Is Racism about appearance?

Not really. I've only used a couple. And they still stand.

Because visual cues are a primary identifier. That does not mean they are the only one we'd use were ocular identification not available.

What else is it about? You either like something, you're ambivalent, or you don't. Aesthetics do not rely upon vision alone.

And... a gardener, for the third time, is not only basing his decisions upion aesthetics. It is his goal to make something aesthetically pleasing, but it isn't simply about choosing only what you like. There are many factors to take into consideration. Climate. Soil. Insects, resistance to disease.
Non-visual factors. Clear?

You step into my line of sight, then you're mkaing yourself a focus.
Would you rather I ignored you?

All I did was make a comment that I hadn't understood what you were saying until I realised you missed the reference. If you would like to take that as being an insult, then perhaps that speaks more about your attitude toward me than mine toward you. Yes?

 

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Doreen, I've always come down hard on comprehension skills being lessened due to either a sympathy or lack of it to what you are reading. I come down harder on myself when I do it than anyone else, if it helps.
If you have sympathy for Glaucon's argument, fine. Don't be surprised when I point out how it affects you.

Glaucon first sentence in that paragraph read "You fallaciously assume that, outside of the scope of visual observation, there are in fact "differences"."
This led to my initial misunderstanding of the intent of what he'd written.
Now go away and have a think about how the use of the word "fallaciously" in there changes the meaning of what he was trying to say, and puts it at odds with the remainder of that paragraph.

Oh dear.
You want me to say I'm racist? Then you want me to tell you exactly why?
I'm not going to offer any opinion on the first, and therefore the second is moot.
I've used analogies, instead. From those, one might assume that I do indeed have certain leanings, deliberate or not, and that I have come to those conclusions based on far more than skin colour or physical appearance.
Does that make it clearer? Of course it's all bloody abstract.

I've said it before - if all these people in this thread took an MRI on the subject, we'd see some surprising - or perhaps not so surprising - results.

One might say the same thing to you. Given that we're not all blind, and you can't prove what you're asserting either, and as I said not long ago this entire argument falls into the realm of the theoretical, then I believe my analogies go further toward "backing it up" than the simple assertion of "without visual clues, there would be no racism" does.

So clearly visual observation isn't the be and end all of aesthetic choice, in which racism is intrinsically bound.
Getting warm?

 

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If everyone was blind, the hairlips would be fucked...

 

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Just going back to something earlier...

Fraggle, this doesn't even remotely approach the level of thought and knowledge you usually put into your posts.

I believe even Shakespeare described the notion of prejudice, and here we're going back to the 17th century alone. "Othello", and "The Merchant of Venice" for a start. I really don't think we can put it as recently as the colonisation of America, or even for some time before that.
I particularly don't agree with it being, as you seem to be saying, an invention by business leaders. Perhaps they might have gone along for the ride, as it were, but I seriously doubt the ideological separation of white and black was some sort of marketing ploy. I'd have to do some serious looking around if I was going to dispute the origins of the terminology itself, but I would dispute that the use of certain words was the beginning of white/black prejudice.

Racism has been prevalent as long as humanity has been around, and I'm not even going to limit that to the emergence of modern man.

 

Not to mention the role of Aron in Shakespeare's 'Titus Andronicus', a much earlier work.

Arthur L. Little Jr. considers the element of race in Lavinia's rape, arguing that the sexualized presence of the black-skinned Aaron represents a contagion of Otherness in the story. Race is central to the character assessments of Francesca T. Royster, who places Aaron and Tamora at opposite ends of the racial spectrum in Titus Andronicus. Royster notes that both Aaron the Moor and Tamora the Goth are defined as racial extremes who depict moral evil and barbarity in relation to the Roman norm.

Royster, Francesca T. “White-limed Walls: Whiteness and Gothic Extremism in Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus.” Shakespeare Quarterly 51, no. 4 (winter 2000)

Little, Arthur L., Jr. “Picturing the Hand of White Women.” In Shakespeare Jungle Fever: National-Imperial Re-Visions of Race, Rape, and Sacrifice. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000.

Ever see "A Patch of Blue"? The film makes this same argument that blindness somehow removes all race distinctions.

