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> It looks to me like this guy ... assumed that all black people Thus is the heart of the matter - in reverse. I'm not trying to be pointed, but there is no o

> It looks to me like this guy ... assumed that all black people Thus is the heart of the matter - in reverse. I'm not trying to be pointed, but there is no other way to say it, so here it is: it is you who have assumed, not the author. This extrapolation of the one to the many is at the heart of modern identity politics. It is the core of what the article gets at - to be identified as a thing you have to fit the stereotype. And anything the one does is instantly assumed to be a comment on the many or, in some cases, the all, and any way the one varies from the many doesn't change the definition, it is merely discarded. I despair at this, I really do. Why do we breakdown the individual homo sapiens in a story to their base elements of race, gender, sexuality, religion, rather than celebrate their unqiueness? I had a 23andme DNA test years ago, and I shared my racial profile (X% Scndanavian, y% norther european etc) and someone made a comment about the last line: "100% 5thaccount - you are 100% you". I still think about that comment a lot. These elements that make us up don't define us, as we are not the sum of these elements the way water is two parts hydrogen, one part oxygen. We are our own selves, who are more than, or sometimes less than, the sum of these things. Rather than reduce our experiences to the net sum of these simple elements, I think we should praise the unique - an unique implies not generalisable to the many or all - outcomes we each create.

jakelazaroff 10y ago
We can still "celebrate uniqueness" while acknowledging that how we're treated by society is in large part determined by what groups we happen to belong to. For example: if you're black, you will likely receive a longer prison sentence than a white person who commits a similar crime[1]. Full stop. You're your own self, you can't be reduced to the sum of your race/gender/etc, and yet on solely on the basis of your skin color you'll be given a more severe punishment. The "but everyone's their own person" critique of identity politics doesn't hold water because regardless of whether or not I bucket myself, society will still bucket me and treat me thusly. [1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887324432004578304463789858002 https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887324432004578304...
- zachkatz 10y ago
  > The "but everyone's their own person" critique of identity politics doesn't hold water because regardless of whether or not I bucket myself, society will still bucket me and treat me thusly. Yes, but everyone is being bucketed by society. By their gender, skin color, age, height, hair type, personality type, on and on and on—there are so many buckets that eventually you reach the level of the individual. Everyone is in their own bucket.
  - neumann 10y ago
    Perhaps I am misunderstanding you and you are responding to a particular point, but the buckets are not equal! Your 'bucket' is not just based on your unique identity but on social categorizations which influence others and their (and their government's) policy that can have decades, and even centuries long influences on you and groups of people.
    - jakelazaroff 10y ago
      Exactly! Using the same example, if you're being sentenced for a crime, the race bucket matters much more than the hair color bucket. The study of how these buckets interact is called intersectionality.
    - zachkatz 10y ago
      I'm going to delegate my response: https://youtu.be/aDRgMUoEvcg?t=2445 https://youtu.be/aDRgMUoEvcg?t=2445 Highly recommend the whole thing, but 40:45 to ~46:00 is, to your point, the most eloquent argument I've ever heard about this topic.
      - neumann 10y ago
        Thank you for your response. I watched that section, and I offer a rebuttal. My summary:The speaker here argues that post-modernism's great illogical flaw is that it invites all individuals to assign themselves labels of victimhood, and argues that if one were fair and listened to everybody, everybody is a victim. Firstly, that argument doesn't appear very insightful - the individual's narcissism is incompatible with fairness. On a separate note, the speaker uses self-identifying label as a call for victimhood when many individuals (which is the perspective he is using) would never see it that way, so he is revealing a prejudice about the labels he is referencing. Either not self-aware or a deliberate choice. But that's not the point here - this argument has it backwards. It's not about a black person saying 'I am disadvantaged because I am black'. It is about statistical facts showing that black people are disadvantaged, and historical laws showing that this is due to decades of policy and laws which were a result of another bucket of people (whites) saying, 'These people are black, let's disadvantage them'. The segueway about LGBTQIAK label is I think parallel/tangential to this and is itself super interesting with a whole bunch of complications that societies have to unravel, but let's not conflate the two, because they are not analogous. edit:grammar and clarity
s3cur3 10y ago
I feel the same with respect to being "just you." On a personal level, I can't relate to people whose sense of identity is strongly tied to any aspect of themselves that's outside of their control---whether that's their race, sex, family, birthplace, etc. At the same time, I thing loads of people feel that way, and I'm in the minority. It's something I've tried to make myself more conscious of throughout my life... I've definitely been less sensitive than I should have been with respect to this sort of thing.
mclightning 10y ago
Holy cow, someone made exactly the joke/remark about my DNA ethnicity overview "%100 MyNAME", when I shared it with my friends :D

