New "Let It Go" Rule in GD?

The BBQ Pit
61

See my post above which describes you with the face’s insistence that three cups and one drop are the same thing. Can you image what she must do when copying a recipe?

I’m glad to see that you agree that it could not have been tested.

I don’t know what needs explaining about a curling iron. Some people who are considered “white” have hair that is straight and some have hair that is curly. I don’t understand the genetics enough to explain the texture and origin of the kinds of hair. If you can explain the origins of straight, curly, wavy, round hair, flat hair and any other kind of hair and how they overlap, I would be interested.

My hair is a mixture. It is wavy, curly, and nappy in front of the ears. The nappiness is from my grandfather who had auburn hair. His daughter, my aunt, had straight hair and had to use a curling iron. Who knows? If you do, I am willing to be educated in the facts of genetics. I am ignorant in many areas of science.

I do not object to be calling “ignorant.” We are all ignorant of many things. I am not ignorant of the specific things that you now claim. I don’t recall ever having been ignorant of that rule. Any Southerner my age knew the rule. Whites couldn’t drink from “colored” fountains either. And if you wanted to be stared at, just walk into the “colored only” bus station at Greyhound in the South in the early 1960’s. The blacks did not want any white woman getting them in trouble.

I know that I am ignorant for never having lived as a black. But if you were born after 1960, there is a lot about the Civil Rights Movement that you don’t relate to either. At least I have taken responsibility for my ignorance.

Again, no one defines me but me.

62

Hi, spoke-! It’ll be okay! If you think about it, we’re all on the same side. They just don’t want to believe it. That’s the sad part.

63

I know that I should just walk away from this thread and let the stupidity in your posts speak for itself, but I can not resist the urge to respond.

Zoe, whatever magnificent, awe-inspiring “point” you’re trying to make about the one drop rule it is, without a doubt, the dumbest “point” that anyone has ever felt the need to make in GD. Congratulations for earning that superlative when the competition is as fierce as it is. But I urge you, for your sake moreso than mine or anyone elses, please stop trying to convince tomndebb of your rightness. He’s not going to budge just because you keep whining, and most importantly, he shouldn’t budge.

It would be far better for me to think that you were ignorant of a historical fact (albeit, kind of a big one) than to assume that, apropos of nothing, you were using an autistic-like literal interpretation of the one drop rule to argue something completely and totally unrelated to the conversation at hand and in such a way as to imply that whites didn’t care that much amount about black ancestry because curly hair was a “prized attribute and young ladies with straight hair used curling irons to duplicate the effect.” I think you should actually be flattered that I didn’t initially assume you were being that dumb and offensive.

When you made it all too apparent what your real argument was, I expressed how I felt about it quite clearly and succinctly:

Why do you call this “double talk”? The last clause makes it plain why your “point” deserves to be shit upon and shut down. If the spirit of the rule was equivalent to its literal interpretation, then it doesn’t matter if it was impossible for them to test for drops of blood. I have no doubt that if white folks during those times had had the capabilities to perform such tests, those results would have been used as actionable information. One only has to consider cases like Plessy to see where I coming from with this belief. And this is why I have concluded that your “point” is, without a doubt, the stupidest point that anyone has made in GD.

I hope you understand that now.

64

No, Zoe, she insisted no such thing. You were the only one in that thread who was talking about cups of blood, measuring drops of blood, etc. you with the face was clearly using that phrase in a figurative sense, as it has been used for many many years.

65

Exactly. They couldn’t test for it, but no amount of blood or DNA or heritage or any other word we want to use would have been too small for these people had they the capability of finding it.

And had they been so incredibly stupid to believe that curly hair could only be the result of one drop or many drops of African blood, curly hair would also have been used as actionable information. But even the shockingly ignorant people of that period knew better than that.

66

Zoe, I’m sure that your hair is very pretty.

If you had jumped in with the news that “one drop” didn’t refer to actually draining someone of his/her blood and examining it drop by drop, that would have been – well, slightly dotty, since no sane person did or would think that anyway, and a little rude in the way of an interruption that contributed nothing, but not too objectionable. Even as you kept repeating it, it would have been merely annoying, like a child who knows the facts about the Easter Bunny and insists on sharing it with the adults in the room every five minutes. At least the fact would have been right - inane, but right.