The argument being made assumes that a blind world would not group themselves into distinct groups or that if they did, color being eliminated they would not discover distinctions that would identify a different racial group which may or may not lead to racism. It assumes for example that whites wouldn't recognize blacks or asians from their difference in speech, smell, habits and not to mention cultural distinctions or that if they did it wouldn't lead to a racial classification. In the meantime none of us are blind but to draw from another fiction 'Blindness' by Jose Saramago human nature doesn't arise out of one faculty alone, in short human weakness and cruelty abounds under all circumstances. But distinctions being what they are lead to this asinine criticism by the National Federation for the blind:

Blindness, a movie starring Julianne Moore and Mark Ruffalo that opens in the U.S. October 3, uses lack of sight as a metaphor for all that is weak and evil and amoral in our society, and that makes the National Federation for the Blind fighting mad.

"Blindness is no more an appropriate 'metaphor' than other physical characteristics, like hair color or ethnicity," according to a FAQ on the movie by Marc Maurer, the federation's president. "Movies in which all of the villains have dark skin or a foreign accent are rightly criticized as employing racial stereotypes. If a movie were to be made in which people’s hair suddenly turned blonde and all of the characters with blonde hair were vapid idiots, then people with blonde hair would rightly be outraged. In today’s society, it should likewise be unacceptable for blindness to be used as a stand-in for depravity, incompetence, and lack of understanding."

http://specialchildren.about.com/b/...rom-the-national-federation-for-the-blind.htm


Ironic isn't it?

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But wait a minute if they had hairy lips who would want to kiss them let alone fuck them... OOOOOOHHHHHH I geeettttt it.

 

No, it does not. I'm dealing with racists here, people who think it's appropriate to use an extreme color scheme (black/white) to describe real people whose real skin is any one of a hundred thousand shades of BROWN.

Some of them, when faced with a logical train of thought, can make the leap of faith from the 19th century into the 21st, where the color of a person's skin is insignificant and what's much more important is his personality, his friends, his ability to work, socialize, pay his taxes, take part in local, state, or federal government, and be a good father or mother.

There are others, however, who have grown up with racist parents, gone to racist schools, hung out with racist friends, and are either jealous or condescending of the lifestyle of other people on the "other side of the tracks". These people have been using racist words all their lives. Telling them that the "other people" are potential friends could be a real hazard to their thinking patterns.

For their sake, it's necessary to create a bridge they can cross one step at a time. That bridge is the concept of a "mixed-race" person, one who, like our current president, has one dark-skinned parent and one light-skinned parent. When a person who uses colors to describe people, they are sometimes upset at the new thoughts I offer them, which I consider to be appropriate for a new century.

As an extreme example of these new experiences that can sometimes produce new thoughts, I offered (two pages ago) the experience of Adolph Hitler watching Jesse Owens in the 1936 Olympic Games. If Mr. Hitler had a rational psychiatrist on his staff, he might have been able to begin a long process of accepting the humanity and perhaps even the friendship of Mr. Owens, but this would have required an adjustment in Mr. Hitler's thinking. The concept of a mixed-race person is one that can be used to form the bridge necessary to cross the chasm of racism. Please remember, the concept is not one I use myself. It belongs in the 20th century, which I consider a bridge from the 19th into the 21st.

After the chasm has been crossed, and the former racist has accepted the FACT that skin color, hair texture, nose shapes, and other "racial criteria" are, in fact, useless as indicators of personality, food choices, work habits, religion, music choices, clothing styles, and other individual traits, the bridge that got him there should be burned so that the former racist cannot become a racist all over again. This means not using the semi-racist terms "mixed-race" or "multi-race" in favor of referring to people simply by their names, or perhaps by using an appropriate title. If the person's name is Ronald Smith it may be more appropriate to call them Judge Smith, Dr. Smith, Lieutenant Smith, Rev. Smith, or Mayor Smith.


[I'm dealing with some people on this thread who sincerely believe that it's possible to put themselves and others into colored pigeonholes.]

It's not a fact, it's your racist opinion. Race is a myth, for reasons I've been outlining for quite a while.

 

[As far as I'm concerned, the colors are, strictly speaking, inaccurate as to an actual physical description of the color of anyone's skin.]

Yes, I admit it, I'm color-blind. I had no idea that some people were walking around with skin that was the color of milk. I also had no idea that people were walking around with skin that was the color of a car tire, but you must think there such people somewhere.

