Come Oh Ye Rational Thinkers...and explain race theory to me

[Mister Agenda]

I just got banned from another board for being racist, in that I asserted that another poster calling me 'white' as in the culture was racist and offensive. I got dinged, saying "calling you white when you are white isn't racist, look it up". I did. Merriam Webster says, racialism: a theory that race determines human traits and capacities; also : racism. First definition, one is a synonym for the other...bam, banned for life.

'You are white' is not racist. 'You are white, therefore you have white privilege' is not racist. 'You are white, therefore you are an oppressor of minorities' IS racist. Essentially, racism is ascribing attributes to a person because of the race they belong to, to which their race is irrelevant. Merely acknowledging what race you (apparently) belong to is not racist. A race is a regional variation of a species. In humans, you can often determine what continent a person's ancestors were from at fifty paces. But also in humans, there is no evidence that race alone affects character.

This isn't about cross sniping. I utterly fail to see my sin, except that I think race theory is illogical and self-defeating and prefer, for myself only, the status of conscientious objector - my race is human and that's as far as it goes.

What right do you have to expect other people to adopt the same label use that you do? And you seem to have conflated 'race theory' with the fact that humans have minor physical variations as a result of evolution that are useful in describing a person's appearance.

I don't force my views on other people - if you want to be Black and rally for Black Power, good. If you prefer Chican@, I can do that. I manage trans-pronouns with native grace (deal with it, Ms Thing). I have erudite opinions on Gay Cinema and French Impressionism. Groovy. But I insist that be two way.

What right do you have to insist that other people agree with you that they're being racist? If I mow your lawn without being asked, does that oblige you to mow mine? Or do some other favor for me? You don't necessarily deserve to be treated the exact same way you are treating someone else. What you are askig for is not necessarily on the same axis as what you're giving. If I call you human instead of white, what does that entitle me to demand from you in return?

I don't make an issue of it, but 'race theory' is a twisted, evil, sick-to-the-core mindvirus/memeplex and I do not care to have it applied to me.

You didn't have it applied to you. Someone called you 'white'. If you're not white, correct them. If you are white, you're getting worked up over a fact. And if you consider 'white' an insult...that's kind of racist, man.

If you look at me and call me 'white' I will respond with something highly provocative and there we go.

You sound like you're being an asshole about it to me. It's not nice to push people's button, but some people have too many buttons.

My analysis of racialism and race theory as it exists in my culture:

The system of racial classification, which most people see as some kind of natural law, seems to be a sociopolitical construct designed to chart how alien a given person is to the cultural standard, using a mixed metric of skin color, native language and ethnic origin, while consistently refusing to define those units.

If that were true, I would not be able to tell the majority of your ancestors are from Europe at a glance.

For instance, while 'black' and 'white' are considered natural classes, nowhere is there to be found a display showing the various existing human skin colorations and the correct term for each.

They are shorthand for being of subSaharan African extraction (hereafter referred to as African extraction for convenience) and European extraction, respectively. They are not just about skin shade. There are dark skinned people who are technically 'white'. If we lived in India, we would use different shorthand.

In fact, the language itself lacks terms for those shades, despite have tens of thousands of other color terms.

Show a photo of a skin shade that you think no one here can name, please.

It seems that when a 'black' person has a skin tone lighter than many 'white' people, the term 'black' shifts to mean an ethnicity.

No, it still really means the person is of African descent. If they are biracial they are entitled to self-identify as black or white or biracial. And if most of their family is mostly of African descent and they are mostly of European descent, I say they still have a right to identify as 'black' if they want to, and vice versa (though the latter is rare).

In other cases, persons with any skin tone may be assigned to the 'Hispanic' or 'Latino' race based on their native language.

'Hispanic' and 'Latino' aren't races, they are ethnicities.

This leaves persons from countries in 'Latin America' who speak English, Portuguese or other languages in racial limbo - or perhaps not, as the category was clearly added to exclude persons from the Americas outside of the USA and Canada from being 'white'.

Are you on the autism spectrum? I don't mean offense, it would help me to know that in responding to you. You seem to take some things very literally. Plenty of Hispanic people are white. Some are Native Americans. Many are a mix. Fortunately for them being in 'racial limbo', their race is independent of what language they speak or what country they were born in. It depends on what region their ancestors were from. The only real 'racial limbo' that is relevant is that there has been so much intermixing of European and Native American and African that they are indeed 'racially ambigious'.