Instead, you offered it up in support of your denial that the one drop rule was ever enforced, a proposition with exactly the same value as the claim that because statutes are printed in black and white, that so-called “blue laws” were never enforced. At this point you were no longer merely annoying, and here’s why. The denial is a semantic quibble, depending on defining “one drop rule” in a way everyone knows is wrong, one that could result only from improbably profound ignorance or intent. Not only is the conclusion wrong, the argument itself trivializes the issue in an insulting way. As does the whole hair thing.

I have no idea how you acquired the notion that curly hair is probative of African ancestry. It sounds like one of those things heard or mis-heard as a child that never gets directly contradicted or thought much about or otherwise works its way out of one’s head. By itself, it’s a little lump of ignorance, and a forgiveable one. But you offer it as proof that, far from what everybody else may think the one drop rule implies, African ancestry was seen as positively desirable by white southerners, some of whom resorted to curling irons in order to pass as being of mixed race. Which is such a perfect inversion of reality that it’s not just wrong, it’s actually offensive to the truth.

But denying that the one drop rule was enforced is wrong mostly because it was enforced, to the detriment of many, as part of a pattern of denying human and civil rights to millions of people, and as a theory of humanity that served as the very basis of racism in this country. It was a crime, and pretending it didn’t happen is wrong. Not that you’re to be classed with David Irving, but still, wrong.

You are correct, Zoe, that you’re defining yourself. Please don’t define yourself as someone who thinks that because she was once, say, a teacher, that she can’t misspell a word, or that because she took part in the struggle for civil rights, she can’t sometimes be wrong about that as well.

67

They do share one salient characteristic. They are both volumetric measurements, and as such are best thought of as figurative examples, for the purposes of establishing a legal standard for determining who was subject to discrimination under Jim Crow, and who was not.

If we consider 1/10 ml as equivalent to “one drop,” eleven more generations back from three cups would about get you there. And it would still be silly.

68

are you confusing “could not have been tested” with “was not enforced/enforcable”?

the so called (notice how I used the term ‘so called’?) “one drop rule” was enforced. THe fact that enforcement of it did not actually include the ‘testing’ of a single drop of blood is irrelevant.

69

Nope. But you with the face is when she reads my comments!

Further, she claims that the 'one drop rule" could be enforced from a literal standpoint

She admits only that the literal interpretation was “foolish.” (But not a misnomer?)

The “one drop” part of it was not enforced because they couldn’t test for just one drop. The “one drop rule” or “one drop law” was enforced as long as you looked the slightest bit black or if they could find any trace of black in your ancestry. The name “one drop” was a misnomer because they had no way of testing for it. That has been my contention since I first posted about it.

The first time that I commented, I did not explain myself very well. When that became obvious to me, I reexplained more carefully. And then I went over it again. And again. And still again. But after I wrote it in big block letters in crayon in simple words illustrated with stick figures, I knew I had explained enough. Except I explained it again in this post out of sheer habit. It’s become a tick now.

Maybe you with the face really does have all of the comprehension of a sack of hair in addition to her basic maliciousness. I don’t know whether she seriously cannot understand or is just pretending to be slack-jawed. Only she can know that. Her malicious acts are observable.

I’ve seen jsgoddess post some decent stuff elsewhere. I think that she has been prompted to post unkind remarks in the linked thread. Just a guess. Ordinarily, I don’t think that she is that paranoid.

The King of Soup is too savvy not to know what he is doing. He is trolling. I’m through feeding that troll. Oh, waiter! There’s a lie in my soup!

70

wring, let’s say for a moment that you are participating in a thread that has some special signifigance for you. It doesn’t matter what the reason is. For others it may or may not be of particular importance, but for you, the subject is especially meaningful.

At some point in the post, you comment on one of the side issues being discussed. Someone mentions a couple of times that he finds that to be a rather “odd” comment. A couple of other people whose input you trust indicate that they have misunderstood what you have said. And still another friend says that it is irrelevant.

You can believe that it may really be irrelevant in the eyes of your friend and maybe in the eyes of others who found it “odd.” But in the meantime, you want to clarify what you said so that your friends don’t misunderstand. But by the time you do that, a couple of other people are deliberately twisting your words to make them mean exactly the opposite of what you meant.

And this is a subject that is especially meaningful to you…

That’s why you don’t let it go right away…een though it is irrelevant to someone else.

monstro, I was rereading something that you posted above. I think that you are mistaken about one thing. My background is relevant information to others who don’t know anything about me. When you hear information coming from someone, you should always consider the source. Would a well-educated Southerner who had spent most of her waking hours for twenty years in a black community be more likely to know about the enforcement of the one drop rule than someone who was poorly educated and had lived a segregated life in rural New England?