jakelazaroff 10y ago

We can still "celebrate uniqueness" while acknowledging that how we're treated by society is in large part determined by what groups we happen to belong to. For example: if you're black, you will likely receive a longer prison sentence than a white person who commits a similar crime[1]. Full stop. You're your own self, you can't be reduced to the sum of your race/gender/etc, and yet on solely on the basis of your skin color you'll be given a more severe punishment. The "but everyone's their own person" critique of identity politics doesn't hold water because regardless of whether or not I bucket myself, society will still bucket me and treat me thusly. [1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887324432004578304463789858002 https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887324432004578304...

zachkatz 10y ago
> The "but everyone's their own person" critique of identity politics doesn't hold water because regardless of whether or not I bucket myself, society will still bucket me and treat me thusly. Yes, but everyone is being bucketed by society. By their gender, skin color, age, height, hair type, personality type, on and on and on—there are so many buckets that eventually you reach the level of the individual. Everyone is in their own bucket.
- neumann 10y ago
  Perhaps I am misunderstanding you and you are responding to a particular point, but the buckets are not equal! Your 'bucket' is not just based on your unique identity but on social categorizations which influence others and their (and their government's) policy that can have decades, and even centuries long influences on you and groups of people.
  - jakelazaroff 10y ago
    Exactly! Using the same example, if you're being sentenced for a crime, the race bucket matters much more than the hair color bucket. The study of how these buckets interact is called intersectionality.
  - zachkatz 10y ago
    I'm going to delegate my response: https://youtu.be/aDRgMUoEvcg?t=2445 https://youtu.be/aDRgMUoEvcg?t=2445 Highly recommend the whole thing, but 40:45 to ~46:00 is, to your point, the most eloquent argument I've ever heard about this topic.
    - neumann 10y ago
      Thank you for your response. I watched that section, and I offer a rebuttal. My summary:The speaker here argues that post-modernism's great illogical flaw is that it invites all individuals to assign themselves labels of victimhood, and argues that if one were fair and listened to everybody, everybody is a victim. Firstly, that argument doesn't appear very insightful - the individual's narcissism is incompatible with fairness. On a separate note, the speaker uses self-identifying label as a call for victimhood when many individuals (which is the perspective he is using) would never see it that way, so he is revealing a prejudice about the labels he is referencing. Either not self-aware or a deliberate choice. But that's not the point here - this argument has it backwards. It's not about a black person saying 'I am disadvantaged because I am black'. It is about statistical facts showing that black people are disadvantaged, and historical laws showing that this is due to decades of policy and laws which were a result of another bucket of people (whites) saying, 'These people are black, let's disadvantage them'. The segueway about LGBTQIAK label is I think parallel/tangential to this and is itself super interesting with a whole bunch of complications that societies have to unravel, but let's not conflate the two, because they are not analogous. edit:grammar and clarity

s3cur3 10y ago

I feel the same with respect to being "just you." On a personal level, I can't relate to people whose sense of identity is strongly tied to any aspect of themselves that's outside of their control---whether that's their race, sex, family, birthplace, etc. At the same time, I thing loads of people feel that way, and I'm in the minority. It's something I've tried to make myself more conscious of throughout my life... I've definitely been less sensitive than I should have been with respect to this sort of thing.

mclightning 10y ago

Holy cow, someone made exactly the joke/remark about my DNA ethnicity overview "%100 MyNAME", when I shared it with my friends :D