Saying that people "are" black or white implies a much bigger difference in the appearance of any two people who, in reality, usually have much smaller visual differences. As a single man, the length of a woman's hair is much more important than the length or width of her nose, and her hair color is far more interesting than the color of her skin.

You just don't get it. Even though you use colors to describe real people, I don't. If I were to get mugged, I would give the police a description of the actual physical appearance of the perp. Such a description would involve an estimate of their age, their height, their weight, any facial hair they had, a description of their clothes, their voice, their habits, their mannerisms, and any tattoos or scars I saw. No police officer would take me seriously if I said that my perp was covered with white paint, but that's what your scenario sounds like.

By the way, I have no idea what a caucasian person looks like, because I have never been to the Caucasas mountains, where I assume they live.

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/100270/Caucasus

Maybe you DO get it. Your grandfather never had black skin, and your grandmother never had white skin unless somebody painted them that way.

I thought for a moment that you understood what color-blindness was, but it appears you don't.

You can use any words you like to describe your grandparents. If I saw photos of them, I would probably use different words. It's a certainty that I would NOT use the words "black" or "white" to describe them because I never use either one of those words to describe real people unless they're painted that way.

Let me try to make this concept easier for you. I used to be a student in a photography school, before digital cameras were very popular. I didn't believe it when one of my teachers told me this, but I could see it for myself. If I was taking a picture of someone outside during the daytime, and the sun went behind a cloud just before I took the picture, the whole scene would become just a bit bluer. The human eye makes the adjustment automatically, but film cannot. We think a white shirt is always white, but if you're photographing someone outdoors wearing a white shirt, and the sky is overcast, that white shirt will not be pure white anymore, it's now blueish-white.

It's the same with people. You see people with dark brown skin, and you always call them "black people", but you don't notice that some of them, like our current president, have medium-brown skin because he has a mother whose skin is much lighter than his father's skin. President Obama's skin is somewhat lighter than his father's skin. But some people still call him "black", even though no color is darker than black, and even though, like the white shirt under an overcast sky, it's visually inaccurate. If Mr. Obama Sr.'s skin is dark brown, then it's simply visually inaccurate to describe Mr. Obama Jr. as "black". If Junior were to mug me, there's just no way I could truthfully say that his skin was as dark as dark chocolate. I would truthfully say that his skin was the color of milk chocolate, and that's what my police report would say.

As I said in an earlier post, there are at least two methods of making a racial identification.
1. One "black" parent produces "black" children. Always. No exceptions.
2. Examine the person's appearance.

These two methods contradict one another whenever you have a man like Thomas Jefferson fathering children by one of his female slaves. Many of those descendants went on to marry people who looked like Tom, thus producing slave descendants who looked like Tom. If you call these people "black" because of the first definition, then you're saying that the second definition is worthless because it ignores a person's ancestry, and if you use the second definition, then you have exceptions to the first definition.

One more time. I don't call ANYONE "white" or "black" unless they're covered in paint. Any tatoos would be described as accurately as I could remember, including the colors. If someone has a red tattoo of a bird on his arm, then it's a red tattoo of a bird. Are you going to call someone a "red" man if he isn't painted that way? If someone isn't painted blue, are you going to call him a "blue" man? Then why do you insist on calling someone a "black" man if he isn't painted that way?

I have a friend who can trace his ancestry back to literally dozens of different countries. He doesn't refer to himself as any one color because it would immediately be too foolish for words.

If you wish to describe yourself as "black", please tell me which one of the above definitions you use, so that I can throw away the other one in your case.


[Please pardon my references to two young women and their future husbands. Since they're so much in the public eye, this is an excellent way of forcing racists (my definition, please) to consider all the possible shades of brown (the only visually accurate description of a person's skin) that they could see in their delivery rooms, after they've grown up and had sex with men of their own choice.]

1. They're not so small.
2. They are likely to grow up and have children of their own.
3. They're likely to choose their own husbands.
4. If they choose a man that has skin that is lighter than either of their parent's skin, then any children they have (Barak's grandchildren) will be even lighter than Barak. With the exception of the gender switch, this is why Tom Jefferson and Sally Hemmings have descendants that look like Tom.