Of course, it depends on the individual, but we are talking about likelihood.

I am beginning to wonder if people are so prejudiced against Southerners that that counts against me more than teaching for twenty years counts for me.

71

Lemme see if I can translate a couple of things:

  1. Zoe: genetics doesn’t work that way. If I have a Cherokee great-grandfather, I don’t have 7 quarts of white blood and 1 quart of Cherokee blood in my system. I don’t have a single Cherokee blood cell or a single white blood cell (ha ha, you know what I mean). There’s no such thing as a drop of black blood, not in the body of a Kenyan. Blood is red, and while it carries genetic code, every drop of blood in a person carries identical genetic blood. Talking about the one-drop rule as if there’s anything literal about it is a bit odd.
  2. ywtf: do you agree that, at a certain point, the “one-drop” rule was, albeit metaphorical, impossible to enforce? Because there was not at the time any way to genetically test someone for recent African ancestry, folks worked from phenotypes, and someone whose phenotype was sufficiently white would, absent compelling ancestral records, be able to pass as white, despite recent African ancestry, if they chose to do so. In this sense, Zoe was making a valid point, although her extension of the “one drop” metaphor obscured it.

To me, it looks as though either side has had multiple chances to resolve this dispute peaceably, if you would try to understand the point the other side was making (however obscured by poor rhetoric) and if you would offer the other side a way to save face, instead of insisting that the other side were racist, strident, and/or idiotic.

Daniel

72

But it is a silly, ridiculous, completely irrelevant sidetrack, Zoe.

Her greater point was that the “one drop” rule is just one arbitrary way of defining race, no less odd or crazy than any other definition. You seemed to take great umbrage at her belief that it was born out of racism, which is the least controversial of her statements. And if you aren’t taking this standpoint, I’m totally confused about what your point was.

It seemed to me that as soon as ywtf responded to you in the other thread that you were overreacting, you labeled her as an opponent and went on the attack. I don’t know why else you would go after her very casual reference to the “one drop rule”. It didn’t seem to me that you were about explaining anything. You wanted a fight, and when she brought one, you started playing the victim game.

You nip on someone’s heels enough and eventually they’ll kick back.

You should let this go and hit her back on another day. 'Cuz this is just lame.

73

The King of Soup is not lying, and he is not trolling, Zoe. He is telling you exactly how your exchange read to a bunch of people. Perhaps his interpretation is misconstrued from what you intended to say, but I’m pretty sure that isn’t his fault.

74

Wow. Just… wow.

75

I’ve been following this entire dust-up with some interest, and I have to say I agree. This whole thing over the meaning of “one drop” just seems incredibly silly and beside the point. I doubt there is a poster on this board that interprets the one drop rule as being about literally A DROP of blood. Yes, it’s a misnomer, and a sign of the sheer amount of ignorance that was present in those times when it came to issues of race. So?

76

While to me it’s obvious that Zoe was picking a fight with you with the face because ywtf told her in another thread that she was making too big a deal over my comments.

And there is no way to resolve a dispute with someone who has decided to play martyred pitbull with a side order of hysteria.

77

This is basically what I came in to say. What was the purpose of the nitpicking over the phrase, Zoe?

78

Not any more impossible than any law on the books. Which means its a moot point that brings nothing to a discussion about race.

It’s illegal to speed above 70 on most major US highways. This is what the law says. Does that mean everyone who goes above 70 will receive a ticket? No, because it’s nigh impossible to post enough cops with radar guns that will allow speeders to get caught. Does that mean it’s accurate to say the law is impossible to enforce? No. In fact, it’s would be highly disingenous to state that.

The same process applies the so-called one drop rule (thanks wring for introducing the concept of “so-called” to our figuratively-imparied Dopers). The rule kept anyone with verifiable traces of “African blood” from receiving the same rights and privileges as whites.

And if I speed on a rural highway and the closest cop is 50 miles away, I won’t get a ticket. And if I kill someone and dump their body in a kudzu jungle off in Tuskegee somewhere, and no one ever suspects me of doing anything, I won’t get charged and convicted of murder. And if I plagiarize a source that no one has ever read or heard of, I won’t get caught and kicked out of school.

And if I look white and no one knows that one of my great grandparents was black, then I won’t have to sit in the colored train car.

