The unintentional racist.

[Senethro]

Either way, its really weird how any black makes you all black. Like whiteness is an easy category to be excluded from and blackness an easy one to be included in.

 

[Cheezy the Wiz]

Either way, its really weird how any black makes you all black. Like whiteness is an easy category to be excluded from and blackness an easy one to be included in.

It's because non-whiteness is seen as inferiority. Having any amount of non-white, whether it's Black, or Asian, or Native American (most Latin Americans, which should properly be called Mestizo, i.e. half-white and half-native), is a degradation from being "fully" white. It's a relic of the era when people bought into stuff like Gobineau's Inequality of the Races, which claimed that humanity was descended from three different groups - white, yellow, and black - and that over time the purity of the bloodlines of each of these had been lost through inter-breeding, but that the white race's bloodlines were the least-tainted, which was why they were the superior race compared to the other two. So if you're partly Black or Asian or whatever, then your blood purity is tainted, but if you're primarily non-white and have a little whiteness in you, then that's just a product of your already-tainted blood, and thus you're still inferior.

Now, today people don't think in terms of bloodlines and such, but the cultural logic behind stigma and attitude remains internalized, and this is where it comes from.

 

[PhroX]

Looking at the original cartoon, I would take it as implying that whoever the guy in the bath is is racist, rather than the cartoon itself being racist...

 

[Loppan Torkel]

It's determined that the cartoonist is a "pure white" then?

 

[Borachio]

Good point. Americans will have to re-think how they deal with race. The massive Mexican immigration that is so intensely changing the demographic composition of the nation already forced them to abandon their old Black and White dichotomy. Now they have this "4 Races" system you mention, White, Black, Asian or Hispanic (though technically a Hispanic can belong to any race, in practice they treat it is a racial category). Still it's a stupid system. As this country becomes incredibly diversified, full of people who don't fit any traditional category (Iranians, Arabs, North Africans, Indians from India, etc), not to mention a booming mixed race population, trying to categorize everybody in neat racial groups becomes impossible. And hooray for that. It will be the death of identity politics and racial demagoguery in general. Or so I hope anyway.

Just four?

I'm very often confronted with a choice of more than twenty.

I always choose other, and write "unknown" where I can.

 

[luiz]

Just four?

I'm very often confronted with a choice of more than twenty.

I always choose other, and write "unknown" where I can.

They also have Native American. But I wonder what say a Bolivian Indian should choose.

Anyway, clearly this racial breakdown of American society doesn't make any more sense.

 

[Borachio]

I've never found a racial breakdown that did make any sense.

 

[Loppan Torkel]

If there were no ethnic breakdown, there could be no ethnic discrimination.

 

[Borachio]

Well, that's always been my point.

Sadly, though, I think it's rather idealistic to suppose that people would simply ignore ethnicity if officialdom didn't recognize it.

And some diseases, like sickle-cell anaemia, are ethnically related.

 

[John Walker]

its really weird how any black makes you all black. Like whiteness is an easy category to be excluded from and blackness an easy one to be included in.

This is probably because white skin is a recessive trait to black skin, so most of mixed people tend to be quite dark.

For example, I suppose all of these people could be classified as African-Americans in the USA (would you agree?):

1:

2:

3:

4:

5:

6:

7:

8:

9:

10:

11:

12:

13:

While the reality behind these people is (you might try to guess before opening the spoiler, and check if you were right):

Spoiler :

1. Noella Coursaris, half Greek half Congolese

2. Ding Hui, Chinese mother and South African Black father

3. Freema Agyeman, half Iranian half Ghanaian

4. Giancarlo Esposito, half Italian half African-American

5. Paul McGrath, half Irish half Nigerian

6. Chipo Chung, half Zimbabwean half Chinese

7. David Alaba, half Nigerian half Filipino

8. Bryan Clay, half African-American half Japanese (born in Hawaii)

9. Amira Ahmed, half Somali half Filipino

10. Lou Jing, half Afro-American, half Chinese

11. Jean Ping, half Gabonese, half Chinese

12. Amerie, half Black half Korean singer

13. Denyce Lawton, half Black half Korean

And this guy could pass as a South-East Asian (perhaps a Filipino), but he is not one:

14:

He is:

Spoiler :

14. Alexander N'Doumbou, half Gabonese half Chinese

And another lighter result (but usually you get darker results):

15:

Spoiler :

15. Kimora Lee, half Korean half Afro-American

 

[Cheezy the Wiz]

They also have Native American. But I wonder what say a Bolivian Indian should choose.

