Uncomfortable topics: Let's talk about race

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

I looked them up, and they're Southern terms that basically mean the same thing as high yellow, usually applied to females, with connotations of sexual attractiveness.

I find that uncomfortable on several levels, personally.

In that context, yeah, but I've never heard it used in the context of denoting sexual attractiveness. At least in the Tidewater area, it seems to just be a slang word for "part black, part something else".

Without sexual connotation I find it less disturbing. Out here we just call it "light". I mean, I am not a huge fan of the common Black practice of categorizing people by skin tone because it's a social hierarchy thing and I know where it came from, but other than that it's not overtly offensive. I guess. Mixed feelings here. (Oh fuck, undeliberate pun! I'm going to leave it.)

The social hierarchy issues associated with skin tone and hair texture are really bothersome. I won't go into the nuances of it right now, but there is a fucked up social dynamic within black communities that is directly descended from the way people were valued in the slave days. A light girl on a plantation would become a house servant because she was more "presentable", so she would be groomed and educated to a certain degree, and possibly even treated with affection (she would probably also be subjected to frequent rape, but hey).

The cultural residue of the higher value (and better treatment) of light-skinned mixes translates to higher social status to this day, and frequently that social status is accompanied by resentment and distrust (often unconscious) on the part of darker-skinned people. Weird dynamic all around. The result is that a weird cliquishness forms around skin tone, and dark girls often won't even try to befriend light girls because they think we're stuck up. And then we often don't approach them because we think they're aloof. So the cycle perpetuates itself.

I see Mexicans doing it too, favoring people with lighter skin and making comments like "My grandfather was Spanish, he had blue eyes" like it's somehow more special to have colonizing shitheels in the family than Indians.

The Indios call them Gallegos, I am told, and despise them just as much.

That one hasn't made it here yet, when it does at least I'll know what they're talking about now.
And we have white people who think Native Americans stop at the Rio Grand and Mexicans begin, I don't think they know what an Aztec is. And South Texas was Lipan Apache, a lot of the people here who identify as Mexican could be superimposed into a picture with Cochise's kids and you couldn't pick them out if you weren't familiar with the photo already. There's really no border at all, it's just political bs.

Yeah, this. People assume I'm Mexican all the time, and then people apologize when I tell them I'm Native American. And since I'm 1/4 Apache, it's the same fucking thing.

[Roly Poly Oly-Garch]

I see Mexicans doing it too, favoring people with lighter skin and making comments like "My grandfather was Spanish, he had blue eyes" like it's somehow more special to have colonizing shitheels in the family than Indians.

That was the way it was in my family. We were "Spanish" not "Mexican". We'd be corrected as kids if we said it wrong.

My great-grandpa was always alleged to have come from Spain (with his fair features and blue-eyes, of course). About 3 years ago a distant cousin got a hold of us with a genealogy she had worked on. Our branch of Rodriguez had lived in New Mexico and Southern Colorado at least 2 generations before Grandpa Rodriguez moved up north in the 1910's.

Weird to me that it was such a big point of emphasis to state our origins were Spanish (and therefore more American than "Mexicans"), when any white family, except maybe the odd French one, was more recently immigrated to this section of America than we were.

Not quite as weird when I heard old-timers talk about the "No Dogs or Mexicans" signs that used to grace local store-fronts. This went on at the same time Rosa Parks was doing her thing in Selma. Learned about one of those things in school...the other...not so much.

[LMNO]

Navkat, that was a pretty great rant.  And now, National Brotherhood Week.

[navkat]

Thankyouverymuchforallthecrazy!

[Phox]

Dok's thread on St. Patrick's day got me thinking, but I felt this thread was more appropriate for the content that was spewing out, so here goes:  In my town, being largely homogenous, cliques develop over stupid things, like heritage. (to the point it was just short of gang warfare when I was a kid). There were the Irish kids, there were the Italian kids, there were the German kids, there were the Polish kids, and then there were the regular kids. (Fun fact, in high school, there were also the Catholic kids, and one town over, there were the Black kids, bu they don't figure into this train of thought right now...)I was one of the Irish kids. Personally, it didn't really affect me much. I hung out with the regular kids and the German kids, and maybe the odd Italian or Pole, though, that was largely discouraged, because they lived on the Wrong Street^TM.  But there were a few people who took these distinctions very seriously, and there would be fights over it and what not. Now, it would be social suicide to takes sides against your own when the fists started flying, even if you weren't really involved with the politics of it.

I remember when there was a big stir over some legitimate Mexicans coming into the neighborhood, and suddenly the Italians and the Poles were our friends (<= not joking). Oh sure, there was the Puerto Rican family, but they were okay. Those Mexicans, though, they were bad news. Don't ever play with them. Of course, at school, the score was different, and currying favor with the Mexican kid, who was automatically the coolest kid in class and whichever group had him at the time was walking tall. There were three brothers, and all of them abused this social status, naturally.

It turns out, that the three brothers are all losers as adults: Of course, this has nothing to do with the fact that they are Mexican, and everything to do with the fact that their social status amongst the underground elite; those who were most involved in the ethnic politics turned into the burnouts and the delinquents, because they fancied themselves to be like the '20s gangsters, running the town with the drugs and illicit hobbies. The problem was ALL  they had was drugs. And then, once you get out of high school, that shit dries up in a place like this. Of the Mexican brothers, one's dead, one's in jail, and the other is a would-be drug kingpin in an otherwise uneventful backwater, but really, he's just strung out all the time with delusions of grandeur. As for the rest of those folks, as far as I know, they are all still there, working dead end jobs. if they are so fortunate, and wasting their time getting fucked up on drain cleaner.