Racists do consider all possible shades of brown. Just as you keep obsessively doing.[/QUOTE]

No, they don't. If they're using the second definition, the visual examination, as opposed to the genetic ancestry method, they take every person whose skin is at least somewhat dark and call him or her "black", just as you keep obsessively doing. I don't do this at all because there are so many different SHADES of brown that if one shade is a bit darker or lighter than another, well, there are other things that are much more important about the person, LIKE THEIR NAME, their hobbies, their politics, their food choices, their music choices, their job, their car, and their economic theories.

 

And with all this, I am in complete agreement with you.
You're quite correct, from a behavioural position: I believe, as you do that, in the absence of vision, we would have made use of some other means of identification.
And yes, I was delving into the hypothetical, to be sure. Via the thought-experiment, I was hoping to elucidate somewhat on the actual process of drawing distinctions, which, I would hope, is essential to the racist behaviour.

My apologies to you then as well; I should have been more careful.

Oh I was. I meant "fallacious" in its strictest logical sense.
However, I should have been more explicit in my statement: I should have said "You fallaciously assume that, outside of the scope of visual observation, there are in fact "differences" that are actively used as a primary means of identification."

Again however, we're into the hypothetical. I was (am) maintaining that vision serves as the primary means of identification, and as such, no other supplementary means could result in the development of a racist belief to the extent that vision has. In effect, I'm simply saying that vision more readily enables identification of difference than any other means.

Oh trust me, I'm no man of faith. lol

No, you're correct; given any means of sensation, and coupled with an environment that supports social stratification, humans would continue to stereotype.
This is essentially why I introduced the thought-experiment in the first place. Each of us make use of whatever means we can, quite naturally, and quite correctly, to identify both similarities and differences. In and of itself this kind of organizational activity is of no negative consequence. It's when we move from recognizing tendencies of attributes amongst a group, to extrapolating those tendencies to become a rule, that racism appears.

Again, my apologies.
I should have known better than to jump into such a heated discussion at such a late date.

 

:bravo:

 

I don't think Croats and Serbs and Bosnian Muslims can tell each other apart visually or by spoken accent but they could still figure out who was who well enough to kill each other.

I think that is more than a little oversimplified. There is no reason to think that was not almost as much diversity within the hypothesized four races 15KYA as there is now.

We have bred dogs into all sorts of strange races of dogs but what happens when you randomly let them interbreed for a few generations? Something like the proto-dog starts re-emerging. Lower populations of humans in the past made more isolated pockets in which distinct racial features could arise.

I don't think those 4 races ever existed. I think that if we could travel back in time to 15KYA the people who are supposed to have been part of those 4 races would have appeared more racially/ethnically diverse back then than they do now.

Even now who the hell are the Mongloids and what is Asia? Asia is absurd as a continent because it is too big and to diverse to be comparable to the other continents.

I don't think so. I think Jews were more like the French, an ethnicity created by blending. If we believe the story of Abraham the Jews begin with a Iraqi region tribe invading Canaan. But Hebrew is not an Iraqi region language.

The greatest muddling of Jews happened not because of conquest but rather from intermarriage with non-Jews in the diaspora.

Slavery has been around long before recorded and has taken many ever changing forms and has taken many forms that are a few steps outside our definition of slavery. Indian castes, patriarchical control of women, pimps and hoes, European feudal serfs and indentured servitude are all just outside slavery.

According to Wikipedia "Approximately 10–20% of the rural population of Carolingian Europe consisted of slaves". The word slave comes from Carolingian Europe/ old French because a large proportion of those slaves were Slavs. So the word "slave" itself incorporates a phase when race/ethnicity played a role in who would become a slave.

Originally different races did not meet each other. In general it has been more acceptable to turn people captured from the "others" into slaves than it was to enslave one of "us". "Us" and "them" can be defined by race class or religion or whatever.

I agree with this. I think the foundations of racism can be found In the way groups of Lions, Wolves, Hyenas, Baboons and Chimpanzees treat other groups of their same species. I think it is only after humans form into larger groups and alliances of tribes that racial features start being applied to the instincts for tribal antagonism.

Something like racism makes animals mate with their own species but this does not create antagonism towards other species.

The mental flexibility regarding who is "us" and who is "them" seems to to be present throughout humans. It makes me think that tribal alliances must have begun a very long time ago. How long would it take the instincts that enable tribal alliances to be present and strong in all humans?

