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Where are you getting this idea that people love to put people in a box? The only people struggling with race are you guys. Who is fighting over the race of Obama? I haven't seen any article where the media is trying to define his race. I haven't seen Fox, msnbc, cnn, or cnbc dedicate one minute to decide is he black or white. For the bolded, you make it seem like its some huge discussion everyday on whether somebody is black or white. Nobody is doing that. If we see a black guy, we can acknowledge he is black, and then we move on. We can see mitt is white, and then we move on.
It sure seems to be important to many people on this board, there are so many posts on Obama's race...
There is no point in acknowledging someone's perceived race unless you associate something with that race, whether you are aware of it or not.
ok, so now their called white, whats the issue? You can have a white guy and he can be irish, what's so complex about that?
I stated this fact to point out how arbitrary racial classifications are.
Here's a scenario from history:
Trains traveling North to South in the 1920s had different seating regulations based on racial classifications common to the era. When trains going South crossed Cape Girardeau, MO, the conductors had to enforce the southern region's Jim Crow laws, which required that blacks and whites remain in separate cars while on the trains. Traveling in the North required no such seating arrangements, for the most part.
On one train car on a particular line on a particular day, several white families and black families shared a passenger car. Among one of the families traveling included a Hindu diplomat from New Delhi. As you and I know, people from India usually have dark brown or nearly black skin. On this one trip, the conductor rounded up all of the black people in the car and made them move to the "smoker" or the car that was just behind the engine--because that's where blacks had to sit when in the southern states south of Missouri.
All of these black families--their children--were moved to the smoker, but the Indian diplomat and his family were allowed to remain.
This demonstrates the arbitrariness of the categorization system known as race. It didn't matter what one's skin color actually was, as this historical example points out.
See: Grace Elizabeth Hale, Making Whiteness, Random House, 1999.
0BAMA is like the rest of us- a mixture of a thousand families...a thousand races- a thousand tribes..There is no such thing as race...unless the tribe never bothered crossing over the mountains to find wives and husbands.. Isolated through culture or geography create RACE as we know it- Look at Somalia - they all look like they are from the same family...There scull and facial structures are all the same...They have black skin but you know by looking what RACE they are.
congrats, you've never talked about race, it still exist. You may try to live in a world where race doesn't exist, but back here on planet earth, it exist.
No one's claiming race doesn't exist. It exists as a social construction in which historical processes have crafted the contours by which we define it. It exists as a system of categorization based on arbitrary phenotypical differences, which are rather superficial.
Again, missing the point.
Perhaps you should watch this movie, which would probably serve as an explanation.
I don't expect you to watch it, but I wanted to offer you another source rather than a bunch of folks on C-D whom you obviously aren't intuiting what we're writing.
Black is _____ could be anything. Or it could just mean Black American because blacks come from all different countries.
I think you are going to find that'll never get answer you like other than, "there is no race other than human race" because you keep trying to make something that is simple, really complex. You can be black and have different nationalities, or white and different nationalities. I'm from america and i'm black, somebody can be from jamaica and be black. I say that, and you'll simply respond with a question in which you'll try to break it down more than it should be.
It sure seems to be important to many people on this board, there are so many posts on Obama's race...
There is no point in acknowledging someone's perceived race unless you associate something with that race, whether you are aware of it or not.
obama's race is an issue because of voting demographics. Republicans get upset because 95% of the black population will vote for him, and he will get 80% of the minority population overall. Nobody is arguing that he is half black and half white.
That's the very point. It is an illusion some people seem to love and need for whatever reason. And when they can't put people into such a drawer, they start to fight over it as can be witnessed in all those threads and posts where people say Obama is white or he is black. They don't like it when there is someone that simply can't be filed into any drawer. That messes up their simply view of an orderly world
I guess below all that is the wish to associate the race and thus every member of that race with positive and negative characteristics.
Race is not an illusion. It's misused when people try to talk about it as something biological, which it's not. There is a such thing as race, just like there is a such thing as ethnicity. Denying that it exists or that you don't see race is wrong.
The reason race exists is b/c people are treated differently based on how they look. It can be subtle, or it can be overt. You can explain it away as deserved or racism. The fact is that people of different races have different experiences b/c of how they're viewed and treated by other people.
No one's claiming race doesn't exist. It exists as a social construction in which historical processes have crafted the contours by which we define it. It exists as a system of categorization based on arbitrary phenotypical differences, which are rather superficial.
Again, missing the point.
Perhaps you should watch this movie, which would probably serve as an explanation.
I don't expect you to watch it, but I wanted to offer you another source rather than a bunch of folks on C-D whom you obviously aren't intuiting what we're writing.
are you kidding me with that sentence? Thats how this entire thread got started, that moron and alot you guys keep trying to say "there is no race except the human race." There is a bunch of ya'll claiming race doesn't exist. You're right, I'm not going to watch it. You keep wanting to believe "race" exist because society demands it, when you can look at people and see, my skin color is alot different than that other person. Its like you guys are afraid of labels or something and you want to have this complex discussion about something rather simple.
Race is not an illusion. It's misused when people try to talk about it as something biological, which it's not. There is a such thing as race, just like there is a such thing as ethnicity. Denying that it exists or that you don't see race is wrong.
The reason race exists is b/c people are treated differently based on how they look. It can be subtle, or it can be overt. You can explain it away as deserved or racism. The fact is that people of different races have different experiences b/c of how they're viewed and treated by other people.
I think these people are trying to pat themselves on the back, by saying they are truly colorblind or something. They think they are better people because they don't acknowledge that somebody is black and they want to feel good about themselves for doing so.
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