In regards to the passive racism of the adults, I don't know, really. I imagine they still hold their prejudices, but on the other hand, there was a black family that moved in while I was still in high school, and an Indian family later, and as far as I am aware, they were fairly easily accepted.

I don't really have a point, nor do I know if this is actually relevant to this thread at all, but hey... I am not going to complain when the writing starts. 

[Anna Mae Bollocks]

And going back to the OP:

OK. Now, I will talk about what it's like to be multi-racial. I will start with the fact that growing up, most of my white friends said things like "I don't think about race" and "I don't think of you as being non-white".

*shudders*

There's another one that gets said sometimes, it goes:

"I'm colorblind, I don't see race."

How do you look at a person and notice their face, build, gestures, what they're wearing and everything else and not SEE any ethnic features? I mean, yeah, it would be wrong to judge them by that, or presume anything, but not SEE it? No way.

[Anna Mae Bollocks]

Phox: What are "regular" kids?

and

Where I grew up, I think it was weed that brought the races together and got everybody voluntarily hanging out with each other, not integration. When your part of town dried up, you went and hung out in the other part and vice versa, that's what finally did it.

[Phox]

Phox: What are "regular" kids?

and

Where I grew up, I think it was weed that brought the races together and got everybody voluntarily hanging out with each other, not integration. When your part of town dried up, you went and hung out in the other part and vice versa, that's what finally did it.

The "regular" kids, were the kids whose families did not strongly associate with any of the ethnic groups. (That's not to say that they weren't German, Irish, Polish, etc., they just didn't lay claim to that background, nor live in the neighborhoods that distinguished the groups.) Since it used to be a big time coal mining town, I'd imagine that the ethnic neighborhoods (that seems weird to say) were where the miners lived. I do know that previously there was a ton of social status based on being a miner or a townie, and when the mines closed, that distinction was lost, so they grabbed on to the next most identifiable thing.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Part of that, I suspect, is that people with very little else to lay claim to as a point of pride will fall back on their ancestry, despite it having nothing to do with their worth as people. So the kids who clung strongly to their genetic background were doing so because they had little else to bolster them, and probably little more was expected of them by their families. The gang-like or cultish identification with their heritage was just a symptom of the conditions that led them to become losers.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

And going back to the OP:

OK. Now, I will talk about what it's like to be multi-racial. I will start with the fact that growing up, most of my white friends said things like "I don't think about race" and "I don't think of you as being non-white".

*shudders*

There's another one that gets said sometimes, it goes:

"I'm colorblind, I don't see race."

How do you look at a person and notice their face, build, gestures, what they're wearing and everything else and not SEE any ethnic features? I mean, yeah, it would be wrong to judge them by that, or presume anything, but not SEE it? No way.

Yep. Drives me crazy because it's such smug self-deluded bullshit, and they say it like it makes them somehow better people.

[Bebek Sincap Ratatosk]

And going back to the OP:

OK. Now, I will talk about what it's like to be multi-racial. I will start with the fact that growing up, most of my white friends said things like "I don't think about race" and "I don't think of you as being non-white".

*shudders*

There's another one that gets said sometimes, it goes:

"I'm colorblind, I don't see race."

How do you look at a person and notice their face, build, gestures, what they're wearing and everything else and not SEE any ethnic features? I mean, yeah, it would be wrong to judge them by that, or presume anything, but not SEE it? No way.

Yep. Drives me crazy because it's such smug self-deluded bullshit, and they say it like it makes them somehow better people.

I love how Colbert really pokes this common liberal bullshit statement.

As for me personally, well see my sig

[Phox]

Part of that, I suspect, is that people with very little else to lay claim to as a point of pride will fall back on their ancestry, despite it having nothing to do with their worth as people. So the kids who clung strongly to their genetic background were doing so because they had little else to bolster them, and probably little more was expected of them by their families. The gang-like or cultish identification with their heritage was just a symptom of the conditions that led them to become losers.

I agree completely, Nigel, though I wonder if it's not also partly the result of raising your children to be yourself, as some of the people who were into it when they were younger were either smart enough to get out young or just naturally grew out of the bullshit, and a few of the losers otherwise had the talent to come out ahead, but either lacked the ambition, or simply never tried.

[Bebek Sincap Ratatosk]

One of the good things to come out of the way I was raised... I was taught that God made people of all colors, just like he made fruits and veggies of all kinds, so humans could enjoy variety. I wasn't taught to "not see" but rather to see and love it all.

[Don Coyote]

Hey so I had this though earlier today during my history class.

I think that idea that aliens had ANYTHING to do with ancient structures may be rooted in racism. Basically, these smudgy people in places that aren't Europe COULD never have possibly built those structures so it HAS to be aliens.

Thoughts?

[Cain]

That's possibly part of it.  For some people.

Then again, I'm reminded of the likes of David Icke....when he said giant, shapeshifting reptilian aliens were response, he really meant it.  If their objections seem especially hung up on "but they're primitive" aspects, regardless of proof otherwise, then it's certainly a possibility that cannot be ruled out.

You sometimes see this kind of thing when it comes to 9/11 as well.  Especially from "white nationalist" types.  "A bunch of idiot ragheads humbled the USA?  Hah, hardly. Jews and their globalist allies though..."