Quiz - Which Political Party would you belong to?

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Genjo Conan
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Re: Quiz - Which Political Party would you belong to?

Post by Genjo Conan »

PeterC wrote: Tue Sep 14, 2021 2:56 am
Genjo Conan wrote: Mon Sep 13, 2021 7:49 pm "intersectionality"--which, like CRT itself, has come to mean something different than it initially did
It frustrates me that to this day, despite trying quite hard, I still don't really understand what it means.
In its original incarnation, it means something like "interlocking oppression": the intersection of multiple disadvantages. These days, it seems to mean something like "our girlboss CEO should also be a Hindu lesbian".
I was never really a fan of critical legal studies and critical theory. I have no issue with the marxist roots - I personally think Marx is one of the most consistently correct and also largely misrepresented writers of the last few centuries. I just didn't like the way that they blindly imported ideas and terminology from the study of literature into the social sciences. It just made no sense to me. Different disciplines develop different tools for different tasks.
I'm not sure I'd agree with "blindly." I've never entirely warmed to crit, either in its original incarnation or as a method of legal analysis, but I think it's more elegant than you're making it out to be. The Frankfurt School writers could be impenetrable, but they weren't hacks; nor were the legal folks like Unger and Kelman.
Most of the furore about CRT is purely manufactured. Few of those criticizing it can offer an adequate definition of it. But the proponents of the broad genre of critical theory have really not done themselves a favor by obfuscating some important basic ideas in a veil of opaque and self-referential terminology.
Well, this is academia, isn't it? Before I went to law school I got a grad degree in history, and strongly considered getting a PhD. Some in the academy look down on popular history writers not because their research is shoddy or their conclusions suspect, but because they write so that laypeople can understand them.

Now, there is a certain degree of jargon that is probably useful or at least understandable: specialized terms that would take too long to circumlocute. (The legal profession is moving away from Latin but res ipsa loquitur, for example, hangs on stubbornly because every lawyer understands what it means, and the alternative is "when something bad happened to the plaintiff and you can't prove that the defendant did it but you can infer that they did it with a sufficiently high degree of certainty to assign legal blame because the attendant circumstances make any other cause extremely improbable oh to hell with it res ipsa loquitur.") But most academic jargon is just an encrustation; if it serves any purposes it's as a guild cant, to keep the normies away. CRT isn't any different.
PeterC
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Re: Quiz - Which Political Party would you belong to?

Post by PeterC »

Genjo Conan wrote: Tue Sep 14, 2021 4:10 am "our girlboss CEO should also be a Hindu lesbian".
Why not an autistic BIPOC trans amputee? Hindu lesbians just aren’t sufficiently oppressed these days
Now, there is a certain degree of jargon that is probably useful or at least understandable: specialized terms that would take too long to circumlocute. (The legal profession is moving away from Latin but res ipsa loquitur, for example, hangs on stubbornly because every lawyer understands what it means, and the alternative is "when something bad happened to the plaintiff and you can't prove that the defendant did it but you can infer that they did it with a sufficiently high degree of certainty to assign legal blame because the attendant circumstances make any other cause extremely improbable oh to hell with it res ipsa loquitur.") But most academic jargon is just an encrustation; if it serves any purposes it's as a guild cant, to keep the normies away. CRT isn't any different.
Jargon as shorthand is a useful thing, it saves ink and avoids confusion. I’m not yet sure that this is what’s going on with this branch of academic jargon.

Legal writing is also to some extent a cultural thing. American legal writing is far more circumlocutory than other anglophone countries.
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Re: Quiz - Which Political Party would you belong to?

Post by PeterC »

Genjo Conan wrote: Mon Sep 13, 2021 7:49 pm Kimberle Crenshaw (she who coined the term "intersectionality"--which, like CRT itself, has come to mean something different than it initially did) springs to mind. Much of her work focuses specifically on race and gender, but she certainly includes a class analysis in her work. For example, from the 1989 paper in which she coined the term, here's her description of the problem:
Imagine a basement which contains all people who are disadvantaged on the basis of race, sex, class, sexual preference, age and/or physical ability. These people are stacked-feet standing on shoulders-with those on the bottom being disadvantaged by the full array of factors, up to the very top, where the heads of all those disadvantaged by a singular factor brush up against the ceiling. Their ceiling is actually the floor above which only those who are not disadvantaged in any way reside.

