4 ms·

> highly focused on racial identity for obvious reasons This is something I get but it always buffles me. Shouldn't it be the opposite? Shouldn't they, in thei

> highly focused on racial identity for obvious reasons This is something I get but it always buffles me. Shouldn't it be the opposite? Shouldn't they, in their own interests, and the interest of groups they aspire to represent, attempt to unite people above skin-color differences and emphasize our human aspect?

locopati 8mo ago
In order to bring people together, it's necessary to acknowledge the harms that have been caused. That is part of repair and trust building. Germany had war crimes trials. South Africa had truth & reconciliation. The US can't paper over the ways in which marginalized populations have been harmed, especially since large parts of the country either don't believe harm has been caused or activity endeavor to perpetuate that harm.
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
- rayiner 8mo ago
  [flagged]
  - locopati 8mo ago
    Have you been paying attention to who the US elected and the people who elected him? They definitely deny systemic racism and are here for ICE targeting non-white people.
  - locopati 8mo ago
    Otherwise similarly situation people in the present are already being grouped together into categories and treated differently...undoing that is the work that needs doing.
    - rayiner 8mo ago
      If people were being treated differently in the present in large numbers, progressive efforts would be focused on enforcing anti-discrimination law rather than on remedial measures such as affirmative action.
  - dctoedt 8mo ago
    > Instead, they resist the idea that those things are relevant to contemporary political disputes involving the descendants of the people who directly caused the harm and who were directly harmed. There's such a thing as generational wealth — financial, cultural — that seems to pay compound interest to successive generations. When prior generations are deprived due to racism, classism, etc., it's not unlike someone who doesn't save for retirement because s/he was repeatedly robbed at gunpoint in earlier years and so was deprived of both those savings and of the compounding effect. See the famous YouTube video about the starting line of life: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4K5fbQ1-zps https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4K5fbQ1-zps
    - rayiner 8mo ago
      Your argument shifts between two frames--from talking about "successive generations" to events in a specific individual's life--without explaining why we should treat those frames as equivalent. I think few people dispute that people's circumstances are path-dependent. But it doesn't logically follow that this path dependency makes a difference morally or politically. Say you have two people who are equally poor, a white guy in Appalachia and a black guy in Baltimore. It's undoubtedly true that historical events contributed to each one's circumstances. The Appalachian's grandfather went a crappy school because he grew up in a coal mining town, while the Baltimorean's grandfather went to a crappy school because it was segregated. But the people who perpetrated those harms are dead. And our two individuals in the present were not victimized--neither of them were "robbed at gunpoint." They were simply born into particular circumstances by random chance, just like everyone else in the world. And both got really lucky on that dice roll--they were still born in the U.S. instead of Afghanistan. So what's the logical basis for treating the one person's poverty differently than the other's? What's the logical basis for treating the one person's poverty as carrying greater moral and political weight than the other's? My daughter's grandfather was worse off than either example above. The mortality rate for U.S. black infants in 1950 during Jim Crow was about 51 per 1,000. For infants born in 1950 in Bangladesh, like my dad, it was 228 per 1,000. Worse odds than Russian Roulette. And nearly any segregated school in America would have been an upgrade from the one in my dad's village, which had no walls and required people to take a boat there during monsoon season. That sucked for my dad, but that's irrelevant to the moral or political evaluation of my daughter's circumstances. She's a spoiled private school kid, just like her friend whose grandfather was a partner at Simpson Thacher in New York. And if she had been poor instead, like my wife's cousins in Oregon, there would be no logical basis for treating her poverty any differently than any of the multitude of poor people in Oregon.
rayiner 8mo ago
I was raised, quite deliberately on my parent’s part, not to have any racial identity. I don’t think anything good can come out of reminding white people that I’m “brown”—especially in the educational and workplace contexts where it’s become common to really emphasize those differences. I think that actually makes people more racist in their treatment of individuals: https://insights.som.yale.edu/insights/white-liberals-present-themselves-as-less-competent-in-interactions-with-african-americans https://insights.som.yale.edu/insights/white-liberals-presen.... I guess liberals have more faith in white people’s capacity to not be racist than I do. I don’t think people can simultaneously emphasize differences but not treat people differently as a result. The only workable approach to having a multi-ethnic society is to synthesize disparate people into a new group, like America did with the category of “white people” or China has done with the category of “Han Chinese.” And ultimately I suspect even that is a fragile status quo.
JKCalhoun 8mo ago
Perhaps, like me, you grew up in the era of the great "Melting Pot". At that time (I was young, it was the 1970's) it seemed fine. Come to the US, melt together with us (okay, it was a little weird, but like some kind of stone soup, I got the gist). By the time I got my Education degree in college though the melting pot was out. Cultures coming to the US don't want to abandon their language, their foods, music… these are a part of their culture and heritage they want to still celebrate. It slowly became clear to me that this was correct—further, it enriches the U.S. to accommodate it. (Mardi Gras down in New Orleans comes to mind as an example—a little poorer the U.S. would be to have tossed that in the name of homogeneity.)
- rayiner 8mo ago
  The problem is that culture isn’t just food and music. That’s the tip of a much deeper iceberg: https://commisceo-global.com/articles/intercultural-training-and-the-iceberg-model https://commisceo-global.com/articles/intercultural-training.... When I immigrated to the US, I dressed like an American I listen to American music. I ate American food, but my mom still socialized me like a Bangladeshi. All the little adjustments and guidance that parents give their small children throughout the day—that’s different between cultures. I didn’t realize how different it was until I started started raising kids with my Anglo-Protestant wife. (And I’ve come around to agreeing with Anglo protestants that food is a distraction. It’s for survival not enjoyment. So it doesn’t make society better to have a diversity of food.) Culture is substantive it’s a type of social technology. It’s strongly influences the kinds of societies and communities that people create. I’m having a discussion with my dad right now about American individualism. From his Asian perspective, Americans don’t care about each other because they have very weak family ties compare compared to Bangladeshis. I thought that too. But what I realized is that Americans teach their kids to love abstract systems snd rules over people. For example, Americans spend a lot of time socializing their children to follow rules about sharing or not littering. Whereas Bangladesh, she spend a lot of time socializing their children to follow rules about how to address, elders, or how to reciprocate, affection, or other social norms that are designed to foster kinship relationships within a more tribal social structure.
  - 8mo ago

