…this bit from Stereo Describes My Scenario has a certain resonance to it:
“That’s like when I hear the old standby, “I don’t think of you as Black.” Well then what do you think of me as?”
I’ve always had a problem with the “I don’t think of you as X” sort of comments, but I’ve never got around to actually consciously determining why. Now I don’t have to.
(Via Stuart Buck)
Moe
Two things. First of all the answer to that question is “i don’t think of you in terms of color”. Pretty damned simple, concise and the way many of us with interracial families are learning to think. Sad that this guy sees none of that where he lives, it’s his loss.
Secondly,this guys site was not impressive. His lead story is attacking Josh Marshall’s post about the Plame Affair. What he fails to notice is Josh’s post was tongue-in-cheek as no one expects the Plame leakers to come forward. Anyone capable of something so heinous is highly unlikely of being truthful about it. He was using the post to point out the weakness of the new spin to try to make the very leaking of her name not a bad thing. Oy vey.
I agree with him on this. I could no more not notice (and take note of) skin color than I could fail to note on a daily basis that my wife is a redhead, even though we’ve been married for over a decade. Of course, there’s degrees to which skin color can show up as a barrier to some people, but I can’t see how the visual and cultural differences can sink beneath notice and consideration. I’d say a worthy goal would be to have it sink down below the male/female level of notice.
There’s a difference between noticing that someone has red hair, and immediately categorizing anyone with red hair as “a redhead” and viewing all of your interactions through the prism of that label.
There’s a certain amount of tongue in cheek mythos that surrounds “redheads”, much of it encouraged by said redheads, so this may not be the best analogy, but hey.
This is, I think, what people mean when they say they don’t think of a person as X, anyway.
my whole point was that there are certain things you can’t not-know about a person. how you treat them because/regardless of that is what really matters, but you never stop knowing. whether it’s race or some other physical characteristic, you don’t stop knowing, you just grow to treat that person as an individual. but why should i have to pretend to not-see what’s obvious about a person in order to do that? I can be Black and still be everything else, so maybe it’s not that my friend should have tried to be colorblind so much as he should have expanded his own boundaries of what race does/does not mean.
Evidently Slarti was never unfortunate enough to hear the dread words “I don’t think of you as a guy…”
(sympathetic wincing)
Don’t DO that, Gromit! 🙂
Moe
PS: Although I wonder what using Avery’s response would have accomplished… do I really want to know, actually? She might hav actually told me, after all.
Perhaps it is important to realize that there is a difference between “I don’t think of you as X” and “I think of you as not X.
I know I over-quote my mother, but Catsy reminds me of what my mother says. She always talks about it as ‘useable catagories’. Of course everyone with normal vison can ‘see’ that another person has darker skin. The question is what catagory of information do you put that in. If you put that in the catagory of information that you use to merely point people out of a crowd or describe someone for identification, you aren’t being racist. In fact you aren’t really using a racial catagory.
If you use the information to catagorize someone’s intellect or morals or other such non-physical traits, you are probably being a racist.
I grew up in a family where the only catagory for race was ‘description of appearance’. And even that may be overstating it because I wouldn’t have classed African-Americans as similar because I didn’t see skin color as an important trait. It wasn’t until well into elementary school (I think 3rd grade) that I discovered some other students would use ‘black’ as some sort of insult.
I think all you folks are a credit to your race.
I’d note that we’d all be better off the more people educate themselves on the anthropology and biology of human “race,” which is so say that it’s largely a category error. There are biological/anthropolical clusterings of genetic traits, but none of them add up to the major, racist, categories of “white,” “black,” or “Asian.” (Let alone how one fits in Australian aborigines, American “Indians,” Pacific Islanders, Aleuts, and on and on.) Some clusterings considered “black” have far more genetically in common with groups in the “white” or “Asian” category, and so on. Lumping together, say, pygmies and Bantus as one “race,” while Ainu and Mongolians are another, isn’t based upon science or fact, but upon 18th century racial theories which don’t hold up. This is quite well documented now, but few people seem to have learned about it.
It’s difficult to avoid noting degrees of melanin, but if eventually people learn the fact that said degrees don’t make a separate human “race,” any more than there is a “race” of six-footers separable from a “race” of five-footers,that would be immensely useful.
Evidently Slarti was never unfortunate enough
Yes, that is a deficiency. Not having been nearly ego-slain by that, I’m not as strong as Moe^H^H^Hsome others might be.
It’s so typical of you people to post the type of comments I’m reading here. But some of you are okay.
In evolutionary terms it would seem a plus at one time to fear those not in your family/clan/tribe so one could defend themselves in case of attack and live another day and reproduce.
Those traits may well be hereditary. It doesn’t mean they should be denied or embraced though. They certainly shouldn’t be encouraged or pandered to either.
The notion of race seems to be somewhat malleable. IIRC in the 19th century the Irish, Italians, and Jews were not considered “white”. I’d say they’ve all made it.
Dave
Good observation.
My father came from a small steelmill town where the Italians (the last immigrant wave) are still thought of as usurpers. Definitely an Us/Them scenario.
On another subject, I have a distinct memory of a scene from the movie True Romance where Dennis Hopper is explaining to Christopher Walken why the swarthy southern Italians look so different from the light skinned blue eyed northern Italians.
His story definitely included an influx of melanin rich genes. As well as a mention of a cantelope and an eggplant
Terrific scene with two very entertaining actors.
Well, I just added Avery’s blog to my bookmarks.
I mean, when I saw that his “Whas’nEVER I Play, It’s Got To Be FUNKY” list included Joe Tex, Joe Cocker and Rare Earth, I felt like I’d come home!