...

In much of feminist theory and, to some extent, in antiracist politics, this framework is reflected in the belief that sexism or racism can be meaningfully discussed without paying attention to the lives of those other than the race-, gender- or class-privileged. As a result, both feminist theory and antiracist politics have been organized, in part, around the equation of racism with what happens to the Black middle-class or to Black men, and the equation of sexism with what happens to white women.
I'm taking the quote out of the original context in which you used it, but it illustrates part of my unease around this movement quite well.

Let's suppose that her model of heirarchical multifactor oppression (or whatever we call it) is basically correct, so we make sure our mental models are accurate, we fully understand the disenfranchisement of the intersectional groups etc etc, and then we are, as she says, able to have a meaningful discussion about sexism and racism. Then...what? Actually addressing the problems of societal inequality involve doing practical things with housing, transportation infrastructure, education, healthcare, policing, etc. At times it seems that the net effect of all these meaningful discussions is just to create more intersectional minority jobs in NGOs having meaningful discussions on these issues. On the other side of the fight, you have well-organized people using very simple slogans that are easy for people to rally around. Low taxes. No reverse racism. Freedom. Etc. The anti-inequality campaign has become an incoherent mess - to the point where I can't even think of a meaningful term to describe what their objective is, when we can summarize the objectives of the other side very easily.
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Re: Quiz - Which Political Party would you belong to?

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PeterC wrote: Tue Sep 14, 2021 6:18 am I'm taking the quote out of the original context in which you used it, but it illustrates part of my unease around this movement quite well.

Let's suppose that her model of heirarchical multifactor oppression (or whatever we call it) is basically correct, so we make sure our mental models are accurate, we fully understand the disenfranchisement of the intersectional groups etc etc, and then we are, as she says, able to have a meaningful discussion about sexism and racism. Then...what? Actually addressing the problems of societal inequality involve doing practical things with housing, transportation infrastructure, education, healthcare, policing, etc. At times it seems that the net effect of all these meaningful discussions is just to create more intersectional minority jobs in NGOs having meaningful discussions on these issues. On the other side of the fight, you have well-organized people using very simple slogans that are easy for people to rally around. Low taxes. No reverse racism. Freedom. Etc. The anti-inequality campaign has become an incoherent mess - to the point where I can't even think of a meaningful term to describe what their objective is, when we can summarize the objectives of the other side very easily.
A long time ago, I tried to understand all that stuff. But I'm basically lazy, found fellow grad students who dropped this kind of jargon into regular conversations unbearable bores, and was attached to my identity as a simple skater. F that noise. Especially when these problems could be, and their solutions, could be talked about in ordinary, colloquial language. "That shit is not fair. Let's make it fair." That's all we are talking about in the end, albeit in fine narrative detail and using stats illustrated in charts. It sucks to be called "chink". It sucks to be left out because of the way you look. What else does anyone need to understand about that?

And this is where the rhetoric and ideas of old traditions that focus on people's fundamental humanity - "God's children" for instance - has been and will continue to be way more effective.

Part of the problem that the left now has is that with the rejection of religion, we've also lost simple principles and language to talk about why people should be treated fairly and kindly, which is basically what we're demanding, isn't it?

Anyways... carry on with the coffee shop discussion.
Last edited by Queequeg on Tue Sep 14, 2021 1:17 pm, edited 1 time in total.
There is no suffering to be severed. Ignorance and klesas are indivisible from bodhi. There is no cause of suffering to be abandoned. Since extremes and the false are the Middle and genuine, there is no path to be practiced. Samsara is nirvana. No severance achieved. No suffering nor its cause. No path, no end. There is no transcendent realm; there is only the one true aspect. There is nothing separate from the true aspect.
-Guanding, Perfect and Sudden Contemplation,
Malcolm
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Re: Quiz - Which Political Party would you belong to?

