it wasn’t really an earnest question. In my head and my mind I can identify myself as whatever I choose if you believe in free will, or whatever I’ve chosen to identify myself as is already dictated by the happenstance of my upbringing and genetics or the state of the universe if you’re not into free will. It’s just another way of expressing my exasperation at the state of the universe.
I guess an earnest question would be when filling out a response of “are you white,… or other” does answering “Other” cause some sort of harm? I suppose it depends on the greater context of how that information is to be used.
Not to mention, if you quote someone else fully in your first comment in a thread, Discourse automatically edits it out, (to avoid needless redundancy, I guess.)
I almost never copy the full quote due to that fact, just the most relevant bits.
Well then, my bad for giving you an honest, straightforward answer.
Yes, it certainly depends on how the information will be used, but, in general, I believe the probability of causing good things to happen by answering “other” is low compared to the probability of causing harm. My advice is to not do it (if you’re a beneficiary of white privilege).
So much this! This is how every other “race” is classified when bigots bigot. They don’t care what someone’s actual ethnicity is, either, and none of them can hide it, any more than you can when they are labelled.
Has that happened? I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised by it, but hadn’t heard of this occurring. There’s an image in the Book Of The Subgenius that shows how a person on the extreme left and extreme right go so far in their reactionary extremity that they essentially become one and the same.
The fact that you could pose it, earnestly or not, shows off privilege. Everyone else knows they don’t get a choice.
Especially since those “negative stereotypes” like bland food or a poor sense of hygiene or “being shitty to those not in the club” are an extremely light burden to bear than knowing that a heavily armed segment of the population has no qualms about shooting you on sight, or shipping you off to a foreign country to die, being denied the right to practice your religion to support the freedom of someone else’s, increased likelihood of harsh treatment from a so-called justice system (if you survive encounters with the aforementioned heavily armed segment).
#notallwhitepeople gets mocked because everybody already knows it’s not the case. It doesn’t need to be said. If you shoplift, I am not going to be immediately side-eyed when I enter the same store or told to empty out my pockets when I get to the cashier. And trust me, that’s exactly what your “non-serious” question says. “#notallwhitepeople! Not me!” But yes all of us. The difference is our white skin automatically grants us the benefit of the doubt, when all anybody else gets is doubt. By not doing a damn thing, we can get away with nearly everything.
This discussion prompted me to turn to that venerable well-spring of knowledge, Wikipedia, for more info, and I found this helpful article:
It’s quite the list!
And, indeed, Stalin’s regime contributed to the long tradition of book burning, as did a handful of other nominally “communist” governments. Still, based on this non-exhaustive list, book burning was mostly a right-wing hobby for the past hundred years, and for most of recorded history, as far as I’m concerned (though the right/left paradigm makes less sense the further we go back in time).
One thing that I find remarkable is how the effect of book burning changed as publishing achieved mass scale in the 20th century, and digitization in the past fifty years: whereas incidents such as Qin Shi Huang’s Burning of Books and Burying of Scholars completely eradicated all copies of some works from existence, a literal destruction of learning, contemporary book burning tends to be a symbolic, terroristic attack on learning. It’s still horrifying, of course, even if the complete erasure of knowledge has become more difficult due to technology.
