I’m guessing “Lonesome Polecat” refers to the unfortunate skunk, Monsieur Le Pew.
“zee stripe! It is gone! She is not a skunk at all!” PPLP
I’m a mulatto who doesn’t mind being called black and I don’t find that comment racist, just wrong. It’s completely a matter of opinion since “black” is a social convention, if enough people thought like him, then de facto they’d be right since blackness is only what we make of it.
I’ve been around enough black people who know I am black (ie., comfortable to speak freely) and white people who assume I’m white to know that whites and blacks are almost 100% equally racist. One group just has way more power and influence than the other because of larger numbers and for historical reasons. There are plenty of self-hating blacks, Uncle Ruckus is not a fictional character, my great grandfather in fact was in a club for light skinned negroes and absolutely ADORED white people.
I have a theory that if we raised children in full body jumpsuits with gloves and masks and assigned their masks colors, orange masks would eventually stereotype blue masks as dangerous and violent, and blue masks would think yellow masks were nerds who can’t dance.
My father used to find himself in situations like this. He tells me these stories about his youth and I wonder how it is that he never flipped out on people. He finds the stories funny now and he tells them so that they are funny. But later, I think about all the acting he had to do. I think it had to have torn him up in some way.
It makes me wonder if it’s harder to be a black person who can pass as white in some ways. If I could pass and I did hear bad stuff on a regular basis, I don’t know how I would respond. What if my boss was the one who was “joking” around? Would I have the balls to say something? Probably not. I’ve inherited the survival instinct from my father.
It’s happened to me a total of one time that I can remember right now–a stranger in a bar and I were chatting, and he allowed as how a certain city was a nice place until the “boat people” showed up. I just told him that I was done talking with him and walked off (and then got a hankering for some vermicelli).
By the way, this is the thread I mentioned in my first post in this thread (i.e., where the OP was posting just to say “let me prove I’m not a racist, please pat me on the back” and lots of people called her on it).
You sure there’s “no such thing as race”? You are positing the existence of a person who is “really” black, but looks white. But in other threads you swear up and down that race is a bullshit concept, means nothing, shouldn’t be used, etc. etc. etc.
Strangers in bars believe all kinds of bizarre stuff. One of them thought he was the reincarnation of Robin Hood and that he had to kill the sherrif (chancellor of the exchequer).
Different contexts. Race as it is commonly used is a subjective social construct. Race in objective scientific terms is a more complicated proposition.
You are missing the point. Monstro seems to believe that this person is “really” black, but looks white. Monstro apparently believes there is a realness to a person’s race that goes beyond how they are perceived by other people.
Social psychologists have been studying just that for decades. They call the methodology the minimal group paradigm.
You are certainly full of shit. I haven’t “sworn” up and down any of those things.
I expect you to come back with some bogus shit from yesteryear, saying, “See! Lookit!” like the retarded oaf that you are. And your wrongness will be apparent for all to see. But even with recent history informing you of your incompetency playing the “gotcha” game, you will nonetheless do a search on my postings. This is apparently what gets you off–stalking someone who barely knew you existed till a few days ago. But who am I tell to judge you? Whatever gets you through the night, yo.
I noticed you didn’t address the substance of my post. I also noticed I wasn’t surprised in the least by that.
Ok, I remember that thread. I didn’t think this one was quite the same, but this thread is going all over the place anyway. And… sounds like you handle this the way many reasonable people do.
Presumaly how they choose to self-identify and how other people would apply social constructs to them given their genealogy. Which is what he was alluding to in short hand. Reading that thread, your issue shouldn’t be with monstro’s secret race realism, it should be as referring to discrimination on the basis of skin phenotype as racism (which is apparently a liberal douche subversion of the pure doctrine of racism as espoused by Bolk or Gobineau). See, that’s actually just petty “casual” racism, to be the real victim of racial discrimination they’d need to establish whether he had even one drop of something that can’t even be defined by phenotype.
Race isn’t just what other people perceive you to be if race has an underlying culture/ethnicity tied to it and is based on a rubric based on genotype rather than phenotype. Which is most certainly the case in the US, at least historically. The fact that race is defined in other ways in other societies is what makes it a social construct.
Anyone with passing familiarity with history knows this. And if they don’t know this, they should probably spend more time reading some books rather than wanking off on the internet.
Rand, I hope this is the last time you play “gotcha” with me over some bullshit nonsense.
If I didn’t already have the best sig…
Anyway, I meant to ask before, why are you so antagonistic to people who decry racism on the board? Is it just those particular posters? Or is there some other point?
In Sudan, dark-skinned people are called “green.” I.e., people who in America would be called black are called green in Sudan. Mainly because in that culture it’s considered uncouth to call anyone black. When I worked for the US Census a couple years ago, I was assigned to interview a lot of Arabic-speaking people. When I asked one Sudanese mom about her family’s race, she did say aswad ‘black’ because of course she knew that’s the designation used in America. But her little boy, hearing that, burst out, with a desperate edge to his voice, “No, Mommy! Don’t tell her we’re black! We’re white! We’re white!!”
In Sudanese Arabic they use seven terms for gradations of skin color where we have only two or three. White is basically what we call white. In order of increasing darkness, the rest are yellow, red, brown, green, blue, and black. But to call someone black is considered uncouth as it implies slavery. The Nilotic peoples of South Sudan like Nuer and Dinka, who are much darker than anyone found in America, are the “blue” ones. African-American people if they went to Sudan would be classified variously as yellow, red, brown, or green, depending on the gradation of skin tone. (We do have the old-fashioned expression “high yaller” for light-skinned African-Americans.)
In medieval Persian poetry, also, sabz ‘green’ is used to refer to dark-skinned women who are celebrated in song as erotically attractive. Linguist Joseph Greenberg of Stanford University, doing mass comparisons of vocabularies from languages all around the world, identified putative cognates whose semantic range of “dark colored” included words meaning black in some languages and green in others.
Otherwise, I got nothin.
How much time you got, bro? Let’s see:
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I get annoyed by people who talk about racism but can’t seem to ever define it. Posters here actively avoid defining “racism” like doing so would cause them to automatically contract leprosy. I think the only definition of racism that makes sense is “the belief that people of at least one race are inherently and irredeemably inferior to people of at least one other race.” No one has ever wanted to really discuss what they mean when the use the term “racist” or “racism,” and no one has ever directly discussed my definition.
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I get annoyed that some people seem to find racism in every little thing, even when there are alternative plausible explanations. I think that these people are the reason that we will never get over racism in this country. If every single racist were to die in their sleep tonight, and no one else were to ever become a racist, I think that some people would still find racism in all sorts of situations because that’s just how they’re wired.
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I get annoyed at affirmative action in general. I think that people should be judged not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. And I think that the only way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.
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I get annoyed that some people take their self-perceived anti-racism so far that they make ridiculous claims like “there’s no such thing as race.”
That seems like enough for now.