In some situations, the word 'Caucasian' is used, but rather than referring to natives of the Caucus Mountains, it appears to be a synonym for 'white' based on a theory discredited a century ago. Likewise, 'Mongoloid' is a nice term that can mean 'of East Asian extraction' or 'congenitally retarted'. The terms 'Black', 'African-American' and 'Negro' superficially refer to persons who are ethnically sub-Saharan African, while 'white' likewise pretends to mean 'of European extraction'.

Have you heard of the etymological fallacy?

However, when a White and a Black produce offspring, all are Black, rather than Gray or Half-Black as one might expect.

Actually, the result is usually a blend of skin tones exactly as you might expect, because skin color is a blended trait. Brown eyes are a dominant trait but brown skin is not. Interpeting the offspring's appearance as 'black' instead of 'biracial' is a cultural artifact. A racist one, actually.

This can be repeated ad infinitum with the same results: if you take the F1 Black offspring, crossed with a new White, you still get only Black, despite the actual skin tones of the children, which by now are well within the range present in Southern Europe.

Ah, you understand. You must be making some sort of stupid point, then.

This pattern applies only to Black - the F1 of a WhitexAsian cross are 'half asian' or 'mixed'. The only possible analysis of this is that 'White' means 'pure' and 'Black' means 'polluted'.

It's not whites enforcing the 'one drop' rule anymore. Another possible analysis of this is 'black pride'. The people you're talking about almost universally value their black heritage more than they value identifying as white, but even they usually start identifying as white when everyone assumes that's what they are based on their appearance anyway, as a sheer matter of practicality. It's not the 1960s anymore.

The system of hyphenated names to refer to ethnicity seems to be an alternative, but upon inspection shows glaring inconsistency. A 'Japanese-American' is a person with a Japanese cultural heritage who is either born in or a resident of America, but 'African-American' isn't reducible, but a fixed term to refer to persons with cosmopolitan American cultural roots and dark skin, and significantly does not refer to a person with African cultural heritage in the USA. Or maybe it means both. Logically, an Afrikaner or Egyptian immigrant to the USA is also an African-American? Notable for its absence is the term European-American, which should be the proper term for 'white' but isn't used at all. This could go on for hours.

Is there a label for people who insist that everyone use the same terminology they do? Not everyone wants to be as fucking precise as you.

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I object to having that crap applied to me, especially by people who take it as natural law. Likewise, I don't appreciate being classified as an infidel my Muslims. It's technically correct, but it's irrational crap and I find it offensive on that basis. I don't like being seen as an archetype based on my Zodiac. So? Don't look at me and call me 'white'. Don't read my genome and call me 'black'. And please note that my status as an Asian is only honorary. I want to be classed, racially, as Human.

When I look at you, I think 'touchy', 'oversensitive', 'privileged', and 'over-entitled'.

Human is your species, not your race. 'Human race' is an inaccurate experession, aren't you obsessed with semantic precision, or is that only for other people?

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Human races *don't* exist, at least in the categories we recognize.

What's this 'we' stuff. Speak for yourself.

Hindi's are Indo-Europeans.

No kidding. Since 'Hindi' isn't a race, and skin tone isn't the only measure of race, why wouldn't they be?

The Japanese don't seem to be related to anyone, nor or the Basque.

Everyone is related. The Japanese don't like to admit that their ancestry is probably mostly Korean mixed with Ainu because the Japanese tend to be pretty racist about that. It's not really such a mystery. I don't know much about the Basque, but even if they don't 'seem' to be related to anyone, they are.

In the real world, you most often find very fuzzy borders.

Again, no kidding.

There is more genetic diversity in one African village than all of medieval England - a sequence will tell you that two people from the same African village are more different than any two people in England. It's CULTURALLY DEFINED and exists for the purpose of discrimination.

It's nice that you read, but if it were really culturally defined, we would not be able to tell a naked person of predominantly subSaharan ancestry from a naked person of predominantly English ancestry by their differing physical qualities. Africans are more diverse because they're the oldest race.

Do you think on Japanese forms the Nihonjin check Asian? In India, your religion is registered with the government and you have to fill out forms to change it - it's their version of race.

It's your version of making everything fit into your worldview that race 'doesn't mean anything'.

It's crap and I don't subscribe to it. My race is human - you can labelled yourself however you like, it's good with me.

Gosh, how white of you to let me label myself however I like.