No Stupid Questions

Answer: you’re white, right? Few people who experience growing up black in America come away saying “what’s the big deal about race, anyway?”

If you want to know what the big deal is with being black, there’s wonderful tradition in American literature of telling you all about it. Pick up a copy of Black Boy by Richard Wright for a place to start.

Why are people making more of a thing out of it than they were 10 years ago? Well, my personal view is that the whole “just don’t talk about it and it will go away” has not worked. And has that ever worked for anything?

People say that everyone has the same opportunities now. But life outcomes for white and black people are statistically quite different and it’s due to more than just talking about race. So I think people are getting sick of being quiet about something that clearly matters, and are talking about it openly. Others are responding by saying that talking about it is the entire problem and is, itself, racist. This is about the dumbest shit ever IMHO but some people are just really sick of having to hear about it and as a sheltered white person you have little personal reason to care. That is unless you care about other people.

White people who are sick of hearing about it loooove that Morgan Freeman video. They love it. It tells them just what they want to hear. But one extemporaneous comment by a celebrity does not make a thorough analysis of the topic that works for everyone. So yeah, sorry about that.

I'm not sure what you're asking here. Are you asking why people bring up being black or make it a part of their identity? Being black in America is a part of their every day lived experience. At no point will society let them forget they are black and just let them be themselves. If not outright discrimination, then they'll experience people making assumptions about them based solely on the color of their skin. Assuming they're poor, uneducated, unintelligent, untrustworthy, or dangerous. So, since they can't escape the label anyways, they embrace it in order to find community and to heal. Like one might do if they were a part of the LGBTQ+ community.

Are you asking why black people have stereotypes about white people? The same reason you have stereotypes about anything. Humans are pattern recognizing machines, often to our own detriment.

Are you asking why black people might treat white people with disdain or fear? It's because the most blatant discrimination towards any out-group will always come from the most insulated in-group. As a result, they can't blindly trust that white people will treat them with dignity or respect.

Are you asking how we end racism or to get more people to think like you (colorblind)? That requires one, ending systemic oppression of black people (if you think this step is done, then you need to do you some learning). Two, educating people on the history of black people in America, both their contributions and their struggles, so that there's a solid understanding and empathy built up. Three, wait several generations so that no one has negative, undeserved biases against black people OR create a culture where people can be called out on their racist actions without fear of retribution or retaliation.

This is really difficult to grasp, especially if you've never experienced direct discrimination and think that is just the actions of individuals that are the issue. As a white man with a black partner, it took me YEARS to really breakdown all the negative assumptions that society instilled in me without me even realizing. Even the "I treat everyone the same, regardless of their skin color" thought is bad, because it means you're unwilling to listen when people tell you they're being harmed because of their skin color. Especially if it's you doing the harm.

You can't start by being mad at the discriminated for telling you they're being discriminated against. You need to listen to them with empathy and compassion, and realize also that they don't really need to teach you about this stuff, you need to be inquisitive and want to learn.

You're right. Identity politics is itself what fractures the civil polity, working against creating real opportunities for ending marginalization, and perpetuating that marginalization through affirmations of difference.

You are arriving at the same conclusions as Critical Race Theory in America, just from a clearly outsider’s perspective.

Your uncomfortable feelings quite directly align with the truth that “race” is not a historical or natural human element, but rather an entirely subjective construct built and enforced by white supremacists ~~in~~ following the 1500s and perpetuated through today.

However, systemic issues as deeply embedded as white supremacy cannot be addressed without systemic solutions. One such solution is solidarity. People of color, especially in a system as deeply entrenched in racism as America’s, will often need to rely on one another in order to overcome racial barriers. Indigenous, Black, Asian, Latine, mixed, etc. folk do not have the same privilege as White folk do as individuals or as minority groups, and so they strategically find ways to create spaces and communities that prioritize the needs of themselves and their neighbors. It’s kind of like the queer community. If gay people had never been demonized, sure! There would be no need for careful interrogations of identity and sexuality. But the fact is that LGBTQ+ people and POC have both been abused and mistreated for centuries. The process of healing those wounds requires a huge degree of intentional community and commitment to understanding marginalized identities.

I am guessing that perhaps 80% of the “making a big thing” of race you see is this forging of community in solidarity. Now, racism is of course still a thing, so when you do see racial language that is centered around putting down, limiting, or otherwise devaluing lives based on race, feel free to call it the fuck out and feel as uncomfortable as you like. But! If you even see a glimmer of mutual aid, solidarity, and a recognition and redressing of historical denigration of non-white life, take a moment to pause and listen. For centuries race has been exclusively under the thumb of white individuals, so it might be time to let people of color have a moment at the reigns as we move towards healing.

The first half of your comment is an acknowledgement that you don't understand American culture and the second half is you casting declarative judgement upon it.

I don't know which one of your minds to respond to.

There are three distinct concepts I think you’re confusing:

• The idea of biological races. Yeah, any given culture’s definition of “race” is historically contingent and biologically incoherent. I think you get that and are assuming that’s all there is to it.

• Race as a correlative of ethnicity. There are some ethnicities whose members tend to have darker skin colors or other physical traits, and people conflate skin color and ethnicity. Ethnicity (as a set of cultural institutions) is meaningful to many people, and some of them interpret a disregard for “race” as a disregard for their ethnicity, or as an attempt to suppress ethnic identity.

• Race as a social construct. When the above ideas permeate a society, people with different skin colors experience systemically different treatment—even in the absence of actual biological or ethnic distinctions. So people with similar skin colors can be grouped on the basis of those shared experiences, and the different behaviors resulting from those experiences feed back into society’s conceptions of biological race and ethnicity. And it doesn’t suffice to counteract such social constructs by ignoring them—social behavior is taken for granted unless people make a conscious effort to reevaluate it.

