creating a new system from race, appearance and cultural terms

[Crazy Eddie]

Yeah... screw that.

Step 1: Admit to ourselves the sad truth that there is no such thing as "the white race." That "whiteness" is an umbrella that was originally concocted purely to exclude black people from full citizenship in what was originally a binary racial makeup of pre-Civil War America. The entire concept of "whiteness" is now thoroughly obsolete and actually incredibly demeaning to self-identified "white" people who no longer get to enjoy the benefits of white supremacy and whose racial identity is reduced to "Not being black."

Step 2: Encourage people to claim a cultural self-identity that fits their family/traditional circumstances most appropriately: you may be Irish, Polish, Scottish, Welsh, Dutch, Black Texan, White Texan, Creole, Redbone, Canadian, French Canadian, Bostonian (yes, that's a real thing), etc. In which case it is less about race than it is about culture, and your self identity tells us more about who you ARE NOW than who your ancestors were.

Step 3: Magic brownies.


tl;dr
Eliminate "race" as a meaningful identifier and replace it with "culture."

"Admit to ourselves the sad truth..."? There is no white race, and that is a sad truth?

Well, it's sad that so many people for so many years have been taken it by what is effectively a massive scam perpetrated by a handful of slave/landowning elites at the expense of literally everyone else. It's sad that the "white" identity was established to create solidarity among disparate groups that otherwise had nothing much in common and unite them against a common enemy (black people) and thus divert their attention away from the plantation-based oligarchy that was gleefully fucking them over.

It's sad because when it was all said and done, white supremacism doesn't actually benefit white people as a group, and that the concept of the "white race" is just an artifact of a racial power structure that is, at it's heart, a giant pyramid scheme.

So, supposing that races really do exist, would that not be the sad truth?

It would, IMO, be extremely tragic to learn that the greatest racial atrocities committed throughout history were based entirely on bullshit, that the targeted racial groups were defined arbitrarily or sloppily. It would be especially tragic to discover that most of the "black" people sold into slavery, oppressed by Jim Crow and currently derided as a degenerate "thuggish" race by dog-whistle meta-racists today are, in fact, genetically closer to the people who enslaved/oppressed/derided them than they are to the racial group they have been made to identify with.

It was the tragic reality of many slaves to live with the knowledge that one of their parents was also their owner, that they were slaves in a home where their actual brothers and sisters ran free. It's the tragedy of a man who grows up hating his father for ditching him when he was a kid, only to find out that the man he thought was his father was just a babysitter he'd gotten too attached to.

Let's be real about this. I read in scientific papers critical of racial correlations, published in peer-reviewed journals, that "Because of the social ramifications... Bad research on this topic should be discouraged much more strongly than bad research on other, less charged topics." You may have heard that politics has no place in scientific thought, but, on one side of the debate in matters of race, it is openly shameless. And they customarily accuse the other side of being political.

It's complicated, I get that. There are a lot of people who want to keep the old system in place because it works for them. There are people who want to keep it because it's comfortable for them. There are people who want to keep it because they just assume it's how things are. And there are people who want to keep it because they're afraid that something worse will take its place.

And deep down, in a little hopeful corner of every person's mind, EVERYONE wants to change it. They're just not sure how, or even if it can be done.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

dude, what system do you exactly propose - i put mine on the table. and it's genetic, not geographic, you do understand that in 10 year you'll be able to go to mal-wart and buy a kit where you prick your finger, add blood to disposable unit plugged into your computer and have your genome, right?

Which means fuckal to anyone who knows what their racial background actually is, and means even less to groups that are divided more by tradition than genetics.

Why would a Chinese person need to go to Walmart to get a blood test to determine his racial background? He knows he's Chinese. His parents were Chinese. His grandparents were Chinese. He probably knows which sub-group they belong to as well, and the sordid history thereof, the details of which most westerners have never even heard of. He also knows his great aunt and her sisters were raped to death when the Japanese Army took Nanjing, so if he ever gets one of those tests it'll probably be just to make sure his daughter's boyfriend is really Korean like he claims and not a dirty Jap.

it's the mfin' 21st century, 'asian' don't mean shit.

And it never really did. Not to Asians, anyway.

do you really want to put a bunch of people from all over asian in a room and try to convince them they're a natural group?

No, because I don't have to. THEY know what groups they belong to. The distinctions between them go back hundreds of years, and believe me, they don't need genetic tests to tell each other apart.

 

[tantric]

Which means fuckal to anyone who knows what their racial background actually is, and means even less to groups that are divided more by tradition than genetics.

Why would a Chinese person need to go to Walmart to get a blood test to determine his racial background? He knows he's Chinese. His parents were Chinese. His grandparents were Chinese. He probably knows which sub-group they belong to as well, and the sordid history thereof, the details of which most westerners have never even heard of. He also knows his great aunt and her sisters were raped to death when the Japanese Army took Nanjing, so if he ever gets one of those tests it'll probably be just to make sure his daughter's boyfriend is really Korean like he claims and not a dirty Jap.

i think i'll call you 'testy eddie' ;-) well, i was very surprised to learn that i'm black. see, when i was growing up, i was told my maternal grandfather was 'one of those wild ass indians'. when i got to HS (he'd been dead 8yrs) I decided they meant the creek/muscogee, rather than the 'civilized' cherokee, the only local options. fuck, i even downloaded and played with a muscogee language book...but then i ran my DNA. not a trace of native american, but 2% sub saharan african. hmmm - i asked my dad what he knew about his long dead wife's longer dead father's family and he said 'nothing' so i explained and we agreed - my papaw was a high yella man pretending to be indian so he could marry a white woman. and this IS the deep south, and one drop pollutes - exactly why he had to pretend to be indian, because my mother and i are black, technically. i'm VERY amused by this, my sister is in denial. DNA makes a difference - my naming system has genetics (wesrominbantugens), phenotypic (anglo) and cultural terms (cosmocult).

it's the mfin' 21st century, 'asian' don't mean shit.