Anyway, clearly this racial breakdown of American society doesn't make any more sense.

Indeed, it's both arbitrary and limited, in the same way that Whiteness and non-Whiteness are, such as I described above. It's a bit absurd, telling people what they are and are not, based on the bureaucracy's criteria.

I've never found a racial breakdown that did make any sense.

Link to video.

 

[John Walker]

When you mix a Gabonese with a Chinese, children look like Filipinos (see above). This isn't a coincidence because Filipinos themselves are also a mix of two or more ancestral populations, one of which have very dark skin (link):

http://www.google.com/search?site=&...c.1.54.mobile-gws-hp..0.16.3334.3.0pggmQhwt_g

 

[Traitorfish]

It's because non-whiteness is seen as inferiority. Having any amount of non-white, whether it's Black, or Asian, or Native American (most Latin Americans, which should properly be called Mestizo, i.e. half-white and half-native), is a degradation from being "fully" white. It's a relic of the era when people bought into stuff like Gobineau's Inequality of the Races, which claimed that humanity was descended from three different groups - white, yellow, and black - and that over time the purity of the bloodlines of each of these had been lost through inter-breeding, but that the white race's bloodlines were the least-tainted, which was why they were the superior race compared to the other two. So if you're partly Black or Asian or whatever, then your blood purity is tainted, but if you're primarily non-white and have a little whiteness in you, then that's just a product of your already-tainted blood, and thus you're still inferior.

That doesn't explain the "one-drop rule", though, which is a peculiarly American (at least in origin) conception of race, which identities blackness and specifically blackness with any visible evidence of African ancestry. A person of mixed white and Asian ancestry may be regarded by racists as inferior, but they'll still tend to be regarded as mixed race rather than simply Asian.

 

[Gori the Grey]

I've never found a racial breakdown that did make any sense.

What race would the people who hate you consider you to be? ___________________

 

[John Walker]

"One-drop rule" was only in English colonies. Spanish, Portuguese, etc. colonizers had a different approach:

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orfas_del_Rei

http://www.google.com/search?site=&...c.1.54.mobile-gws-hp..8.36.3981.3.Nsj7ZM4vM8s

 

[Farm Boy]

I've never found a racial breakdown that did make any sense.

I'm reminded of the spat earlier this year when some people caused a ruckus about a form in NYC(I think?) because it still included colored as a selectable option(alongside Black/African American). The people in charge of the form responded that they still have a couple percentage points of people who self select that option and that while popular words-in-usage change people's self-identities change more slowly and some of the older population still considers themselves to be colored people. Which is probably true. I think they wound up changing the form anyhow once it hit NPR blurbs nationwide.

 

[EgonSpengler]

I'm reminded of the spat earlier this year when some people caused a ruckus about a form in NYC(I think?) because it still included colored as a selectable option(alongside Black/African American). The people in charge of the form responded that they still have a couple percentage points of people who self select that option and that while popular words-in-usage change people's self-identities change more slowly and some of the older population still considers themselves to be colored people. Which is probably true. I think they wound up changing the form anyhow once it hit NPR blurbs nationwide.

And to confuse us more, the term "people of color" is used a lot, while "colored people" is considered antiquated. I wonder how many people using that form were thinking of the former rather than the latter.

 

[Traitorfish]

"One-drop rule" was only in English colonies. Spanish, Portuguese, etc. colonizers had a different approach:

It wasn't even very pronounced in most English colonies, because while the English certainly remained more acutely aware of non-white ancestry than others, it still tended to placed in a framework of admixture. The "one-drop rule" seems to emerge in the United States in the nineteenth century as Americans struggle to rework the eighteenth century identification of whiteness with freedom and blackness with servitude in the face of abolition, first gradually taking shape in the North and then becoming entrenched in the South after the Civil War. It spread out from their, certainly, especially as sizeable black populations emerged in European countries that had previously regarded blacks largely from a distance, as colonial subjects rather than as co-nationals, but I think even today it's more pronounced in the US than elsewhere.

 

[Goodfella]

The watermelon stereotype is easily one of the most common and most used. It's extremely doubtful that the author didn't know about it.

 

[warpus]

Dude, you just can't mention watermelons and black people in the same sentence in America.. you can't do it! Are these people crazy? Yeah, as if they didn't realize what was happening. They should know the rule. Watermelon and fried chicken. Black people. Don't put in the same sentence. Geez. It's like Germans and sauerkraut, except even more offensive because Germans were never slaves.