LogFAQs > #956668742

Unbridled9 posted...

That is an unacceptable definition.

I agree. It's ridiculous to frame colonialism as if only European nations have committed it. Historically European nations have done it the most, sure, but China is a colonizing imperial power as well.

And let me guess 'real communism hasn't been tried' as well?

... What the fuck does that have to do with anything I said?

No one is disputing that America's history with racial relations has been... strained... at best.

That also has nothing to do with what I said. A unique situation requires unique analysis to get the most out of said analysis. In terms of racial history, you're going to miss out on things if you use a one size fits all framework; Brazil's racial history is very different from the USA's, which is very different from China's, which is very different from New Zealand's, etc, etc...

Did you say this just because you have no rebuttal to the fact that everyone accepts the writings of Frederick Douglass, but you're fearmongering about the framework of analysis based off of his work and the work of those like him?

I mean the civil rights act only happened in the 1960's, we had a civil war over it, and the south basically rebelled against England because they were afraid that increasing English influence would result in their slaves being freed.

You're just making my point for me.

However the solution to that isn't to cram all white people (some of which have some VERY strongly negative feelings about each other due to their histories) into a single homogenous group, proclaim they have all the power when many of them have ancestors who came to America specifically because they had NO power, claim they all engage in a racist system, and then redefine words and change history to non-sense meanings whenever someone points out that they don't make sense.

There is an exception to outlawing slavery still enshrined in the Constitution, but you don't believe in systemic racism. Okay.

I mean, you guys haven't even defined what 'white' even IS yet. Just said that society defines that.

Because we would have to give you like five or six different ones in succession. It's easier to explain the history of whiteness than a definition, because, it being a social construct, the definition has shifted repeatedly over the course of history. Originally "white" simply referred to the English. Now it includes Germans (er...), Greeks, Slavs, Italians, the Irish (some people include Egyptians in it but that's rare), etc, etc... but no one wants to type out thousands of words worth of information about the history of whiteness when you could just get up off your ass and google it yourself, since you probably wouldn't even read it anyway.

Look, an easier example. What originally defined a woman vs a man? We usually use superficial sex characteristics to do that, but these are nebulous- even going by those categories, there is a lot of overlap between both sexes among cis people. Once we learned about chromosomes, we changed the definition of the sexes, but it was insufficient because it didn't take into account that all of these traits wind up on a bimodal chart rather than a binary one. And this method of categorization boils down to a lazy shorthand for what our society finds useful to group up- sex as a category, even though it's based upon factual attributes, is a social construct.

To people who know anything about the history of taxonomy, this shifting of categories is nothing new. Linnaean Taxonomy (you know "Mammals produce milk, give birth to live young, etc") is a highly flawed form of categorization, because you keep running into evolutionary exceptions (like the platypus) that don't fit into the category but are, undeniably, mammals. This is why we use Phylogenetic Taxonomy now, and that works far better... now imagine you have a bunch of people screaming about how Phylogenetic Taxonomy is a communist plot that is changing the meaning of the word "mammal." That is what you sound like to us. :-/

I'd say more in a less lazy and more polite way but I have to go to work so just... yeah that's all I have to go crap.

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