This is why I’m reading and watching what she had to say as @Logolepsy posted above. She’s been apologizing and clarifying her comments since the backlash began.
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That does not prove the apologies are sincere and that her original comments were not, or if she is just sorry she risks losing her job over this.
Then again I suppose we should be grateful she is apologizing in an era where being anti-nazi has somehow become a controversial position.
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7 posts were split to a new topic: Of Founding Fathers and Slavery
I think it’s reasonable to assume she meant what she said at the time and also meant what she said when she said “I stand corrected.”
She was wrong and I’m glad she was able to own up to it.
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I’d be interested to know the timing of that apology. Because I saw her with Colbert, and she was clearly doubling down on her earlier comments, saying things like “people are very angry”, “don’t write me”, and claiming to be misunderstood.
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I was reading a pre-WWI spy novel, very popular at that time, a year or so ago and was amazed but not overly surprised to see that the English characters considered the Germans, the villains in the book, to be a separate race. In the 19th century and into the 20th century, race was not primarily about skin pigment but about ethnicity as in “the French they are a funny race” or considering the English to be a different race from Germans, Italians, or USAmericans. “Race” then was nationalism.
We’ve tended to forget that in our general conversation about race (an invalid concept) which here in USAmerica is almost always about skin primentation and not ethnicity (which is a valid concept).
Thanks for mentioning that the Nazis killed more than Jews in their extermination camps. I agree with Gitta Sereny that it was a grievous mistake to focus only on Jews when thinking of the genocide(s) the Nazis committed. It diminishes the reality of the evil they perpetrated and erases the suffering of the Roma and others who were also murdered by an insane and, yes, racist ideology.
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It seems, according to various sources, that the Late Show is produced live-to-tape (recorded program produced in real time, usually with a studio audience, for later broadcast) and the recording goes from around 5:30 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. (assuming EST). The tweet was posted at 8:15 p.m. (again, assuming EST). So, it seems that the discussion with Colbert precedes the Tweeter apology.
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Huh. A straight up apology with an admission she was wrong. That’s rare
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“Ethnicity” is just as much an arbitrary social construct as “race.”
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I don’t agree. The places where my ancestors came from are not arbitrary or social constructs but realities. The cultures they came from are social constructs but that history has a reality as well that can’t be ignored.
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The borders between one country and another are arbitrary social constructs, not fixed by natural law.
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You might not be replying to the comment you thought you were, as I didn’t imply any of that.
“Arbitrary” does not mean “not meaningful” or “without consequence”.
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Of course not. As I already said upthread, just because something is a social construct (like “money” or “national borders”) doesn’t mean it can’t have life-or-death consequences.
What I’m saying is that humans have invented all kinds of ways of “othering” members of their own species, and ALL such distinctions are arbitrary constructs. So when someone like Whoopi Goldberg says “Well, this is white people doing it to white people. Y’all go fight amongst yourselves” it kind of misses the point about how racism works.
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Sure it can, for all of us who are not part of the dominant culture.
It’s a form of privilege, to know the history of your family. To have documentation of their lives, both personal and in official records. To know they weren’t on the run from oppression and thus not really ‘from’ wherever they happened to be living for a while.
And speaking as someone who has helped countless people find answers for some secret in their family, I can tell you that your genealogy isn’t as certain as you think it is. So the historical location you think your great-grandparents came from might not be accurate at all.
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The land is real whatever the name(s) people have for it and our historical connection to it is there whether we know it or not.
And when you categorize people by “ethnicity” how do you decide which people are part of the same group?
Is a Frenchman from Paris a different ethnicity than a Frenchman from Dunkirk? Is a Frenchman from Dunkirk a different ethnicity than a Belgian up the road in Ostend? Is a person from Western Europe a different ethnicity than a person from Eastern Europe? How did we even decide what counts as “Western Europe” versus “Eastern Europe” anyway? What happens to all those ethnicities when political borders shift?
At the end of the day any system for categorizing and labeling groups of human beings relies on arbitrarily drawn distinctions.
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I don’t characterize people that way. Each individual has to determine who and what they are for themselves.
So… an arbitrary social construct, just like race.
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