This is a hijack, and I don’t intend to make an issue out of it – I’m just curious. Where did you go and for how long?
I spent a year teaching English in China and it was a hell of a learning experience. I’m not Mormon, I did this for, uh, fun.
His challenge said nothing of a “lifetime” or having no way to escape. Let’s review:
I gave up my comforts and went to live in Chile for 2 years. I was a visible minority in Chile. I’ve already done exactly what asahi challenged me to do. That’s what I was saying “been there, done that” to, not some figment of your imagination.
Holy shit, Carson? Shouldn’t there be signs of brain activity before one gets a cabinet job?
I find your evidence that Bannon and Sessions are personally racist to be weak tea. Sorry, I’m unconvinced. We already hashed this out in a thread about Steve Bannon, but if you’d like to start a new thread to discuss Jeff Sessions’ alleged racism, I’m sure we could have an interesting discussion about it, but let’s not hijack this one.
He lived in an inner city as a child, so that qualifies him. I’ve been to a doctor many times, so I can be a surgeon. That’s just how things work, duh.
I heard Trump was disappointed when they told him John Rambo was a fictional character.
Didn’t Carson just say a little while ago he was unqualified for H&HS? He’s actually an impressive neurosurgeon and, I believe, the youngest chair of a medical department at Hopkins.
But he’s going to run HUD? Because is experience in that arena is, what, owning a house?
[With a nod to Seth Meyers]
QFT.
And I don’t think this is hijack because we are indeed talking about Trump’s curious cabinet members.
Hey, he’s black, you know. (public) housing, urban development. The blacks all live in ghettoes. This makes sense through the Trump filter.
Perhaps Trump thinks that the word “urban” in “Department of Housing and Urban Development” is just a euphemism. Like how it is used in phrases like “urban music.”
If you’re of white/Euro-American ethnicity and appearance, I don’t see how you’re claiming to be a “visible minority”, ethnically speaking, in majority-white Chile. You may have been obviously a linguistic minority if you didn’t speak Spanish very well, but that’s not the same as being a racial minority.
You missed the point. The point is that racist actions are still racist even when they’re committed by a person who doesn’t explicitly self-identify as racist or personally utter explicit racial epithets.
Thus, Bannon’s promotion of racism and white nationalism in Breitbart is a racist act, even if Bannon himself doesn’t personally make racist remarks. Sessions’ view that a white lawyer supporting black civil rights is a “disgrace to his race” is a racist position, even if Sessions himself isn’t personally repulsed by the society of black people.
But as I said, this sort of logical distinction seems to be beyond the capacity of today’s Trumpublicans. In their eyes, if you can’t prove definitively that somebody unwaveringly and explicitly espouses racist beliefs, then nothing that person does or says can possibly be racist at all.
I was expecting those links to lead to a video like this.
Virtually everyone who saw me in Chile was able to instantly identify me as a foreigner, and most of those knew I was an American at a glance. That’s what I call a “visible minority”.
ETA: asahi’s challenge said nothing of ethnicity.
Sure it did. In the immediately preceding sentence, it was made entirely clear that the challenge was specifically about race:
So no, if you as a white American are living in majority-white Chile, you are not a “visible minority” in the sense of racial minority, which is very plainly what asahi was talking about.
The fact that most Chileans you met could probably instantly identify you as a white foreigner or a white American, rather than as a white Chilean, does not make you a member of a racial minority group as far as majority-white Chilean society is concerned.
Kimstu,
I’ve found that around here, people tend to have their own definition of “race” and “ethnicity”. Could you define those two words for me?
Since you seem to think that none of Trump’s picks qualify as racists, why don’t you just give us your definitions of those words?
Ben Carson is Trump’s pick to head the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Let’s go to the quarry and throw stuff down there! The next four years are shaping up to be some very interesting times! I’m now hoping that Sarah Palin is nominated for Secretary of State!
What specifically qualifies Carson for this job?
Having spent a lot of years in other countries, it’s no surprise to me that they could pick you out. Even in Europe, an American is almost instantly identifiable just by the way he walks, let alone other clues like clothing, hairstyle, etc.
:dubious: Actually, you seem to be the one who’s using the terms idiosyncratically. Here, to recap, is where asahi introduced the term “racism” into the discussion:
And you replied by more or less denying that the term had any meaningful significance as generally used at present:
So, since the rest of us here seem to agree in accepting the standard usage of the terms “racism” and “race”, and you’re the one who finds it confusing or inaccurate, then I agree with Czarcasm that it’s up to you to explain your own personal, and apparently rather unusual, interpretation of these words.
Apparently, he grew up in an “urban” area.