Post by Malcolm »

Johnny Dangerous wrote: Tue Sep 14, 2021 3:18 am
Malcolm wrote: Tue Sep 14, 2021 2:46 am
Johnny Dangerous wrote: Mon Sep 13, 2021 9:27 pm

You just wrote ‘race is class’, which is too reductionist for me, it’s just a statement of the obvious fact that some people are oppressed worse than others…
Because of their skin type….that has nothing to do with economics, that has to do with pure bias. Now, you can try and explain away such prejudice as a function of class tensions, etc….but I think it is an insufficient explanation, particularly when the standard trope of older white leftists is to try and gloss racial issues as mere economic issues…hence CRT, etc.
What do you mean it has nothing to do with economics? Have you ever looked at the comparative households incomes of white and black families? Of course the oppression of black people is economic, forty acres and a mule etc...it has always been like that. Does every bit of the oppression they experience come more from racial or class animus? That's a tough question but none of the socialists I hung out with would ever answer it the way you are saying they would, making this conversation a refutation of a straw man, which is pointless.
The oppression of black peoples has economic consequences, but the cause is not is merely that they don’t get to share the profit of their labor, the reason they don’t get the same share as whites, all other things being equal, is that they are Black. Color, as a basis for for class, is far older in history than labor. It seems to be mostly an Indoeuropean issue.
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Re: Quiz - Which Political Party would you belong to?

Post by Malcolm »

PeterC wrote: Tue Sep 14, 2021 6:18 am The anti-inequality campaign has become an incoherent mess - to the point where I can't even think of a meaningful term to describe what their objective is, when we can summarize the objectives of the other side very easily.
Mostly, to point out things that white people in America are unaware of because of our cultural narcissism.

The term "karen," for an entitled, clueless middle-aged white women seems to have bubbled up in the last decade or so from the Black zeitgeist. Exhibit 1, a karen being berated by her husband in front of two Black people she started harassing at a gas station:



This is meaningful, because it shows that white people in this country are not all as thick as bricks, myopically addicted to Tucker Carlson.
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Re: Quiz - Which Political Party would you belong to?

Post by Malcolm »

Queequeg wrote: Tue Sep 14, 2021 12:52 pm
A long time ago, I tried to understand all that stuff. But I'm basically lazy, found fellow grad students who dropped this kind of jargon into regular conversations unbearable bores, and was attached to my identity as a simple skater. F that noise. Especially when these problems could be, and their solutions, could be talked about in ordinary, colloquial language.
The problem is that white americans, are in general, unaware of or choose to ignore the fact that racism in this country is still a huge issue, as you yourself acknowledge.

Why would the people causing the problem have the answer for it?

If you don't properly diagnose an illness, you cannot treat it effectively.
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Re: Quiz - Which Political Party would you belong to?

Post by Queequeg »

Malcolm wrote: Tue Sep 14, 2021 3:22 pm
Queequeg wrote: Tue Sep 14, 2021 12:52 pm
A long time ago, I tried to understand all that stuff. But I'm basically lazy, found fellow grad students who dropped this kind of jargon into regular conversations unbearable bores, and was attached to my identity as a simple skater. F that noise. Especially when these problems could be, and their solutions, could be talked about in ordinary, colloquial language.
The problem is that white americans, are in general, unaware of or choose to ignore the fact that racism in this country is still a huge issue, as you yourself acknowledge.

Why would the people causing the problem have the answer for it?

If you don't properly diagnose an illness, you cannot treat it effectively.
I beg to differ.

George Floyd's murder moved people, not because he was black, per se. Not because he was snuffed on camera, not because he pleaded, "I can't breathe!" You know what part of that video broke people? When he was calling for his mother. Every mother who saw that felt it in their sinews. Everyone with a heart felt the break when a big strong man was reduced to crying for his mother, facedown in the gutter. It was visceral in a way that transcended everything, down to a mother and her child.

That cut through everything to an identity that every sensitive human being knows in their gut. That plea cut through everything to Floyd's humanity.

I get it racism is the problem. Anti-racism is not necessarily going to be the solution. The Civil Rights movement was successful when it appealed to common humanity - "I have a dream that one day little black boys and girls will be holding hands with little white boys and girls."