locopati 8mo ago

In order to bring people together, it's necessary to acknowledge the harms that have been caused. That is part of repair and trust building. Germany had war crimes trials. South Africa had truth & reconciliation. The US can't paper over the ways in which marginalized populations have been harmed, especially since large parts of the country either don't believe harm has been caused or activity endeavor to perpetuate that harm.

deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
rayiner 8mo ago
[flagged]
- locopati 8mo ago
  Have you been paying attention to who the US elected and the people who elected him? They definitely deny systemic racism and are here for ICE targeting non-white people.
- locopati 8mo ago
  Otherwise similarly situation people in the present are already being grouped together into categories and treated differently...undoing that is the work that needs doing.
  - rayiner 8mo ago
    If people were being treated differently in the present in large numbers, progressive efforts would be focused on enforcing anti-discrimination law rather than on remedial measures such as affirmative action.
- dctoedt 8mo ago
  > Instead, they resist the idea that those things are relevant to contemporary political disputes involving the descendants of the people who directly caused the harm and who were directly harmed. There's such a thing as generational wealth — financial, cultural — that seems to pay compound interest to successive generations. When prior generations are deprived due to racism, classism, etc., it's not unlike someone who doesn't save for retirement because s/he was repeatedly robbed at gunpoint in earlier years and so was deprived of both those savings and of the compounding effect. See the famous YouTube video about the starting line of life: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4K5fbQ1-zps https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4K5fbQ1-zps
  - rayiner 8mo ago
    Your argument shifts between two frames--from talking about "successive generations" to events in a specific individual's life--without explaining why we should treat those frames as equivalent. I think few people dispute that people's circumstances are path-dependent. But it doesn't logically follow that this path dependency makes a difference morally or politically. Say you have two people who are equally poor, a white guy in Appalachia and a black guy in Baltimore. It's undoubtedly true that historical events contributed to each one's circumstances. The Appalachian's grandfather went a crappy school because he grew up in a coal mining town, while the Baltimorean's grandfather went to a crappy school because it was segregated. But the people who perpetrated those harms are dead. And our two individuals in the present were not victimized--neither of them were "robbed at gunpoint." They were simply born into particular circumstances by random chance, just like everyone else in the world. And both got really lucky on that dice roll--they were still born in the U.S. instead of Afghanistan. So what's the logical basis for treating the one person's poverty differently than the other's? What's the logical basis for treating the one person's poverty as carrying greater moral and political weight than the other's? My daughter's grandfather was worse off than either example above. The mortality rate for U.S. black infants in 1950 during Jim Crow was about 51 per 1,000. For infants born in 1950 in Bangladesh, like my dad, it was 228 per 1,000. Worse odds than Russian Roulette. And nearly any segregated school in America would have been an upgrade from the one in my dad's village, which had no walls and required people to take a boat there during monsoon season. That sucked for my dad, but that's irrelevant to the moral or political evaluation of my daughter's circumstances. She's a spoiled private school kid, just like her friend whose grandfather was a partner at Simpson Thacher in New York. And if she had been poor instead, like my wife's cousins in Oregon, there would be no logical basis for treating her poverty any differently than any of the multitude of poor people in Oregon.

