Tackling the question “Can you change your race?”

when the stated basis of you argument is that most people do it, “THE community”, as you put it… people will tell you your argument is fallacious.

taking that personally is a choice.

You yourself say “they don’t see this as abuse”…but your statement strongly implies (as I think it is intended to imply) that they are adopting someone for the specific evil reason of treating them as a slave. So there are indeed awful misguided people adopting kids, (and this should be stopped)… that we agree on. But I think your characterization is misleading, and is intended to smear whites as trying to adopt kids just so they can beat them.

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Okay. I was wrong.

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As I understood it, the community in question was TRAs: transracial adoptees. They get to decide what to call themselves.

I meant it was a problem more generally, not that @Aloisius was a problem.

My point to is that, whether we like it or not, agree with it, or not, skin color in America has meaning, it has come to have meaning, something that we can’t just gloss over. In fact, glossing over race is pretty much a white privilege, or maybe a white skin privilege.

I got @Aloisius point that, yes, at the end of they day, on the surface of things, we can’t look at Michael Jackson in the years before he died, and easily say “he’s black/he’s white”. But Michael jackson did not claim to be anything other than a black man. But in this case, he’s sort of not typical, in that he was hugely famous for much of his life and as such, his experiences were different from others in the black community.

I also think you can’t divorce race from history, since it’s a historical construct in the first place. While prior to the new World slave trade, people could see and notice differences in skin, social class meant much more than that. Post-
Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676, new laws regulating relations between freed slaves (who were treated more like indentured servants then) and former indentured servants from Europe began to crop up - anti-miscegenation laws for example. It also became easier for indentured servants to get a slice of land for themselves, while slavery became a permanent status, that you passed on to you children. It’s the roots of crafting racial barriers that are still with us today.

Well . . . what if we did have a machine that could change your race? If a certain Dr. Seuss book about “Sneetches” is any indication, it could lead to everyone just not caring about race anymore.

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Thank you for the link and the explanation. It still strikes me as sad that something that should be a default in the way people treat each other is also used a racist ploy. The nations I’ve worked in officially promote Multiculturalism, so that’s the environment I’m used to. And at least that approach doesn’t automatically lead to making cultural assumptions based on skin hue.

Yes, hence the culture/language question. Unfortunately when the audience becomes global, talking about “white people” as a monolithic thing leads to the sad irony of lumping a whole mass of people into a ‘side’ of your (as in the USA’s, not your own personal) race problem, based only on the colour of their skin … :confused:

I’m not claiming that multiculturalism makes things perfect out here in the rest of the Anglosphere, far from it. But from where I’m sitting things are incredibly more messed up where you are. :frowning:

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I have to disagree with this,
“The equivalent of transpeople in racial terms…”

The equivalent of trans people in racial terms would be an albino person from the African continent whom everyone else insists is white b/c said observers know best based on their own narrow life experiences how that person fits into their worldview.

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