tantric
Member
This is my first post here. I'm not joining just to cause problems, I've been looking for a site where I can discuss some issues rationally. I don't see the world like other people do - I have/am low latent inhibition. One of the issues with this condition is a tendency to disregard conventions that seem irrational, and that doesn't go well with race politics.
Terms: racialism is dividing humanity into races, in our case, to those recognized by western cultures. Racism is then organizing those races hierarchically. Colorblind is a point of view popular with liberal/left/progressives based on not seeing race, which is considered offensive or detrimental in some ideologies.
I don't get very far with any of this - racial classifications are unrelated to biology or genetics and the deep meaning behind the terms and how they are used is pretty poisonous. The classic example is the deconstruction of 'black' as 'pollution', based on the One Drop rule, which is sadly still at large, meaning Obama isn't the first mixed race president, he's black. What drove that home for me was the CSI: Miami episode in which a guy got married and then killed his wife when he realized she was black. No, he wasn't blind, he just couldn't tell by looking. (Double Jeopardy) It's sick and wrong in so many ways.
But it's uttery mindless to try to say that race isn't a factor that drastically affects many, many people. The colorblind stance, 'I don't see race', seems like turning your back on evil. Besides, I do see race - but not like the vast majority of people do. Low latent inhibition is a weird thing, just between autism and genius. Nothing ever gets tuned out for me, I can't just categorize something or someone and put it on the back burner. So I see what race a person would be considered, I see how much of their identity is invested in this, how other people relate to that. People are fascinating. Some parts are harder - 'Asian' is a pretty useless term, for example, I don't get the grouping (my LLI flat insists that Europe isn't a contient, it's 'Eurasia'). So despite my weird mental system, I don't put it on other people. 'African-American' makes no sense to me semantically, but if that's what you want, good. Or black, Latino, Amerind. Good, I can deal. It's like speaking a foreign language, you just drop into the mindset as best you can.
The part that seems unacceptable to people is that I don't like it being applied to me. My race is human. You can ask me my skin tone, cultural roots, geographic origin, whatever, but I''m of the human race and that's it. That upsets people - and I'm hoping someone can explain why. In a world with these land-mines of language, loaded terms and linguistic mazes, I don't get why I can't be what I am and just that.
I'm going to give you an example of my mental process. While I was working in ecology, our building had courtyard with a beautiful wisteria climbing the walls. One of the divisions of the ecology depart concered invasive species and their eradication and, unfortunately, wisteria is such a species. One day they got all fired up and hacked down the wisteria, leaving a pathetic stump, which upset a lot of people. I decided to be funny and cut out a little word balloon, making it look like the stump was speaking, that read "Next time you want to get rid of an invasive species, try packing your own asses back to Africa." Shocked? It never even dawned on me that that would be racially offensive. The human race is from Africa, we invaded other continents and brutalized the ecosystems. Yeah, didn't go over well. The point being, I'm not fake colorblind, I'm not ignoring stuff, it's just not part of how I think, so sometimes I do/say wildly offensive things with ignorant/genius innocence. (the positive result is that I bonded with the only black ecology grad student, who thought the whole uproar was hysterical)
When I was heavy into gay rights, one of the things I learned from Queernation involved not allowing other people to force you into their categories. That's why we took back the word 'queer' and made it mean anyone with a non-traditional sexual identity, including heterosexuals. I like being queer a helluva lot better than being gay - it's freeing and inclusive and it makes different powerful. So why is it offensive to be human instead of whatever the world would pigeonhole me as? I'm asking this very seriously, and when you answer, if you do, please understand that though we speak the same language, we don't share some of the underlying mental map.
Terms: racialism is dividing humanity into races, in our case, to those recognized by western cultures. Racism is then organizing those races hierarchically. Colorblind is a point of view popular with liberal/left/progressives based on not seeing race, which is considered offensive or detrimental in some ideologies.
I don't get very far with any of this - racial classifications are unrelated to biology or genetics and the deep meaning behind the terms and how they are used is pretty poisonous. The classic example is the deconstruction of 'black' as 'pollution', based on the One Drop rule, which is sadly still at large, meaning Obama isn't the first mixed race president, he's black. What drove that home for me was the CSI: Miami episode in which a guy got married and then killed his wife when he realized she was black. No, he wasn't blind, he just couldn't tell by looking. (Double Jeopardy) It's sick and wrong in so many ways.
But it's uttery mindless to try to say that race isn't a factor that drastically affects many, many people. The colorblind stance, 'I don't see race', seems like turning your back on evil. Besides, I do see race - but not like the vast majority of people do. Low latent inhibition is a weird thing, just between autism and genius. Nothing ever gets tuned out for me, I can't just categorize something or someone and put it on the back burner. So I see what race a person would be considered, I see how much of their identity is invested in this, how other people relate to that. People are fascinating. Some parts are harder - 'Asian' is a pretty useless term, for example, I don't get the grouping (my LLI flat insists that Europe isn't a contient, it's 'Eurasia'). So despite my weird mental system, I don't put it on other people. 'African-American' makes no sense to me semantically, but if that's what you want, good. Or black, Latino, Amerind. Good, I can deal. It's like speaking a foreign language, you just drop into the mindset as best you can.
The part that seems unacceptable to people is that I don't like it being applied to me. My race is human. You can ask me my skin tone, cultural roots, geographic origin, whatever, but I''m of the human race and that's it. That upsets people - and I'm hoping someone can explain why. In a world with these land-mines of language, loaded terms and linguistic mazes, I don't get why I can't be what I am and just that.
I'm going to give you an example of my mental process. While I was working in ecology, our building had courtyard with a beautiful wisteria climbing the walls. One of the divisions of the ecology depart concered invasive species and their eradication and, unfortunately, wisteria is such a species. One day they got all fired up and hacked down the wisteria, leaving a pathetic stump, which upset a lot of people. I decided to be funny and cut out a little word balloon, making it look like the stump was speaking, that read "Next time you want to get rid of an invasive species, try packing your own asses back to Africa." Shocked? It never even dawned on me that that would be racially offensive. The human race is from Africa, we invaded other continents and brutalized the ecosystems. Yeah, didn't go over well. The point being, I'm not fake colorblind, I'm not ignoring stuff, it's just not part of how I think, so sometimes I do/say wildly offensive things with ignorant/genius innocence. (the positive result is that I bonded with the only black ecology grad student, who thought the whole uproar was hysterical)
When I was heavy into gay rights, one of the things I learned from Queernation involved not allowing other people to force you into their categories. That's why we took back the word 'queer' and made it mean anyone with a non-traditional sexual identity, including heterosexuals. I like being queer a helluva lot better than being gay - it's freeing and inclusive and it makes different powerful. So why is it offensive to be human instead of whatever the world would pigeonhole me as? I'm asking this very seriously, and when you answer, if you do, please understand that though we speak the same language, we don't share some of the underlying mental map.