But the outcome of all of these scenarios change just as soon as someone knows the truth about me. So I’m trying to figure out what value there is in pointing out that the one drop rule, to a certain point, was impossible to enforce. How does this enhance our understanding of the implications of that practice? What benefit is there in acknowledging that there were logistical limitations associated with enforcing this rule?

No she is not. Please stop trying to make one happy ending. Zoe is the one that created two Pit threads over this issue, and I’m not going to tell her that she has made a valid point just to make her feel warm and fuzzy inside. That would be dishonest of me.

79

You know, upon thinking about this, I have to say that I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many people being so wrongly accused of having motivations other than just to have an enlightening discussion. In just one or two posts, Zoe has accused jsgoddess of being paranoid, The King of Soup a lying troll, and you with the face as being “basically malicious.” I don’t think any of these things are true, and certainly have not been demonstrated here.

Zoe, it really looks as though you misunderstood what jsgoddess said to you about the white hoods. It seems as though your reaction to that is what has spawned your go-around with you with the face and 2 pit threads.

Considering how angry you are over people misconstruing your words, I would think that you could give jsgoddess the benefit of the doubt. It looks very much (to me) as though what she was saying was, “I’m not saying this makes you a racist, but is that what it means to be colorblind to say that you basically forgot a person was black, and indeed saw them however momentarily, as a white person?” What she was questioning, I think, was what it means to be “colorblind,” (which, I might remind you, was the topic of the thread), not accusing you of racism. She was questioning the idea that it takes forgetting a person is a particular color in order to “prove” that you are not a racist. This is not an indictment on you, necessarily, but on our culture and how we see race. Certainly, what she said was not worth all of this.

80

Left Hand of Dorkness, I understand that genetics doesn’t work that way. And although the general consensus is that my question was irrelevant – and certainly any point made during a debate should be relevant – I did not understand that it wasn’t relevant to others at the time I asked it.

(Those that seem almost hostile about its relevance did not comment at all about the multipost flirtation that went on in that thread. Was that relevant? (No, it didn’t bother me, but I don’t get all bent out of shape if we don’t stick to a strictly formal debate form. Et tu, Hazlenut Coffee?

LHOD, You’ve been able to sort through what went wrong well. It is easy to confess to poor rhetoric and I have done so – though not using exactly that particular word for those of who are literal minded.

Maybe you and jsgoddess can sort through the genetics of different kinds of hair. Questions of genetic differences are a puzzle to me, but jsgoddess seems to be a source of information. Anything you can add would be appreciated.

I took no umbrage at all, monstro. Of course the one drop rule was born out of racism! How could it not be? That would be illogical.

**Racism in all of its variations is ugly. Your sister has a problem with it. **

If you look back through the posts of both GD threads, try making a list of insults that I made. Before, you said I was being too defensive. You said nothing about my making any attacks on your sister.

Why don’t you be specific about what you think I said that was insulting and attacking. I dare you.

In the first thread about race, you were the first to question my feelings. And you were the one who labelled me “colorblind.” I didn’t mind the label because I didn’t think it was given with hostility. I thought you knew me well enough. But when others said that I had claimed to be “colorblind,” why didn’t you speak up? You knew that I had no made that claim.

As for the question on the one drop rule, I didn’t think it was an irrelevant sidetrack. You did. I thought the flirtation was an irrelevant sidetrack. So what? Are we that formal in GD? We all have a right to our opinions. Maybe your opinion is worth more than mine. Maybe jsgoddess’s opinion of whether my feelings were for real or not wasn’t a very appropriate thread to put up in GD. “Let’s debate Zoe’s feelings.” How’s that for a thread topic? That’s how that thread read to me. Next time, let’s talk about whether you are being honest about your feelings and experiences. Let’s question whether you are truthful. Or maybe something jsgoddess mentions would be good to put under a microscope. Let you see what it feels like to be nitpicked and have your integrity questioned as if you had done nothing of any value.

Sorry if my “hitting her” has been scheduled for a bad day for her. She has always been so meek and quiet. (Except for that razor tongue that her friends love.) When would be a more convenient time for her?

I played by the rules, monstro. Your sister did not. She is the one that was described as an angry woman * by her friend* in the other thread.

You are right. She nipped at my heels one too many times and I kicked back, but only figuratively. Go read the thread, monstro. Look at the reality of it.

I will end my contribution to this thread with my choice for the stupidest thing ever posted in General Debates. Then I’m having a cup of tea following by several days off for some good reading.

“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.” - you with the face