If you're one color and you're living in a culture where you're surrounded by a majority of people of a different color who don't treat you as one of them, then you're going to identify more with the community of your own color.

Ok, I'll bite. Just because you grew up not having to consider the color of your skin doesn't mean other people had that same privilege. I wish I could say that ethnicity doesn't matter, but people here will absolutely treat you differently because of race, whether it makes sense or not. The fact is that "not seeing race" is something you only have the privilege of when you are not in the minority race. Interestingly enough, while I am a very clearly black man, my mixed half sister (32) has faced more direct racism than me, starting from as early as second grade. Her also mixed daughter (15) also gets called the n word at school regularly. You're right that it shouldn't matter but it does to enough people that it can't just be ignored.

USAmericans have a heavy focus on heritage due to their history (wiping out nearly all of the local population). It is thus a great melting pot of people who left their own behind and had to start again from scratch. Going to another country where everybody's from somewhere else led to them trying to find out how they're unique and looks and heritage are the easiest to focus on. Combine that with a good chunk of their population being descendants of slaves (African, Asian, and European) and you will have a bunch of people focusing on that. Now factor in that blacks are the third biggest ethnic group.

The same didn't happen elsewhere to the same degree as in the US because there are millennia of history and culture in other places or the population is more homogeneous. Go to Poland you're surrounded by Polish people whose forefathers might've come from the very same region, spoken the same language, adhered to the same values and customs, suffered very similar fates, and shared the same traditions. They will try and stand out differently e.g through their accent, dialect, money, and so on instead of skin color and heritage.

It is a complex, multi-faceted issue, but those are my impressions of it. I agree that the focus is annoying, especially when copy-pasted abroad as if history doesn't matter there, but I'm sure the more you read about US history, the more you'll understand.

I don't have a good answer to your question, but to me "white" as an ethnicity makes about as much sense as "Christian" does as a religious description - they both cover such a wide range of backgrounds and beliefs to be essentially useless. Do a Catholic, a baptist and a modern evangelical actually believe the same things beyond how they frame those beliefs?

To my mind, same goes for ethnicity - "white" can mean anything from the baltics to western Europe to north America, and to my mind, is kinda racist. It lumps people from as diverse places as Ireland and Russia together purely based on appearances. I get "black" as a self-selected descriptor of people who do have a big cultural touch-point in common - our ancestors were enslaved, brought here against our will, and we still feel the impacts of that even if our ancestors themselves were from a wide background.

I guess "white" is an easy antonym to "black", but then that still comes back to a racist tint - "we are white because we aren't Them" - and lumps in people who have nothing to do with the lasting impact of slavery in the US into this "oppressor vs oppressed" false dichotomy.

Whiteness is an exclusionary concept used to create an 'ingroup' and 'outgroup'. Hasan Piker gives a great breakdown of it here.

Historically, it comes from a justification of chattel slavery. Painting 'whiteness' as purity and superior and 'blackness' as inferior and subservient. Leeja Miller gives a great analysis about how this has influenced Eugenics in American history (which inspired the ideology of the Nazis) which is still practiced to this day in certain circumstances.

It's long, but Knowing Better gives an extremely detailed history of neoslavery in American history. To understand why 'whiteness' is still so prevalent in America in modern day, it's important to understand the history of systemic racism and how it persists to this day.

Edit: We can expand on this concept of Identity Politics from just America to the lens of Colonialist Race Relations through the works of Franz Fanon who explored and wrote about this in detail. While Fanon wrote about this in the 1960s, his works are just as if not more relevant today. Adi Callai does a fantastic analysis of Fanon's works about Identity Politics, how to overcome it, and the realities of Race Abolition. If you're interested in how to overcome and move past the identity politics of Whiteness and Blackness, check out Adi Callai's video here.

are you white, by chance? i find that there’s a strong correlation between not understanding and caucasity - as a middle-aged white man myself, it was a blind spot for me, at least.

but also there’s a shitload of american culture that’s downright vicious to people who aren’t white, so having a community that shared something (in this case, skin colour vis-a-vis oppressive history/current events) is a powerful draw that i absolutely understand.

edit: the only people i see celebrating “white” are reactionary racists who seem to be able to not be able to tolerate others enjoying their skin colour or culture or whatever they enjoy.

No, you're not the only one. It makes me feel uncomfortable as well, especially if it's white people making a huge deal about being white or others not being white. That's creepy AF, as this has been used historically as a really bad reason/excuse to mistreat others.

You should read up on the history of racism in the US. A lot of places it isn't talked about, because we are the land of freedom. /irony

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism_in_the_United_States
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_People%27s_History_of_the_United_States

Post-Occupy American media social discussion has focused on nothing but race/race relations for the past ~15 years. Our 0.01%er overlords know its an immutable difference between people and use it to drive a wedge between us in the name of "progress."

America is literally founded on racism. First white settlers came and gave smallpox to anyone who looked different than them. Then they imported dark skinned people and made them literal slaves. Then half the country waged a war against the other half over the right to keep them as slaves. There was even a period of time when Italians and Irish weren't considered white as a means to discriminate.

There is a lot more context than just skin tone, and unfortunately white supremacy was never curb stomped out

I truly can't tell if this is a perfect textbook nostupidquestion or someone being disingenuously obtuse.

Though not "black" and "white", I know that some black people do not like being considered African American. There is a difference between someone who has family come over through slave trade, and someone who came to America willingly from Africa.

I can understand why they might feel that way, they had family sold into slavery by others in their countries. They've lived on unable to express themselves for generations, and are culturally different from people from their ancestors homelands.

So being black and calling them African American may not acknowledge what they see as clear differences between the two.

White has an advantage because they always get the first move. To be more fair, any tournament should rotate the players between black and white pieces.