says the guy posting four times in a row with line-by-line rebuttals. Thanks for the feedback.
Oh, sweet screaming Haplorhini, are you one of those people who doesn’t believe “fish” exist? Do you really not get what he meant? I mean, in a world where people call Black Africans in Africa “African-Americans,” it’s possible you don’t!
Don’t ask me, I’m a notorious anti-Semite. I can’t tell these things.
Oh, open your ears and shut your yap. He lives in the Far East (from context it sounds like Japan, but I seem to remember from previous threads it’s actually somewhere around Thailand), you sheltered self-important pseudo-bougie Yank moron.
This is pretty much my experience of the terms.
Well, yes? But the corollary is that sometimes you have to offend people and accept it. Because they are emotionally tied to stupid self-definitions.
I understand why my (tiny) Chinese (very tiny) friend insists that she does not look Japanese—“Japanese people are short!” she says—and there are reasons of both regional and personal history there.
Misinterpreting the meaning of “Oriental” in the mouth of someone who didn’t come from a part of North America with a strong history of anti-Chinese sentiment? That’s a mild self-important ignorance.
Insisting that one’s particularly ethnicity/party/nation/cult has TRUE SCIENCE and ARE GOD’S PARTICULAR FAVORITE CREATURES? Yeah, we may offend such a person in his self-importance, and be justified in doing so. Even if they are a POC, yes.
But the other, milder cases are not exactly race crimes on the part of the “offensive,” nor malicious.
Did I mention sophomoric? Throw that in too.
I understand that the Japanese experience in North America was different from the Chinese experience, and the Chinese experience different between Appalachia, California, and Hawai’i, and different depending on whether one lived in a Chinatown or not, and different in different eras…
Sometimes that level of granularity is not what we have. Are you actually me at eight years old, when I couldn’t understand why anyone would estimate in maths?
You mean Paul, the blotchy pink guy with the tall nose and tiny nostrils; Dawayne, the nappy-headed darkie; and Chang, the handsome yellow dude?
This is untrue, even in Europe. It depends on what level of “granularity” the speakers intend to discuss.
Clearly we need to ask someone in Barranquilla what term they use.
Apparently Mr Dibble is.
Appreciated as always!
I need to apologize to MrDibble. I assumed he was both white and a Yankterms that must be confusingly ungranular to him. I forgot that he was our resident proud Cape Colored of um, Khoekhoe descent?
Yeah. And despite calling LHoD sophomoric, I agree with him in the argument with MrDibble. So there you go.
I agree with OP. Some people are just pissy.
No it isn’t. Maybe if this was a thread about “LHoD’s local meetings” it would be beside the point, but it’s not. The point is that you give one specific anecdote (“this one time, grouping by race only was OK”) and expect it to counter a general principle (“Don’t group people by race”) and I was pointing out that no, it doesn’t counter it because the circumstances are not always like your home town.
But you’d only know this when you heard them talk, not before, when the grouping was already decided.
No, it doesn’t make it impossible to have the conversation. But it does give the lie to assigning people to racial groupings before addressing them as individuals, which is what I object to.
If we were talking about single exceptions, I’d be all with you. But we’re not, we’re talking about *millions *of people.
You can - but you’d be stereotyping all the same.
And that’s fine. I agree we can’t have many conversations without doing so.
But you have to acknowledge up front that that’s what you’re doing, and that addressing individual concerns is superior.
Errm, no, you *didn’t *acknowledge any exceptions in your initial post. If you had started out that way, we wouldn’t be having this argument at all.
“categorizing the speakers by race was absolutely appropriate” is an exact quote from you. If there were exceptions, how would it be an appropriate categorization?
As a amusing folk relic or a name for something on my plate, sure, fish exist.
As a meaningful scientific classification, no, fish don’t exist.
I “get” what he means, I just don’t agree with the usage.
Gosh, and no-one in Asia is ever racist towards other Asians or sounds like it…
HA ha ha! Idiot. Subsequent apology noted, but idiot all the same.
Where the everliving fuck, in the modern world, do we not have that level of granularity? We’re not observing people in the wild and having to make random stabs at their ethnicities, here. We can always just ask (if it’s even relevant, which, most of the time, it really, really isn’t).
In terms of discussing a given individual ethnicity. I’d love some examples of where this happens in Europe.
