4 ms·

> As an aside, as a minority, I find her Tweets extremely racist as well – and hope no one ever makes this sort of racist speech on my behalf or while pretendin

> As an aside, as a minority, I find her Tweets extremely racist as well – and hope no one ever makes this sort of racist speech on my behalf or while pretending to be helping me. Seriously! I grew up in an actual diverse place. My high school was 98% Hispanic. None of use realized we were systemically oppressed though. Even "darker skinned" Hispanics. For example, it wasn't until I left my state for college that I realized there was actually a significant difference between white and Hispanics to some people.. for some reason. It was bad enough that the same people would ask "ok yeah, but come on what's the difference between Mexican culture and Cuban culture -- the food is the same". These same people were self-proclaimed "liberals". They just grew up in a small liberal all-white town their whole lives. Growing up, I literally thought my friends and I were all white, because nobody told us we were something else. What I mean to say is, my fellow Cuban friends, my Colombian friends, my Veneuelan, and Puerto Rican friends etc... didn't think we were in a different category than say Italian people, Irish people, or Polish people. This shit is just weird. It was actually shitty to find out I'm technically part of some arbitrary category that entitles activists to treat me like a handicapped puppy. I'd rather people not consider it at all. It's patronizing because you're suggesting I'm inherently less capable on my own. I'm not saying there aren't issues that can be solved by affirmative action. I'm saying when you purposefully exclude white males and I can technically still apply for your job, I can't help but feel like you're treating me like an inferior being that needs extra help. You're not letting me compete with a certain class of people because you think they're inherently more capable than I am. The situation in the article isn't affirmative action anyways, it is exclusionary discrimination that is emotionally harmful to the people who apply too. Affirmative action is about considering diversity when you have a diversity problem, it's not supposed to be a very strong factor. Ugh. I wish they would just stop asking me about my "race". It's a totally futile effort to get me to codify some sort of needy status. Besides, if you do require it, I'm going to check off White, Hispanic, and Other: High Elf -- just to fuck with you anyways.

dsajames 11y ago
98% Hispanic sounds anything but diverse. Diverse doesn't mean "not white".
- autoreleasepool 11y ago
  > 98% Hispanic sounds anything but diverse. Diverse doesn't mean "not white". The demographics of a particular High School != The demographics of an entire city. Do you consider Miami to be a diverse place? You also missed the larger point: we didn't know we were "not white". For the record, most of our teachers were Irish Americans.' Maybe it was more like 90% I wasn't striving for accuracy. A few kids were "real whites" now that I think about it. They never really mentioned it. The rest were black or hispanic.
peckrob 11y ago
You hit on a very good point that a lot of people miss: the entire concept of "race" is a social construct that can and does change over time and even depending on who you talk to. Not too long ago, people of Jewish descent weren't considered "white." [0] Neither were Poles or other Slavic people, Roma, Italians, Greeks, most Eastern Europeans, etc. Some people even omitted the Irish. "White" exclusively meant Anglo-Saxon and Northern European western Christian (mostly Protestant, though some Catholics were included) descent. These days, most of these people would be considered "white." It's not perfect, but there's a bit of a parallel to this in history: during the Roman period, the definition of "Roman" changed dramatically. At first, it was a citizen of the Roman Kingdom who lived within the city. Then it was extended to the Italic tribes after the Social wars, and eventually to the entire Empire (all free-born men, that is) under Emperor Caracalla. To put it another way, a "Roman" in 600BC lived in the city of Rome, spoke Old Latin and practiced the old Roman religion. A "Roman" in 1000 AD may have lived in Constantinople, likely spoke Greek and practiced Christianity. The entire definition of "Roman" completely changed over the course of 1500 or so years. It's one of the reasons I find "race" to be such a frustrating, silly and dated concept. Considering how much in common we share genetically with one another, classifying each other based on such arbitrary and ever-change definitions makes very little sense to me. I usually write "human" in the Other box. :) TL;DR what "white" is entirely depends on what people think it means at the time. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definitions_of_whiteness_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definitions_of_whiteness_in_th... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caracalla https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caracalla

dsajames 11y ago

98% Hispanic sounds anything but diverse. Diverse doesn't mean "not white".

autoreleasepool 11y ago
> 98% Hispanic sounds anything but diverse. Diverse doesn't mean "not white". The demographics of a particular High School != The demographics of an entire city. Do you consider Miami to be a diverse place? You also missed the larger point: we didn't know we were "not white". For the record, most of our teachers were Irish Americans.' Maybe it was more like 90% I wasn't striving for accuracy. A few kids were "real whites" now that I think about it. They never really mentioned it. The rest were black or hispanic.

peckrob 11y ago

You hit on a very good point that a lot of people miss: the entire concept of "race" is a social construct that can and does change over time and even depending on who you talk to. Not too long ago, people of Jewish descent weren't considered "white." [0] Neither were Poles or other Slavic people, Roma, Italians, Greeks, most Eastern Europeans, etc. Some people even omitted the Irish. "White" exclusively meant Anglo-Saxon and Northern European western Christian (mostly Protestant, though some Catholics were included) descent. These days, most of these people would be considered "white." It's not perfect, but there's a bit of a parallel to this in history: during the Roman period, the definition of "Roman" changed dramatically. At first, it was a citizen of the Roman Kingdom who lived within the city. Then it was extended to the Italic tribes after the Social wars, and eventually to the entire Empire (all free-born men, that is) under Emperor Caracalla. To put it another way, a "Roman" in 600BC lived in the city of Rome, spoke Old Latin and practiced the old Roman religion. A "Roman" in 1000 AD may have lived in Constantinople, likely spoke Greek and practiced Christianity. The entire definition of "Roman" completely changed over the course of 1500 or so years. It's one of the reasons I find "race" to be such a frustrating, silly and dated concept. Considering how much in common we share genetically with one another, classifying each other based on such arbitrary and ever-change definitions makes very little sense to me. I usually write "human" in the Other box. :) TL;DR what "white" is entirely depends on what people think it means at the time. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definitions_of_whiteness_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definitions_of_whiteness_in_th... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caracalla https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caracalla