Some of us find it much harder than others of us to ally with people who are not like us. How we are raised probably explains most of the variation but I suspect that we may have quite a bit of genetic variation in our instincts regarding "us them antagonism" and how different somebody can be and still be accepted as one of "us".

 

I had one summer all over Europe and into Turkey in 1986. I was struck by how everything from the look of the people to the style of cooking and to the sound of the music changed in small increments towards the next place as you travel in that direction. Going from Germany to Vienna you could feel the closeness of the Slavs and even the Greeks and Turks making Vienna different from Germany.

The Bosnian Muslims speak Serbo-Croat and have always been there in Bosnia Herzegovina they just adopted Islam after the Turkish conquest where as their Serbian neighbors stuck to Orthodox Christianity that they inherited from the Byzantines. The Croats were the same people but they were ruled by the Catholic Austrian Empire. The Kosovar Albanians are in Kosovo which was until recently part of Serbia. That is a different place from Bosnia Herzegovina.

I was only in Yugoslavia for a few days. I had no clue about the ethnic tensions that would explode a decade later. The only clue I got was somebody telling me that Tito was the only Yugoslav.

There is a semantic problem with referring to any cultural or ideological hostilities as racism. Xenophobia is not the same as racism. Bigotry is not always racism.

The reason I use "us" versus "them" is because that feels like the core issue to me. We can stick whatever we want on the us versus them mold.

At roughly the same time I read Chimpanzees of Gombee, Nathan McCall's "Makes me want to Holler" about a young black guy growing up in gang life, and "The Reckoning" by David Halberstam partly about corporate culture at Ford. I saw parallels in these books. The Gang behavior Chimpanzee behavior parallel is rather obvious but at Ford there was "us" versus "them" tensions between marketing and engineering and design and finance within Ford. My high school and the neighboring town played a football game every thanksgiving. It was so easy to get caught up in the town rivalry.

I agree that each instance of "us" versus "them" is largely crafted rather than instinctive, and that the "us" versus "them" identifier varies from instance to instance, occurring often but by no means consistently. Race means race. Since ordinary people don't run DNA to determine race, race is largely determined visually. That which is determined linguistically is not race.

When somebody says that they are comfortable with Obama because he does not sound black they are sort of saying that their bigotry is ethnic bigotry against African Americans rather than racial bigotry against the African race. Whites used to like OJ Simpson I think because he smiled and could talk in a basically white dialect. I liked Reverand Wright and felt like while America may be ready for black skin the are not ready to appreciate the intelligence and brutal honesty of a man who speaks like reverend Wright.

I think racism as a word can't really be separated from appearance unless we are willing to separate racism from the root word race. Unless I need to be brief and quickly understood I will stick with "us" versus "them" as my name for those flexible antagonistic tribal instincts.

 

I don't think that's so true as you make it sound and, anyway, where it is it relies as much on linguistic and fashion cues as purely physical visual ones.

And that latter qualifier ends up being a difference in kind. Absent any innate visual cues, the discovery in question could well never occur - it's a question only of how the person presents themselves. There are entire communities of "crypto-Jews" in certain places, who have secretly been Jewish for many generations while presenting themselves publicly as members of the majority religion (Christianity, typically).

Now imagine someone trying to be "secretly black" in that way. The whole pretense would crumble the moment they step out the front door.

It's a quintessential bigotry, but the question of whether it's racism is not so clear-cut. I would not invoke that example as some kind of definitive proof that Jewish is a "race;" there are plenty of people and organization that think and speak as though the two categories are distinct.

 

Yeah that is a fib on Fraggle Rocker part. Often a mentioned problem with japans "no foreigner" exclusion for businesses is that they only target people they can identify a "foreigners" they have been specifically tricked by allowing through say a Chinese women by making sure the Chinese women does not say a word (and thus give away her accent). The equal argument would be to say that one can easily tell apart a Brit from a French man or a German.

Certain if a white business owner could put up a "whites only" exclusion in the USA, it would not be hard to sneak a Jews past (fuck I usually pass for white despite my Jewish-Hispanic background) just dress them up like Billy bob redneck and you could easily get them into the KKK! Now you are spot on that this kind of "racism" is not visual as say Blacks or Asians, and represent a bigotry rather then racism, but racism has become such a blanket term with so many definitions it practically can mean anything these days!