We don't need to explain why human beings should be treated fairly. We need the technical data to identify where the unfairness plays out and could be balanced. The people who deny the systemic unfairness in the system are not paying attention or worse. Screw them.

You mentioned affirmative action as one of the most effective equalizing policies. I agree with that. And I don't look at it as some Kumbaya happy ever after policy where we all live and work in a respectful, multicultural paradise. In fact, it pisses a lot of people off and in some sense makes things worse. I expect blacks who get their foot in the door to be as self-interested in getting other blacks into the institutions as Irish were bent on getting other Irish into the Northeast cities' police and fire departments a century ago. I expect these policies to play out with all the self interest of white supremacy, even as the motivation of the policy is about a fundamental fairness and shared humanity.
There is no suffering to be severed. Ignorance and klesas are indivisible from bodhi. There is no cause of suffering to be abandoned. Since extremes and the false are the Middle and genuine, there is no path to be practiced. Samsara is nirvana. No severance achieved. No suffering nor its cause. No path, no end. There is no transcendent realm; there is only the one true aspect. There is nothing separate from the true aspect.
-Guanding, Perfect and Sudden Contemplation,
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Re: Quiz - Which Political Party would you belong to?

Post by Malcolm »

Queequeg wrote: Tue Sep 14, 2021 4:54 pmThe Civil Rights movement was successful when it appealed to common humanity - "I have a dream that one day little black boys and girls will be holding hands with little white boys and girls."
The Civil Rights movement (which is not over by a long shot) succeeded because in 1965 (when I was 2 and nine months old) white people in the North finally saw Black people being treated like this in the South on their TVs:

Image
Selma was what catalyzed the Johnson Administration to do finally something about segregation in the South, once and for all. It lead directly to the Voting Rights act, subsequently gutted in our lifetime by SCOTUS.

We need the technical data to identify where the unfairness plays out and could be balanced.
CRT is an analytical tool for just that.
You mentioned affirmative action as one of the most effective equalizing policies. I agree with that. And I don't look at it as some Kumbaya happy ever after policy where we all live and work in a respectful, multicultural paradise. In fact, it pisses a lot of people off and in some sense makes things worse. I expect blacks who get their foot in the door to be as self-interested in getting other blacks into the institutions as Irish were bent on getting other Irish into the Northeast cities' police and fire departments a century ago. I expect these policies to play out with all the self interest of white supremacy, even as the motivation of the policy is about a fundamental fairness and shared humanity.
The funny thing about the Irish in America is that they too were contending with the issue of white supremacy. But there is one crucial difference between Black people and the Irish, their skin tone. That's why after Kennedy, the Irish became fully "white." One of my bosses grew up in Massachusetts when "Irish Need Not Apply" signs were common in Boston. That's also why the Irish in S. Boston reacted so strongly to bussing in the early 70's, because they were jealous of their new found "whiteness."
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Re: Quiz - Which Political Party would you belong to?

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Malcolm wrote: Tue Sep 14, 2021 5:32 pm Selma was what catalyzed the Johnson Administration to do finally something about segregation in the South, once and for all.
Right. In rhetoric, we talk about our common humanity, about inequality, fundamental fairness. This is the idealism that overcomes self interests enough. It takes a blatant impression of a fundamental disregard for a person's humanity to get us to act, though - something so outrageous that we feel compelled to act if we really hold these ideals as what defines our personal character. I guess back in the late 50's, early 60's, people getting assaulted by men with attack dogs would do it. Watching Rodney King get the shit kicked out of him did it in the early 90s. Now, watching a man get choked to death doesn't do it (Eric Garner). He has to be reduced to a pathetic thing calling for his mother to tug at our sympathies.
The funny thing about the Irish in America is that they too were contending with the issue of white supremacy. But there is one crucial difference between Black people and the Irish, their skin tone. That's why after Kennedy, the Irish became fully "white." One of my bosses grew up in Massachusetts when "Irish Need Not Apply" signs were common in Boston. That's also why the Irish in S. Boston reacted so strongly to bussing in the early 70's, because they were jealous of their new found "whiteness."
Like I said, equality isn't going to be some kumbaya moment. Its going to be that time when everyone has an equal chance to elbow each other and grab the money and power off the table. Governments role is not to force people to be nice and kind. Its to keep the game fair and the field level.

