Can democracy last?

Again, these labels were NOT created by the white male population, they were created by individuals. This is fact. You are still objectively wrong.

These labels are not a bad thing. A complete non issue and are necessary for administration purposes. I've already pointed out why and your refute is weak and baseless.

These labels are not an issue at all I'm getting our society at an agreeable level. The issue is partly people like you making issues of everything. This whole labels thing is not an issue. They are absolutely needed. Even if a Hispanic legislator deemed themselves something different that doesn't change anything, there will still be people like you unhappy.

White men had these labels "forced" on them by these individuals the same way everyone else did.

Races were always established on a visible level even before we had a name for it. Reality does not depend on our perception. It's there regardless. So putting a name to it is a natural thing we do as humans. Absolutely nothing wrong with it.

And no, bringing race into every issue serves to create racism, not combat it. Your entire way of thinking in this area is so flawed. But its OK, I'll teach you.

You are very, very wrong.

 

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The notion that individuals can decree racial classifications for their society is not sensible, and not what happened in the US.

Millions of individuals, working in concert over a time span of hundreds of years, mutually agreeing to call themselves "white men" and mutually adjusting the membership in that race until it worked for them, got them what they wanted, established the racial classifications of the US.

Nobody else had any say in the matter.

Few delusions have abetted more misery, or are doing more damage to American community.

Like what?

For the last few generations, of course. So?

No. Not as we know them today in the US.

In the 1700s, before the US white race was fully established as it is now, Benjamin Franklin and others commonly referred to the Irish and sometimes the Swedes as "black". There are entire bodies of research into the question of when and how the immigrant Catholic Irish, in particular, became "white", and some researchers contend the transition involved conscious and purposeful effort to escape the fate of "black" racial identity (many had family stories of ancestors who had been captured in Ireland and sold to the sugar plantations of the Caribbean islands, as new immigrants they were being shunted into menial jobs and abusive employments just a step up from slavery, and so forth. The danger was real). Jews have often been excluded from the "white" race in the US, over history, by significant factions of US white men. The question of which US race some people belong to is still open, and visual grounds are not enough to settle the matter (the Mexican aboriginal tribes, for example: brown race or red race? Hispanic or Indian? The US white men have not settled the matter among themselves, so it's not settled.). There are dozens of such examples - basically, the current US white race did not exist prior to 1800.

Racism has never been absent from any significant political issue in the US. It's always been there. Nobody has ever had to "bring it in".

It's the only reason racial designation has any "administrative purpose" in the US. Without the need to handle the economic and political and social effects of racism, there'd be no point in tracking that kind of illusion. Why would anyone care if a bunch of crazy people decided to call themselves "white men", if it had no real consequences?

 

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White men did not create the labels, it was absolutely individuals. You are wrong.

I've already pointed out why we need the labels.

Those labels are not a bad thing, and certainly have not damaged our society. You are so wrong.

There are plenty of issues of racism that warrant attention. This is not one, because it is not racist. By "bring it in" you would understand what I'm saying if you applied some critical thinking.

I've already addressed all of your questions. Just reread my previous posts.

Again, individuals gave the labels, not white men. Still a non issue.

 

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And I agreed with you, in several posts including #62 - we need racial identification in the US to handle the consequences of the situation created by the establishment of these races; something white men did between 1650 and 1850, with consequences we have been living with ever since.

You claimed that "we" need them for some kind of "administrative purposes". That was and remains vague, compared with my specifications, and you don't seem to agree with my take on the matter (or maybe you aren't reading my posts - can't tell). The closest you came to elaborating on that, after repeated queries about what you meant, was police identification of perpetrator race - that is, perp membership in one of the races established in the US by white men by about 1850.

So with that as evidence, until you clarify what you are talking about, I agree that what you say is of course probably true. That is, I agree, but it depends on several factors I am assuming without information, such as who you mean by "we". These races were invented in the first place for the "administrative purposes" of self-labeled white men, such as enabling removal of obstacles to gold mining and identifying the enslavable (or jailable) while sequestering economic opportunity and the bulk of the community production of wealth among themselves. They were and still are quite useful for such purposes, if not exactly a "need" certainly a convenience.

