Racism by degree

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No... I'm just going to point out that strawmanning to call somebody racist while implying something racist is BEING RACIST YOURSELF.

Race is nothing. Cultural and values are everything.

ruveyn

Janissy - quite true that there are things like Tay-Sachs and sickle-cell that are clearly genetic - where known ancestry can serve to alert one to risks. But even those are not bound to perceived / assigned race as such.

Janissy - quite true that there are things like Tay-Sachs and sickle-cell that are clearly genetic - where known ancestry can serve to alert one to risks. But even those are not bound to perceived / assigned race as such.

How about "Would you rather your daughter marry a nobel laureate of with a different skin color, or a wino of the same skin color?"

Or
"Would you rather your son marry a girl of a differnt skin color, or a boy of the same skin color?"

The fact that you think you're morally superior to anyone who attacks your sacred cow of politically correct thinking is plain douchebaggery.

That's true, especially given that people can have kids with whomever they like, making it all even more complicated. I was really just debating the use of the term "meaningful" There are some contexts (like medical) where skin color and so on really are meaningful. Skin color makes an awful lot of difference for skin cancer risk. But of course skin color doesn't divvy up neatly along racial lines either. There are light skinned people with a "black" label and dark skinned people with a "caucasian" label (I'm thinking some Middle Eastern people, who got a "caucasian" label on past U.S. census tallies) so the doctor really has to pay attention to skin color rather than race lable.

Let me add that I do like that you said "perceived/assigned race". I think race is partly a cultural optical illusion. There are real genetic differences (Africans don't have any Neanderthal DNA, it now turns out) but there is also considerable blurriness among the labels and a feature that supposedly lands a person in one racial box can also be found in somebody put into another racial box. We as a species care very much about putting things in neat categories but Nature apparently doesn't.

I am morally and intellectually superior to somebody whose values are so backwards that they have to rely on strawmanning and outright lies to make their case.

I think these are too extreme. You'd only end up with the most fervent racists... Even somebody who is very prejudiced may recognize that his daughter would have a better life as the wife of a nobel laureate. You'd have to be almost militant about it to condemn your child to a life of poverty, abuse, etc. just to keep her from another race...

That won't work. What if the person is a non-racist anti-intellectual alcoholic who objects to his daughter marrying the nobel laureate not on the grounds that he is of a different skin color but on the grounds that he assumes the nobel laureate is an incurable intellectual snob who will convince his daughter to dissociate herself from him and the wino is a friend of the family who will keep his daughter connected to her roots? If you look at mixed-race couples, they tend to be from the same class. And mixed-class couples seem to be rarer than mixed race couples.


Or


This pits racism against homophobia and assumes that racism will trump homophobia if a person is racist. But "racist" isn't necessarily an is/is not proposition. People can be degrees of racist just as they can be degrees of homophobic. A person who is strongly homophobic and weakly racist would still prefer the hetero mixed race pairing on the grounds that it is the lesser of two evils.
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Janissy - so true. From vision through higher levels of taxonomy, we have to persuade our brains that boundaries exist where there is no true break, and that categories can be based on qualities that do not hold up to close inspection. Nature is closer to the dots of the newspaper photo than to the discrete objects we perceive.

That too. There are degrees of everything, including racism. A person can be just a little bit racist but be quite excited that his daughter is marrying up in class, even if he would have preferred a same-race spouse. Or he could be classist and not want his daughter marrying up for reasons related to not wanting her to become "one of them" (different class, not different race) and be perfectly ok with his daughter marrying the alcoholic of a different race but same class. Or he could be the same class as the nobel laureate and approve of the marriage on the grounds that she stayed in the same class rather than marrying perilously down.

It pits racism against classism and assumes that racism will trump classism. Not a safe assumption.

WHY do the SEXISTS always frame the question as "your daughter marry"?

The BROTHER of a friend of mine married a Southside Chicago girl of noticeably different genetic background - I have their wedding picture around here somewhere.

Anyhow, I would not want my daughter, had I one and were he available, to marry Obama. NOT because of his ethnic heritage.

AND she should stay clear of boozer, users, and losers.

Otherwise, as long as Herself and I give the thumbs up, she may marry anybody she likes.

Thank you for proving my point. You think your arrogance is called for just cuz someone disagrees with you.

How is it strawmanning or outright lying to call affirmative action racist? The policy is about hiring someone on the basis of their skin colour alone rather than their qualifications. As for "lying", how you feel about it is a matter of opinion and opinions can't be called lies.

You can't be that stupid. You just can't. I can only conclude you're being dishonest, for the sake of trying to troll me.

It's an effort to address historical errors.

It's like if you beat a man senseless for years, torture him, deprive him of many things and then one day walk away and say that you are done and that everything is even now. Some argue you should offer him a hand to his feet and feel some responsibility for his treatment and his situation. That there might be some way to mitigate the damage. If he was an individual or a corporation, the legal system would agree. Others will claim that though their group may have benefited directly and indirectly, they themselves didn't do it and that it has nothing to do with them.

I don't see anything racist about it. It's a difference of opinion regarding responsibility for historical policies.