Unconscious Racism

Every notice that whenever theres a thread about race, it turns into a black/white thing. As if there arent any other races.
 
Tmy said:
Every notice that whenever theres a thread about race, it turns into a black/white thing. As if there arent any other races.
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Like the dog race, for instance? ;) There's only one race - the human race; discussing racism inevitably returns to skin colour issues because that was the key characteristic in the racial typology that the racism originates from. I know that race is used interchangeably with other concepts such as ethnicity and religion, species etc, but at the risk of sounding PC I think it's better that we're clear with which concept we're dealing with, otherwise conflation errors occur.
 
Race is a strange issue. I'm curious about the people who get uncomfortable if someone's race isn't obvious. They try just about everything to find out, like they can't relax until they know this completely irrelevant piece of information. Must make being biracial especially difficult, having to field annoying questions from all sorts of people, and being stared at and discussed.

But to be honest, I find myself feeling the same mental disturbance when I cannot deduce someone's gender. Guess we all have funny little hangups.
 
Knowing the persons gender will affect your speech towards them. "He's vs She's" and all. (Remember the old SNL "It's Pat" skits)

Even the term bi-racial is becoming dated. It implies that the person is 1/2 X and 1/2 Y. As the generations intergrate more n more its not as simple as "my mom is Korean and my dad is black." what about when its grampa and granma who are already mixed?
 
Virgil said:
what a truly excellent thread...I would some of our black posters would comment.


V
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Honey, I fulfill the black, Asian, and possibly some of the Native American quota on this. My school used to list me as "black, non hispanic".

We're covered.
 
TragicMonkey said:
Race is a strange issue. I'm curious about the people who get uncomfortable if someone's race isn't obvious. They try just about everything to find out, like they can't relax until they know this completely irrelevant piece of information. Must make being biracial especially difficult, having to field annoying questions from all sorts of people, and being stared at and discussed.

But to be honest, I find myself feeling the same mental disturbance when I cannot deduce someone's gender. Guess we all have funny little hangups.
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I'm triracial, possibly quadracial.

I've turned it into a game. As of yet, no one's gone for the "multi-ethnic." I'm rather disappointed in this day and age over that.

Current favorites are Hispanic, General Middle Eastern, Israeli, Hawaiian, Eqyptian, Brazilian, Greek, Sicilian, Italian, and Spanish.
 
The funny thing about being multiracial is that your "race" changes depending on which part of the country you happen to be in.

What people dont realize is that us "mixies" are the next evolutionary step of man!! Soon we will enslave the inferior mono-racials and do away with them much like homo erectus did away with the neanderthal............ooops I said to much. The other Freemansons will be so cross with me.
 
Tmy said:
Every notice that whenever theres a thread about race, it turns into a black/white thing. As if there arent any other races.
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Actually I don't think the thread only mentions black/white...look through it you will also find mention of people of asian extraction as well as hispanic etc.

I have never understood this whole "bi-racial" idea or trying to find out what another person's parents were. I have aboriginal ancestry as well as a great deal of european, but I just think of myself as an Aussie.
 
Re: Re: Re: Unconscious Racism

Skeptic said:
Indeed so. There's nothing like living with people of group X to stop prjudice about it.
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Or to start it.

Before I lived in a city with a largely-Asian population, I thought the whole "Chinese driver" stereotype was just that.

Unfortunately, some stereotypes actually pan out.
 
"Unfortunately, some stereotypes actually pan out."

And the admission that some stereotypes can be valid is one starting point for examining the idea that they aren't causal.

Which is one starting point for defusing some racist notions.
 
Is everyone a racist? No.

Is everyone prejudiced? Yes. There is a difference.
 
I would guess that a lot more racists rationalize that they are just exercising 'pre-judgement' than non-racists agonize over their prejudices.

I've been privy to more than one situation where a member of a minority group was not perceived as a minority by co-workers, et al.
The insights from those situations convinced me that while the bad old days of Jim Crow era racism may have been pushed off stage, the subtler replacement of institutional racism, liberal patronization of minorities, minority racism against other minorities, closet racism and so forth, isn't going to be so easy to move past.
 
There's a stereotype round my neck of the woods that Asians are either taxi-drivers or shop-keepers, because of the number of Asians who are shop-keepers and taxi-drivers, but which ignores the numbers who aren't. More interesting is the way it's used as a form of disapproval, in a they're-stealing-our-jobs kind of way. Compare and contrast with the general stereotype that Black people are lazy and prefer to steal than work (and it's interesting to note that the exact same steretype was used against Irish immigrants in the 19th and early 20th centuries*). There's an interesting "damned if you do, damned if you don't" double-bind going on here.

*It feels dead wierd saying that...
 
Re: Thanks for the question!

belinda said:
I was discussing with my partner about attraction - particularly to people with different racial extraction. He's says he finds most asian girls attractive, but not so with african girls. Whereas I am the opposite, I find most guys of african extraction attractive, but am attacted to very few asian blokes.
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Then there are people like me who are attracted to other races just because they are so different. Being mostly WASP, I am attracted to asians, africans, indians (both eastern and western), hispanics, italians, greeks, jews, arabs. You name it, if she is exotic (to me) I'm attracted to her.

I used to feel that this was not racist, but now I'm not so sure. It could just be a friendlier form of racism.
 
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