 

They've told me that as well, but I don't really believe them. In the first place, situations where they'd be called upon to make such a designation based purely on facial appearance are very very rare, so there's no real scientific basis for the claim. Moreover, ethnic nationalism is pretty extreme in that part of the world, so that's an obvious factor that would lead to exaggerated perception of one's ability to distinguish.

Also, there is actually a website that attempts to test exactly this issue: http://alllooksame.com/ . They show you pictures of faces of Japanese, Chinese and Korean people, and you try to assign them to the right category. And while I can't find a link presently, I could swear that I've previously read statistical results from there showing that Asians are any better at this than anyone else.

 

No, that's bigotry. I've been talking about racism, the preliminary step that involves:
1. making a classification system based on arbitrary and meaningless facial features, hair textures, and the lightness or darkness of a person's skin, and
2. exadurating those small differences by assigning people to a highly contrasting color scheme, e.g. "black" and "white".

In reality, due to the never-ending ability of most people to bridge small differences by marriage and parenthood, there are, in fact, a hundred thousand shades of brown skin on the planet, requiring a hurculean effort on the part of the racial classifiers to draw the line between their mythical "races".

Is it accurate to call a man "black" if his mother and his father look very different than each other, as you do when discussing Barak Obama? I made the point much earlier, as an intellectual exercise. Imagine the world being composed of six races, identified by the first six letters of the alphabet. Now assume that a man from the B race meets and falls in love with a woman from the C race. After they marry and have children, the racists have a difficult choice to make:

1. arbitrarily assign the children to either the B "race" or the C "race", or
2. create a seventh race for the children.

If you choose the first option, which many people are now doing when they claim that our current president is "black", they are immediately making themselves vulnerable to seeing his descendants being called "black" for the same reason, even if they resemble Ted Turner or Jane Fonda.

If you choose the second option, you've established a method for creating a hundred thousand new races, one for each of the hundred thousand shades of brown skin that exist in the world today.



[As far as I'm concerned, the colors are, strictly speaking, inaccurate as to an actual physical description of the color of anyone's skin.]

If someone had blue skin, then they have blue skin. I don't say that they're a member of a blue "race", because it's just as mythical as the "black race".

Likewise, Barak Obama's skin is a medium-brown color, not dark brown, and certainly not black, so he's not a "black" man. This is simple visual accuracy, which is required whenever a person needs to fill out a police report, or to describe a color photo of him, like this one.

http://sathyasaibaba.files.wordpress.com/2008/08/barack-obama.jpg

Because they could give him grandchildren or great-grandchildren who resemble his mother's light-colored appearance, depending on who they marry (not absolutely necessary, but it helps).

Remember, they're not small children anymore.
http://literaryobama.files.wordpress.com/2009/02/obamakids.jpg

And the same goes for you, too. Don't assume that because you use a classification system, the rest of the world also uses it. As I've pointed out many times, other parts of the words have their own system, just as inaccurate as your own, including one used in Moscow that makes Muscovites "biologically different" than the Cossacks, the Tartars, the Mongols, and the people who live in the Baltics, who they refer to as members of the Baltic "race", simply to create an artificial "difference" where none exists.

Racists exist, people who use a color-coded classification system. Some of them are also bigots, and some bigots are violent. I don't ignore the obvious, but as a person who doesn't use any color-coded classification system, I can never be a bigot, and neither will anyone else who takes the same truly enlightened 21st century attitude.


[You can use any words you like to describe your grandparents. If I saw photos of them, I would probably use different words. It's a certainty that I would NOT use the words "black" or "white" to describe them because I never use either one of those words to describe real people unless they're painted that way.]

Those words aren't "problematic", they're inaccurate. Nobody, I said NOBODY, has skin that is the color of a car tire, and nobody has skin that is the color of milk. Those are the standards I use, and they're the basis for a truly rational view of people based on something other than an arbitrary choice of one of six or seven color-coded pigeonholes to put the world's population into, an exercise that has always seemed to require more effort than any possible benefit you could get from using it.

Race is a myth, one that will be in steep decline at the end of this century, thanks to the free choice that people like Barak's children will have and make when they grow up, date, marry, and produce children of their own, possibly very different in appearance than either one of Barak's parents.