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

[emilynghiem]

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.

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.

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

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. 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.In fact, the language itself lacks terms for those shades, despite have tens of thousands of other color terms. It seems that when a 'black' person has a skin tone lighter than many 'white' people, the term 'black' shifts to mean an ethnicity. In other cases, persons with any skin tone may be assigned to the 'Hispanic' or 'Latino' race based on their native language. 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'. 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'. However, when a White and a Black produce offspring, all are Black, rather than Gray or Half-Black as one might expect. 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. 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'. 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.

First I agree with you what is being debated are CULTURAL issues and differences in thinking and biases from that; so for you, by your cultural values, the person who made that comment really did so in the spirit of making a racially loaded remark.
if other people didn't see it that way, that is their cultural bias. and regardless if it was or was not intended as racial, if it came across that way to you, then it had that effect.

as for race, it has been shown that people's ethnic proximity makes a difference in medical issues, where genetics matters. the example I cite most often is HLA compatibility for bone marrow transplants. caucasian donors and patients have 9/10 chance of finding a match; but the minorities only have 1/10 chance of finding one. Race matters so much, it even depends on matching patients by nationality, like Nigerians to other Nigerians, and Vietnamese to other Vietnamese. the bone marrow registry set up 4 nonprofit groups to target recruitment for 4 key races identified as Asian/Pacific Islander, African, Latino/Hispanic, and Native American. so they even recognize that lives depend on matching people by these specific pools.

with black/white class division in America, the issue of slavery introduced factors into the actual bloodlines: first the factor of spiritual wounds carried from one generation to the next that require extensive work to heal and let go of resentment and anger that can express itself as either hatred or even phobic level fear of racism by others. you can say it is carried in the spirit, and race correlates as another factor passed
down from one generation to the next; race isn't necessarily the cause but a correlating factor in order to identify socially so the issues can be addressed.

second the factor of no family experience or history with owning and managing property and businesses, so that there can be a near phobic engrained fear of owning property under a daunting system that appears dominated by white culture and class. i've run into fear of property and fear of laws and govt etc because it is associated with white systems and white man dominance over the poor who are victims to it.

whatever you call that rental mentality and fear of being able to gain equal control as the white wealthy classes, i've seen this even worse in some black families and communities taught to resist and distrust this whole system as a way of oppression.

this should be just a physical difference in opportunity that can be remedied by education and experience, but it has been engrained in people because of the painful history of slavery and the deprivation of rights to own property and learn how to manage and govern as other property owners can. so it is deeper than just socioeconomic and some of it is passed down from families without this background, because the family history was destroyed by genocide and needs time to recover.