Dude is paid to string words together.
So I don’t think it’s fair to cut him any slack regarding any supposedly accidental dog-whistling.
Not American, so maybe I dunno, but ‘biracial’ totally implies you give a shit to my ears.
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Thanks, that was great!
Easy for a white guy to say. Try telling others that because race is a fiction, they should just “get over” the social fact that they’re not white, and that the world often treats them accordingly.
Oh wait, I can easily imagine you having already written that to people who aren’t white, internet warrior for the white race that (ironically enough) you seem to fancy yourself being.
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It was a humorous way to say, “You know, it’s kind of a stretch to interpret this as satire since it has precisely zero signs of being satire.” Is there any way to say that that will “leave much room for reasonable disagreement”? At some point you have to point out that “satire” is the default excuse for people saying stupid shit and getting criticized for it.
In fact, I’d go so far as to say that trying to say “criticism of this statement is invalid because I interpret it as satire” is “not leaving much room for reasonable disagreement.” It’s a ploy to shut down discussion entirely.
And no, that statement you quote from Beschizza is not very much like the one I was paraphrasing in your quote from me.
Actually, in the bit you quote Cohen pretty much explicitly said that he took accepted “the teaching of slavery and how it sometimes gets presented as ‘not so bad’” at face value. So do you even have a point?
Can someone explain to me why so many people take it personally when someone else entirely is accused of implicit racism?
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Interesting argument you have there: because I argue that race is trivia, I MUST be a racist.
In related news, weakness is strength, good is evil, and Big Brother is Watching YOU!!!
Many who see the interests of whites as a group under threat do not consider themselves racist. They think instead that they’re “realists.” Where are you situated in these terms?
I noticed that you totally ignored what I had to say about how the fiction of race results in significant social facts, an understanding of how the idea of race actually works that makes your statement (“In the final analysis, we’re ALL human, everything else is trivia.”) a slap in the face to those who continue bearing the brunt of a de facto white supremacist social order.
Race is not trivia, not even to white people, the majority of whom benefit from it.
Why, given the social realities and inequities brought about by the ongoing salience of the fiction of race, do you continue fatuously insisting that “race is trivia”?
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If you insist that “race is trivia” then chances are you’re ignoring the actual effects of race and racism in our society.
The effects do not seem to be trivial. Plenty of studies show poorer outcome for black folks even after controlling for socioeconomic factors. So why are you arguing that “race is trivia”? You don’t seem to be trying to engage in a real discussion in which you submit your existing opinions to a certain amount of scrutiny. You seem to be using troll tactics and making “gotcha!” non-arguments when people challenge your arguments in good faith.
Perhaps most tellingly, you’re not making these arguments to people who put a lot of stock in race as a biological reality. You’re not off at Stormfront or some evo-psych “race realism” website arguing with real live racists. You’re arguing with people who agree with you that there is no biological reality to race but who nonetheless think that racism (and therefore the socially-constructed concept of race) has real-world effects.
So we’re left to draw our own conclusions about your intent and motivations. Sorry if our conclusions aren’t flattering to you but we can only work with what you give us.
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Just because race is a social construct doesn’t make it “trivia.”
“Trivia” is a term best suited to things like sports statistics and TV show credits. Whether it has a scientific basis or not, “race” is tied to everything from acts of genocide to generations of systemic bigotry.
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And I keep arguing: CATEGORY ERROR. It’s CULTURAL differences that are the cause of all the hate.
Take a average American Suburban baby: raise them from the cradle in. for example, China, and they will have all the prejudices and hatreds of their local culture, even to the point of using local standards of aesthetics and beauty.
Or, to cater to the BoingBoing crowd, take the average baby of a BoingBoinger, and raise them from infancy in the Deep South, or in Utah, and your child of BoingBoing will be a evangelical Christian Tea Partier, or an Osmond-clone. . .
And if you live in a culture where your station in society can be dictated by your complexion or eye color or ancestry or the shape of your belly button then those traits are no longer “trivial.”
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Assuming race was a biological reality you would be correct that it is a category error.
However, race is not a biological reality; it is a cultural construction.
Therefore, race is not distinct from culture – the concept of race is, in fact, determined by culture.
Therefore acknowledging a racial element to a “cultural difference” is not a category error.
You really haven’t thought this through very clearly.
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We’ll have to tell that to, say, native South Carolinean Aziz Ansari who lived there until the end of high school. Or Connecticut’s George W. Bush who turned out to be a Republican evangelical in a land of Democrats.
Or take a girl from Massachusetts, watch her grow up in America and marry the mayor of New York…and because of her skin color there are still people who will gag at seeing their children, people Cohen describes as having conventional morals. The hell cultural difference is that?
Race isn’t an inherent factor in who you are, but despite having it pointed out so many times, you are still neglecting that it is a factor in how people treat you. And no, if how much you know about Iron Man actually changed how likely you were to get a job, get pulled over, or get shot, it wouldn’t be trivia either.
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His comments about Trayvon Martin indicate that he is racist. Him admitting that he was given a sugar-coated version of slavery in school (Gone with the Wind probably did not help) and that “decades” ago he learned it was lie? Using that to state he only “recently” learned that slavery was horrible? Not so helpful.
Are you 100% confident that you immediately identified every time a history class was whitewashed or presented in a western-centric way? Can anyone honestly say that?
Stating “Cohen only recently learned that slavery was horrible” seems to me a slightly hyperbolic way of saying what Cohen did: that the 2013 film “12 Years a Slave” impressed on Cohen the true barbarity of American slavery.
To make this clear, let me quote a bit from the article that you elided earlier:
Steve McQueen’s stunning movie “12 Years a Slave” is one of those unlearning experiences. I had to wonder why I could not recall another time when I was so shockingly confronted by the sheer barbarity of American slavery.
Not decades ago. Cohen published this about a week ago.
I was skeptical of pretty much everything I learned in US history from freshman year of high school on because I recognized that we were being presented with a whitewashed hagiography. No one should be 100% confident about anything – that was exactly Cohen’s problem when he failed to demonstrate any skepticism towards the revisionist bullshit he was taught.
I’m not really in the mood to parse Cohen’s half-coherent thoughts to the point where we can have a conversation about them. If you have any questions about why Rob Beschizza is drawing the inferences he is I will refer you to the OP, to Rob’s comments in this thread, and any further questions can be directed to Rob himself.
Have a wonderful day.
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Race v Culture
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That experiment has been done many times over, thanks to interracial and international adoption. The short answer is, NO, magically dropping someone into a completely different culture where no one looks like you does not mean that person is a blank slate who can become someone entirely different. Will they learn the new language, start to like the new food, get used to the new smells, figure out how to navigate the new culture? Sure. Will they be “as if born to”? Nope.
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Aw, c’mon, this is some epic trolling. Just sit back and think of England!
You refer to “experiments” being done many times to prove your theory that race is just a cultural construct? Your reference is so far off the mark - have you raised any children of mixed heritage, whether adopted or from a natural parentage? In the US, race is still an important issue and if you doubt just how important an issue, please take the time to review all federal/state/local forms that require “race”. Few colleges allow applicants to check several boxes to define their racial background. Race is far more than a cultural concern to those in the so-called dominant race. Let’s see how the “we are all human” concept plays out in the next 25 years when the minority becomes the majority. When writers, journalists, doctors/psychiatrists (check-out Fox News and their new professional commentators that define “normal” and the "crazy ones) decide to join to the pool of misguided and misinformed trolls to engage an audience, well, in our very simplistic world of non-thinkers, is just simply wrong!
Dunno, Salgak’s last comment seemed a little too sincere to qualify as “trolling”.
