Seleucus wrote:Offensive
The position that race doesn't exist or doesn't matter is a highly offensive and insulting thing to say. Race isn't only important to the White supremacist boogeyman. Black student associations, Pan Slavism, and the Pan Arab movement are all essentially racial movements. ...
They are and so far have all failed, why would that be?
Denying people their racial identity is tantamount to intellectual genocide.
What do you mean by a 'racial identity', that peoples skin colour differ? You appear to ignore that if it is about skin-colour then the brown race should be ruling the world.
What it means to be Chinese was a central question throughout Chinese history and drawing on racial Chineseness gave the people the purpose and strength to evict the Mongols ...
When did they do this?
and also the Portuguese from Taiwan. ...
Not exactly hard.
There is absolutely no shame in having a sense of racial identity and pride, on the contrary. ...
What is it you are proud about?
Grey
A world without race would be a very monotonous and meaningless place. Race is a deep part of who all of us is. The Javanese have occupied their island for almost six-thousand years, some anthropologist are reasonably beginning to believe the Aborigines have dwelt in Australia for towards one hundred millennia, and we know that the fair hair of Europeans is at least partly genetically attributable to the Neanderthals. Race is something we can all look at with curiosity and amazement, it contains links to the most ancient mysteries of the origins of our societies and ourselves.
What ancient mysteries?
Leveled
Everyone in the world has a basic idea of race. Even a child understands the basic premise. We easily speak of White and Black and Oriental and Nordic and Mediterranean and Japanese and so on. ...
Since when have Jap or Nordics or Mediterraneans been races? What do you mean by race?
These races are entities that have stood for thousands if not hundreds of thousands of years. ...
But not in the sense of being a united idea?
Meanwhile, there is also a critique of essentialism. ...
What are these traits that apply to races then?
The same post-modern critique can be leveled against any of a number or categorizations. We could say that adult and child are fictions and that puberty is a mult-stage proces, it begins at a different age for everyone, in fact human development is a life long process of change, and moreover some people never even enter puberty at all. ...
Who never enters puberty? We could not easily say this as there are clear changes associated with puberty in males and females and they all occur at roughly the same time.
We could say there is no such thing as man or woman or sex ...
No we couldn't
nor gender and cite people like Judy Buttler and Gail Rubin and Guy Hocquenghem. ...
Well there's an argument that 'gender' is a socially defined set of categories and since those categories have changed over time and cultures it seems a fair point.
We could probably attack the idea of salads, a construct of chavanistic chefs who cannot think outside Escoffier and then we would rebut by discussing the etymology of salads and the most ancient salt mines in Illyria and discuss cooked salads and so on. Simply both the essentialists and the post-modern critique are true at their level. ...
So which points of the post-modern critique do you agree with and which bits of essentialiosm do you agree with with respect to race and gender?
Dangerous
Taking the view that race doesn't exist or doesn't matter is a misguided and risky thing to do. ...
It is, the concept should be integrated into the politics of identity but not taken as the be all and end all of what having an identity means.
The Greek merchants who settled in Egypt thousands of years ago were still Greek when Alexander's armies arrived. ...
Since when were the Greeks a race, you mean they still spoke Greek?
The Chinese in South-East Asia are still Chinese thousands of years after the imperial dynasty refused to allow them to return home. ...
Why would you think a thousand years would be long enough to change evolutionary morphology? Were they still the same cultural Chinese as those still at home?
The Blacks in America are still Black after centuries, and the newly arriving Turks in Europe will still be Turks in a thousand years. ...
Since when are the Turks a race?
The Blacks in America seem very different form their counterparts in Africa? But see above for why you think a few hundred years would change things.
People love their races. ...
Then why do they keep killing and imprisoning each other?
And while it is possible that non-Whorfian shifts can happen and race, language, culture and religion can move independently of one another, what actually is happening is the Egyptians still resemble their forebearers in the Fayum mummy portarits, the Yazidi still practice Zoroastrianism, the Jews are still Jewish, and the Dravidians still refuse to speak Hindi and use Tamil. These characteristics developed in symbiotic and cybernetic ecosystems over thousands of years. ...
What do you mean by " cybernetic ecosystems"? All you seem to be pointing out is that culture and custom are fairly stable units.
Western people play sports, value religious freedom, women's rights, democratic government and environmentalism. In a thousand years from now, Chinese immigrants to North America and Middle-Eastern migrants into Europe are going to have the same authoritarian political views, ...
Then they'll fit very well with you far-right whingers then.
disrespect for women and disinterest in mountain biking they do now; if too many come into our homelands, our civilization is eventually going to be taken over and destroyed.
What do you mean 'our' civilization, as what you describe is the Liberal view of things and it is you and yours who wish to destroy such things.