I've argued with my Trumpy cousins, reminding them of our illegal alien Irish grandmother and French Canadian grandfather and all the discrimination and genocide our ancestors faced. Pretty funny reaction watching the stutter and try to explain that away.

The kindness stuff is for the idealists and religionists to cultivate in the population.
There is no suffering to be severed. Ignorance and klesas are indivisible from bodhi. There is no cause of suffering to be abandoned. Since extremes and the false are the Middle and genuine, there is no path to be practiced. Samsara is nirvana. No severance achieved. No suffering nor its cause. No path, no end. There is no transcendent realm; there is only the one true aspect. There is nothing separate from the true aspect.
-Guanding, Perfect and Sudden Contemplation,
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Re: Quiz - Which Political Party would you belong to?

Post by Malcolm »

Queequeg wrote: Tue Sep 14, 2021 5:51 pm
Like I said, equality isn't going to be some kumbaya moment. Its going to be that time when everyone has an equal chance to elbow each other and grab the money and power off the table. Governments role is not to force people to be nice and kind. Its to keep the game fair and the field level.
What I am saying is that "whiteness" is what many people of European descent were able to move into, after a long struggle of dealing with white supremacy in America.

Image

https://www.theatlantic.com/galleries/a ... rtoons/41/

https://oac.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/hb4t1nb029/?brand=oac4

But one thing a Black person in the US can never do is become white, because skin tone.

Our treatment of Native people is also a great problem. SCOTUS got it right when they handed back 40% of Oklahoma back to the Native population there. The Cherokee were smart never to settle for cession.
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Re: Quiz - Which Political Party would you belong to?

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Image

After the refugee crisis 2015 i started voting for the nazi party though.
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Re: Quiz - Which Political Party would you belong to?

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Toenail wrote: Tue Sep 14, 2021 6:15 pm Image

After the refugee crisis 2015 i started voting for the nazi party though.
Voted for the nazi party. ? Where? That's preety low and disgusting.
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Re: Quiz - Which Political Party would you belong to?

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Malcolm wrote: Tue Sep 14, 2021 2:35 pmThis is meaningful, because it shows that white people in this country are not all as thick as bricks, myopically addicted to Tucker Carlson.

I’m not addicted to T.C., and even though I think that he’s on point sometimes; I’d also put my lady in her place if she was being disrespectful only because someone isn’t ‘white’.

Now Fox News isn’t as terrible as say msnbc or cnn, although I do think that a lot of their reporting are often red-herrings.....

Anyway, Malcolm, you sure seem to like to fuel division, like the news outlets do; whether wittingly or unwittingly. And I don’t like to make things personal, it’s just that c’mon, your preoccupation with political pontifications ought to be called out sometimes....
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Re: Quiz - Which Political Party would you belong to?

Post by frankie »

PeterC wrote: Tue Sep 14, 2021 3:37 am
Malcolm wrote: Tue Sep 14, 2021 3:13 am
PeterC wrote: Tue Sep 14, 2021 2:56 ampersonally think Marx is one of the most consistently correct and also largely misrepresented writers of the last few centuries.


About half of Capital was really written by Engels - at least heavily edited. And he had a better beard than Marx.
Harpo had the best hair though.
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Re: Quiz - Which Political Party would you belong to?

Post by Malcolm »

Shotenzenjin wrote: Tue Sep 14, 2021 6:30 pm
Voted for the nazi party. ? Where? That's preety low and disgusting.
He means the AfD.
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Re: Quiz - Which Political Party would you belong to?

Post by Norwegian »

Malcolm wrote: Tue Sep 14, 2021 7:01 pm
Shotenzenjin wrote: Tue Sep 14, 2021 6:30 pm
Voted for the nazi party. ? Where? That's preety low and disgusting.
He means the AfD.
Yuck.
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Re: Quiz - Which Political Party would you belong to?