And it never really did. Not to Asians, anyway.

do you really want to put a bunch of people from all over asian in a room and try to convince them they're a natural group?

No, because I don't have to. THEY know what groups they belong to. The distinctions between them go back hundreds of years, and believe me, they don't need genetic tests to tell each other apart.

can you tell japanese from korean from east chinese? i have a BA in Japanese and i get it wrong sometimes. telling people they have common blood unites them, you goob, that's the point. when your average 日本人 understands that he has ainu and ryukyu genes, it changes things.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

i think i'll call you 'testy eddie' ;-) well, i was very surprised to learn that i'm black. see, when i was growing up, i was told my maternal grandfather was 'one of those wild ass indians'. when i got to HS (he'd been dead 8yrs) I decided they meant the creek/muscogee, rather than the 'civilized' cherokee, the only local options. fuck, i even downloaded and played with a muscogee language book...but then i ran my DNA. not a trace of native american, but 2% sub saharan african...

So here's a touch of precedent for your new system. Try to wrap your head around this:

Being 2% African does not make you black.
Being 10% African does not make you black.
Being 25% African does not make you black.

Any of those things makes you biracial/multiracial at best. But more importantly, if you weren't RAISED by black people, in a black community with recognizable characteristics in your local community, your genetics isn't particularly relevant in the first place.

and this IS the deep south, and one drop pollutes

Exactly. Genetics only matters in the bullshit white supremacist legacy of American racial politics. Put that legacy to rest and we can finally come up with definitions that make sense.

can you tell japanese from korean from east chinese?

Not even half the time. But my Chinese and Korean friends can with surprising consistency, as can two of my students (siblings) who are Japanese and Texan.

telling people they have common blood unites them, you goob, that's the point.

You've missed the point entirely, then: Chinese people feel united under the "common blood" they share at being Chinese, and are very conscious of their NOT being Japanese. Filipinos are united under the common blood of being Filipinos and are ALSO very conscious of their NOT being Japanese or Spanish despite the fact that they are obviously descended from elements of both cultures.

The racial animosities that generated those divisions are HUNDREDS of years old. Their differences are alot more important to them than their similarities. It is often amusing watching them find ways to overcome those differences. But their cultural identities are trained into them pretty much from birth and genetic testing is going to be largely irrelevant to them.

Geneology tests are certainly useful for people whose family history is convoluted or missing, and that can provide useful information on a case-by-case basis. But creating a whole racial identity system around those tests is just plain silly; most people don't need a genetic test to know what ethnic group they belong to, and the ones that do often enough no longer have reason to care.

 

[tantric]

Any of those things makes you biracial/multiracial at best. But more importantly, if you weren't RAISED by black people, in a black community with recognizable characteristics in your local community, your genetics isn't particularly relevant in the first place.

look, maggot brain - i got the FUNK in me. deep down. i literally believe that Starchild from the Parliament songs is the Maitreya Buddha and i fully expect him to have a righteous fro - and sunglasses, cause you got to wear your sunglasses, so you can feel cool. so stuff that shit. i *know* i'm real light skinned, i got a MF mirror but i promise you, that shit's only skin deep. i'm nigga down to the bone. now back the hell up off fore i hafta get out the BopGun.

you're right about one thing though - my blackness ain't got shit to do with my DNA - i got da FUNK when i was 17, followed this hippie chick into a Bootsie Collins concert. when he came out on stage like some MFin disco canary, and the mothership......but that was decades before i got tested. frankly, i believe the power of the FUNK changed history to make me blacker. 'FUNK don't only move, it can re-move, so whatever part of your body it is, lay it on the radio, let the vibes flow through'.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

Any of those things makes you biracial/multiracial at best. But more importantly, if you weren't RAISED by black people, in a black community with recognizable characteristics in your local community, your genetics isn't particularly relevant in the first place.

look, maggot brain - i got the FUNK in me. deep down. i literally believe that Starchild from the Parliament songs is the Maitreya Buddha and i fully expect him to have a righteous fro - and sunglasses, cause you got to wear your sunglasses, so you can feel cool.

Implying tat you have to be black to like Parliament...

you're right about one thing though - my blackness ain't got shit to do with my DNA

Clearly not. Judging by your posts, I would say it's got more to do with an undiagnosed mental illness.

But I won't hold that against ya. PLAY that funky music, white boy.

 

[tantric]

cause and effect, liking Parliament ain't the same as having da FUNK, that's what makes you black, that's the point.

 

[bilby]

look, maggot brain - i got the FUNK in me. deep down. i literally believe that Starchild from the Parliament songs is the Maitreya Buddha and i fully expect him to have a righteous fro - and sunglasses, cause you got to wear your sunglasses, so you can feel cool.

Implying tat you have to be black to like Parliament...

you're right about one thing though - my blackness ain't got shit to do with my DNA

Clearly not. Judging by your posts, I would say it's got more to do with an undiagnosed mental illness.

But I won't hold that against ya. PLAY that funky music, white boy.

Now that's unfair. There is nothing to indicate in any way that it is undiagnosed.

 

[tantric]

now, do all of you understand the idea of post-modern race? do we want to do it that way, where everything is fluid, your race is what you say it is because no one is in charge to set up anything official? i'm *utterly* good with that - let me tell you about my extinct pygmy soul-ancestors....