientific data.
Contrast that then, with a biologist who might call two subspecies of an animal different races. Even the genetic differences between “races” of humans do not anywhere approach the differences seen between subspecies of animals.
So, to me, a racist is somebody who hates a group of people based on an arbitrary set of traits (which might only be known to the racist). Does that hated “race” map conveniently to a cluster of allele frequencies? Maybe, maybe not. There’s more genetic variance in Africa than in the rest of the world, so by being racist against blacks, somebody is really being racist against a bunch of relatively unrelated groups who happen to have dark skin. If you’re a racist and want to back up your racism with biology, then try to hate a genetically isolated population which is reasonably distinct from other groups.
*Europeans colonizing Africa, etc. Not really accidents in any sense other than things the OP, the racist colleague, and the temp workers can’t do anything about.
Thanks for this post. I understand what you mean by passing now, and I think what you are saying is valid and makes sense.
Now, I would appreciate it if you would read the post right below yours. Geneticists can group people according to how similar their genes are to each other, or according to certain characteristics they share, etc. And they can use the term “race” to refer to those clusters. And all I’m saying is I don’t think there is anything wrong with that. We may learn something about how humans work that could help us cure diseases.
Sure but let’s say Monstro called herself “White”, would you put her in the “white” groups? Monstro has at least as much European ancestry, if not more than African. So what do you do with her?
‘Race’ as a Social Construct i.e. the one drop rule, tells us to put her in with the African-Americans, but ‘Race’ as biology tells us genetically, she may be more European, despite her physical apperance.
Who decides which value is the most important?
I have now stolen that line. Thank you!
Nothing I have ever said should make you ASSUME I would disagree with you. This has been the source of my irritation. The two of us have never had a “racial” tango with each other, as far as I know, but you are antagonistic to me in a way that assumes we have.
I agree with your view, but only up to a point. I will share another story with you to explain why.
Last year I went to a neurologist. He urged me to get tested for a disease that, from his own notes, “is common among African Americans.” As soon as I left his office, I went home and did some research about this disease. He was wrong on two fronts. One, the disease is not common about African Americans. It is not common among anyone. It is a very rare disorder, with a number of documented cases in the hundreds. Secondly, it is not found disproportionately in African Americans, but in South Africans. Most if not all of the cases that have been traced back to families with fairly recent South African ancestry.
Now you might be thinking, “But monstro! You’re a black American, which means you don’t know for sure where your African ancestry comes from.” And this is correct. But I do know that most slaves were taken from western and central Africa. The chances of me having South African ancestry, recent enough to warrant fears of having a lethal genetic disorder, is very very low.
Moreover, as I have alluded to earlier, I do not only have African ancestry. I have European as well. I have no way of knowing how much, but as far as the doctor knew, the woman sitting in his office could have had more European ancestry than African. He never thought to ask me about my background. As I did more research, I found out that there are other genetic disorders quite similar to the South African one that are found disproportionately among European ethnicities. And yet he insisted that I get tested only for one of these diseases. The test wouldn’t have picked up any of the other disorders. Just the “African” one.
I am just as likely, if not more likely, to carry the genes for the “European” disorders as the “African” one, but he recommended I only get tested for the latter. Do you think this was wise? Wouldn’t the more prudent course be to either get tested for ALL of them or, if this is cost-prohibitive, recommend that I sit down with a genetic counselor so that we can narrow down the one that I am most likely to have? Again, he did not ask me anything about my background, but he did identify my blackness in his notes. My blackness filled up the room, blinding him to all other hypotheses (except for sickle cell anemia :rolleyes:).
So yeah, I agree that race is a useful proxy for population, which helps pinpoint inheritable diseases and all that jazz. But if one doesn’t think hard enough to see beyond race, they can draw erroneous conclusions with potentially harmful implications.
I’ve replaced that Kinky Friedman’s “I christianed him down.”