Mr Dibble, if I want to have the conversation talking about tendencies of folks with different racial identifications to have different experiences, I can say something like,
If I go by your level of granularity, the individual, I can’t talk about how racism has affected our community’s schools. Instead, I need to say that same paragraph, taking out references to black and white, for each individual student who went to Lee Edwards High School, something like this:
and so on through the alphabet.
Tell me again how your level of granularity facilitates discussion and understanding?
You admit it. Bad understanding of the applicability of cladistic and non-cladistic classification claims another brain. By this logic, “foreigner” is meaningless (because everyone is a citizen of a specific country somewhere, not “the Land of Foreigntia”), and so is “colored” when referring to fabric (because it must be a given color or pattern, yes?), and so forth.
You don’t get epistemology, or you don’t get the limitations of human opportunities (and manners). Sometimes a person doesn’t have that information, even though the information exists. Sometimes that person had no chance (or no socially acceptable chance) to ask.
I dare you to try entering South Africa into Eurovision, and then listen to why you can’t.
Sometimes; *very, very *slight.
Cladistic wins out, every time. Non-cladists can suck it (for animal classification. Plant classification is a mess. Don’t even talk to me about bacteria) .
Meaningless, no. Context is, of course, king. Like I said, I find “fish” a perfectly meaningful category for certain uses.
NAaah, “colored” fits perfectly fine in a cladistic framework.
No. I disagree that the limits are a matter of practicality vs ingrained resistance to doing the right thing.
IME, most of the time, “that person” has no need to include ethnicity in their characterization of a person in the first place. There are very few instances where knowledge of another person’s ethnicity is necessary at all.
Eurovision is an ethnicity-based competition now? And here I thought it was nationalistic. But I guess it must be ethnically-restricted - I mean, just look at how Herrenvolkisch this former contestant is…
or, IOW, how does that response address my point in any way?
I give up, you’re an insane pedant.
I think the main problem here is that the two main sides in this current debate (MrDibble’s and LHoD’s with other posters) aren’t actually opposing – and thus butting heads – but are coming from two completely different approaches – and thus just moving past each other. This is why it’s possible for me to feel that both sides have valid arguments.
MrDibble seems to be arguing from a more theoretical or ideal point of view, while LHoD is coming from a more practical or pragmatic POV. The concept of distinct and separate races is total bullshit, as MrDibble has explained – quite eloquently – in many threads here. Race is not a biological construct* but a social one, which is why racism/racial bigotry is baseless and unjustifiable.
But I’m pretty sure that LHoD agrees with that. His argument (IMHO) instead focuses on the current reality and its negative impacts. People do insist on classifying people into races and people are racist. Do they have any rational, legitimate, or valid base/reason? No. But that doesn’t change the fact that they think they do. And it doesn’t change the fact that people are directly harmed and oppressed as a result. Someone who wants to help society** progress needs to deal with the reality of how things are and work within that context. You can’t effectively solve a problem when you don’t know (or don’t look at) the actions that caused the problem in the first place.
- For many reasons, such as: there is more genetic variation within one “race” than across different races; there is no universal consensus of what the different races are or who belongs to each; even within a single culture, what race a person is considered to be can (and has) changed over time, and so on.
** LHoD does have a US focus, but I think it is entirely sensible considering his approach.
;p That’s mean. I haven’t said anything that bad, nor have I done anything to warrant that. If your post was just a result of the magnified aggression people have in the Pit, then I can forgive that, but really, what I said is curiously annoying, at worst, and something most people do a few times when they get lazy and refuse to admit it, at best.
Most people stop refusing to admit it after, like, three posts. You virtually hijacked the thread defending the stupid thing you said. If you didn’t know better I wouldn’t have mentioned it at all.
That might well be the case. I am saying this is how I want the world to be, but I’m also saying this is how I act today, this is how anyone can act today. So it’s not strictly theoretical.
I know where the current problems are, believe me. But I don’t agree working inside that system of thought is the answer.
If I acknowledge that plenty of people are born-again Christians, I’m not working within that system of thought. Nor am I working within the system of thought of Randians, Stalinists, or homeopathists to describe how they view the world and the effect their views have had on people.
But in order to describe those effects accurately, I have to be willing to talk about groups, not individuals, because the effects of those flawed worldviews have affected millions of people, and I don’t have time to talk about each person individually.
That’s the problem there - we never seem to, don’t we?
ETA, on this:
You can’t group people by race/ethnicity and not be working in a race/ethnicity-based system of thought, though. By using the groups, you’re participating. There is no “observer stance” there.