rayiner 8mo ago

I was raised, quite deliberately on my parent’s part, not to have any racial identity. I don’t think anything good can come out of reminding white people that I’m “brown”—especially in the educational and workplace contexts where it’s become common to really emphasize those differences. I think that actually makes people more racist in their treatment of individuals: https://insights.som.yale.edu/insights/white-liberals-present-themselves-as-less-competent-in-interactions-with-african-americans https://insights.som.yale.edu/insights/white-liberals-presen.... I guess liberals have more faith in white people’s capacity to not be racist than I do. I don’t think people can simultaneously emphasize differences but not treat people differently as a result. The only workable approach to having a multi-ethnic society is to synthesize disparate people into a new group, like America did with the category of “white people” or China has done with the category of “Han Chinese.” And ultimately I suspect even that is a fragile status quo.

JKCalhoun 8mo ago

Perhaps, like me, you grew up in the era of the great "Melting Pot". At that time (I was young, it was the 1970's) it seemed fine. Come to the US, melt together with us (okay, it was a little weird, but like some kind of stone soup, I got the gist). By the time I got my Education degree in college though the melting pot was out. Cultures coming to the US don't want to abandon their language, their foods, music… these are a part of their culture and heritage they want to still celebrate. It slowly became clear to me that this was correct—further, it enriches the U.S. to accommodate it. (Mardi Gras down in New Orleans comes to mind as an example—a little poorer the U.S. would be to have tossed that in the name of homogeneity.)

rayiner 8mo ago
The problem is that culture isn’t just food and music. That’s the tip of a much deeper iceberg: https://commisceo-global.com/articles/intercultural-training-and-the-iceberg-model https://commisceo-global.com/articles/intercultural-training.... When I immigrated to the US, I dressed like an American I listen to American music. I ate American food, but my mom still socialized me like a Bangladeshi. All the little adjustments and guidance that parents give their small children throughout the day—that’s different between cultures. I didn’t realize how different it was until I started started raising kids with my Anglo-Protestant wife. (And I’ve come around to agreeing with Anglo protestants that food is a distraction. It’s for survival not enjoyment. So it doesn’t make society better to have a diversity of food.) Culture is substantive it’s a type of social technology. It’s strongly influences the kinds of societies and communities that people create. I’m having a discussion with my dad right now about American individualism. From his Asian perspective, Americans don’t care about each other because they have very weak family ties compare compared to Bangladeshis. I thought that too. But what I realized is that Americans teach their kids to love abstract systems snd rules over people. For example, Americans spend a lot of time socializing their children to follow rules about sharing or not littering. Whereas Bangladesh, she spend a lot of time socializing their children to follow rules about how to address, elders, or how to reciprocate, affection, or other social norms that are designed to foster kinship relationships within a more tribal social structure.
- 8mo ago