Post by Malcolm »

Sādhaka wrote: Tue Sep 14, 2021 6:32 pm Now Fox News isn’t as terrible as say msnbc or cnn...
Oh it is far worse. They out right lie and promulgate conspiracy theories. MSNBC is not news, it is just opinion. CNN only runs four or five stories a day, over and over again, but their journalism is just fine, if not terribly deep.

Anyway, Malcolm, you sure seem to like to fuel division, like the news outlets do; whether wittingly or unwittingly.
Gee, why can't we all just get along...

I have my perspective on these worldly events, if they upset you, don't read my posts.
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Re: Quiz - Which Political Party would you belong to?

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https://www.sapiens.org/column/race/cau ... gy-origin/
The term “Caucasian” originated from a growing 18th-century European science of racial classification. German anatomist Johann Blumenbach visited the Caucasus Mountains, located between the Caspian and Black seas, and he must have been enchanted because he labeled the people there “Caucasians” and proposed that they were created in God’s image as an ideal form of humanity

And the label has stuck to this day. According to Mukhopadhyay, Blumenbach went on to name four other “races,” each considered “physically and morally ‘degenerate’ forms of ‘God’s original creation.’” He categorized Africans, excluding light-skinned North Africans, as “Ethiopians” or “black.” He divided non-Caucasian Asians into two separate races: the “Mongolian” or “yellow” race of Japan and China, and the “Malayan” or “brown” race, which included Aboriginal Australians and Pacific Islanders. And he called Native Americans the “red” race.

Blumenbach’s system of racial classification was adopted in the United States to justify racial discrimination—particularly slavery. Popular race science and evolutionary theories generally posited that there were separate races, that differences in behavior were tied to skin color, and that there were scientific ways to measure race. One way racial differences were defined was through craniometrics, which measured skull size to determine the intelligence of each racial group. As you can imagine, this flawed application of the scientific method resulted in race scientists developing a flawed system of racial classification that ranked the five races from most primitive (black and brown races), to more advanced (the Asian races), to the most advanced (the white, or Caucasian, races). Even though the five-race topology was later disproven, “Caucasian” still has currency in the U.S.

One reason we keep using the term “Caucasian” is that the U.S. legal system made use of Blumenbach’s taxonomy. As early as 1790 the first naturalization law was passed, preventing foreigners who were not white from becoming citizens. But according to Mukhopadhyay, Blumenbach’s category of “Caucasian” posed a problem because his classification of white also included some North Africans, Armenians, Persians, Arabs, and North Indians. The definition of Caucasian had to be reinvented to focus the ideological category of whiteness on northern and western Europe. The term, even though its exact definition changed over time, was used to shape legal policy and the nature of our society.
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Re: Quiz - Which Political Party would you belong to?

Post by Kim O'Hara »

Malcolm wrote: Tue Sep 14, 2021 7:56 pm https://www.sapiens.org/column/race/cau ... gy-origin/
The term “Caucasian” originated from a growing 18th-century European science of racial classification. ... The definition of Caucasian had to be reinvented to focus the ideological category of whiteness on northern and western Europe. The term, even though its exact definition changed over time, was used to shape legal policy and the nature of our society.
:thumbsup:
That's a good little article.

If anyone wants to dig into the genetic side of the 'race' question, try Adam Rutherford's A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived. It's authoritative (he's a geneticist), clear (he know he's he's writing for a lay audience) and relatively recent (2016).
A really short summary would be that all of us came from Africa and we have been diverging genetically ever since, including in the last 10 000 years, but that 'race' is a really weak concept. He points out - repeatedly - that there is far more variation within any given 'race' that between 'races', but says that 'races' are (just) distinguishable: when you let AI loose on a lot of genetic data and tell it to look for any kinds of similar groups it can find, it finds half a dozen groups which roughly correspond to our historical idea of races.

Sadly, the weakness of the concept doesn't mean it will go away easily. We have been dividing people into 'us' (always good) and 'them' (always bad and often not considered human) for a really long time, and skin colour is just too obvious a marker.

:namaste:
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