GOP candidate says he'll fight socialists in Congress like he fought terrorists
41 replies, posted
Uh, no. As I pointed out, again:
Saying that someone seems to be of a certain race has nothing to do with applying a judgement of any kind to that person. It's just a statement about where their ancestors seem to have come from. Anything more is just baseless assumptions on your part.
When people who are familiar with the nuances of a situation are having a discussion, they don't need to spell everything out for each other. Their conversation isn't being broadcast to an audience of millions, and everyone involved in the discussion is already aware of such trivialities - or should be. You'll have to demonstrate how exactly their use of terminology is harmful, who it can harm and how. As I just said, it seems pointless pedantry to me. You appear to be making the argument that in an exchange between individuals whose intent doesn't even approach discrimination, using the wrong arrangement of letters can be discriminatory.
So you think that it's logical to infer that someone using the term "mixed-race" instead of "black" is implying that the person in question is less discriminated against than a black person?
If you don't believe that normalising the white supremacist use of the word "black" in circles where it has no place can have a negative then okay, I guess.
That wasn't even my original point. I was simply defending myself against someone who accused me of being ignorant for saying that mixed race people are just as white as they are black.
You keep contradicting yourself. You insist first that you're already aware that people who are half black face effectively the same discrimination as people who are black, and then immediately say that calling someone black instead of half black is... What was that? 'normalizing the white supremacist use of the word'? While completely ignoring my pointing out that this discussion is occurring between individuals who are neither white supremacists nor ignorant about the nuances of discrimination in the USA. Someone's exact race is either unimportant to the context of this discussion or it's very important. Which is it?
You only got yourself into this mess because you took personal offense to @arlygoodbrownie saying that it was ignorant to call Floyd half black, because *he* thought you were making the argument that it made a difference to the discussion. Why? Because the distinction is irrelevant in the context of racial discrimination in America, as we have all agreed.
Now, when I brought up the point of Floyd's skin color in the first place, I could have said:
It's always the height of absurdity to see GOP supporters who have some ancestry of possible African-American or Caribbean-American origin.
Instead I said:
It's always the height of absurdity to see black GOP supporters.
I did this because the distinction is completely irrelevant to the point I was making, which was that he was a person of color representing a party that would like nothing better than to deny his humanity and strip him of his rights and dignity. Unlike some, I don't have all day to waste on pedantry. Furthermore, it's a safe assumption that at least one of his ancestors belonged to a phenotype that was enslaved and treated no better than cattle in America at one point, which makes it even more egregious that he is defending their degeneracy.
I'm sure there are some people of color out there who would argue that whether I said 'Caribbean-American' or 'African-American' was a very important distinction too, but I'm not talking to them, nor do I know enough about Floyd to say for sure if he's even mixed.
The only one making this a mess here is you. I've made my point clear already, I don't have anything to add, but for some reason you feel like spouting paragraphs upon paragraphs to try and nag me into explaining in great detail why I made this specific one-off comment about this dude being more mixed race than black. Doesn't look like I'm the one having too much free time on my hands.
It may seem hard to believe, but not all replies to an article are intimately related to it. My comment was about the weird propensity Americans have to call everyone with the slightest bit of African ancestry "black". That's it. It was a slight tangent. It had nothing in particular to do with this Floyd dude which you're spending most of your post talking about.
I'm not sure what's inherently hard to understand about that or why @arlygoodbrownie immediately felt that I was making some kind of political statement about this guy not facing as much discrimination or something equally asinine.
You two should relax and make amends by having a debate on the merits of gun control.
Not to blindly justify the US government's multitude of shitty wars but there have still been some fairly rightful ones after WW2. Like Korea, and arguably Afghanistan at first.
My mom is brown af but I look white as fuck so I'll be treated white as fuck in 99% of situations regardless of what she looks like. Race is about outward appearance and how that effects your life, not whatever ethnic stew you happen to be.
Defining it as outward appearance makes sense since it's been shown that the way people generally classify races is inconsistent with actual phenotypes as your example shows. But defining race based on how that appearance affects your life is just weird, that would mean that a black person in the US could suddenly become mixed or even white by moving to a continental African country. At this point it would basically make more sense to define race as what the person identifies as, since that would at least remain consistent across borders.