Extraordinarily powerful individuals you will never be able to name, operating in the background while five million men agreed to call themselves white and classify everyone else according to their edicts. Seem likely to you?

Try the Coates book. You badly need a reality check on this "non-issue" fantasy - that is, if the community you claim to seek is to be a real one in the existing US, and include (as it must for the long term health of any US democracy you have in mind) people who find themselves labeled "black", or "red", or "brown", and so forth,

without ever having had any say in the matter, for hundreds of years now.

 

Again, you are still objectively wrong. 5 million white men did not do that. It was a small group of individuals who created the labels.

Not white men, but individuals. This is factual.

It is absolutely a non issue. Just because a small group of ignorant think differently does not constitute a problem for the rest of us.

You forgot how white people get called white without any say so for hundreds of years now.

It's a complete non issue. We need labels, we always have. Always will.

 

Nonsense - as you will discover if you ever try to identify them. It happened across several generations of an entire civilization.

It's easy to see this: For one thing, it took over a hundred years and happened on a continental scale. For another, no small group had that kind of propaganda control over North American society at the time (it would be difficult even now, with television). For a third, serious research has been done into various phases of the process (such as the relabeling of the immigrant Catholic Irish from black to white) and no such influential individuals have been found.

No, I didn't. I posted that first, and referred to it repeatedly - at least three times directly in response to you. As repeatedly posted by me, the US white race we have now was established by around 1850. We've all been stuck with it ever since the Civil War - like the caste system in India, or the ruling family/tribe/sect of Saudi Arabia, it's our particular blight and flaw.

That's the issue. First you say there's no issue, then you point directly at it - the nature of the delusion based need for these labels, and of the "we" who harbors and imposes and maintains that delusion based need, and of the effects of that delusional cultural feature on the politics and economy and democratic prospects of the harboring culture, is the issue.

Nothing in the US provides a greater obstacle to the community you rightly identify as critical for democratic government.

 

It's not nonsense, it's factual. Objectively true.

And it's not a delusion as to the need for labels, it serves very practical uses.

 

Try to identify this "small number of individuals".

Or even easier, if it were possible (which it is not): just try to locate them in time or geography - when and where were they, these few individuals, when they invented the modern US white race? Get within twenty years and 500 miles, and I will credit your answer.

The label, not the need, marks the delusion.

The need is an ever-present degradation and obstacle to community, the central flaw in US culture for hundreds of years now, as significant a threat to democracy in the US as we face.

 

My answer is a self attesting truth. It was individuals who created the labels, not an entire race. It is simply illogical and downright unfair to portray the actions of some with an entire race. And like it or not, that's what you are doing. And it is simply incorrect. What's correct and incorrect has no relation to you crediting it or not.

Labels are not in any way shape or form a flaw. Nor is it delusion. It is a practical way of describing people, as we are all different. It is not wrong and serves no obstacle to creating a better community.

There is simply no discussion to be had. So much we could talk about, and you chose a complete non issue.

 

I'm wondering when Iceaura is going to come out and label white men racist.
He's been assiduously avoiding it so far, but the trap should be fairly self evident and I doubt that he hasn't seen it.
His thoughts on the matter are fairly transparent, though.

 

I agree, and it is those attitudes that serve to create more racism, not combat it.

 

[QUOTE="Fraggle Rocker,
And I still am! For Christ's sake, we've got a black man in the White House, yet the white civilians are still shooting at the black civilians.[/QUOTE]

Just whites shooting at blacks huh?

 

The individuals who created the races of North America between 1650 and 1850 labeled themselves as white men. There were about five million of them, all - to within too small a percentage to measure - involved in and cooperative with this self-labeling and the concomitant creation of the other races of North America.

Nobody else had any say in the matter.

But it does have a relation to whether you can post it without immediately seeing the problems or not.

So to repeat - who, in your view, were these few individuals, where and when did they define - let's pick an obvious one - the US white race as we know it today? If you can get the event within 200 miles and 20 years, you can slide on the names.

If you can't get your head wrapped around even the obvious and recorded history of the creation of the races of the US, how they came to exist as we know them today, nothing else you are "wondering" about is going to make any sense either.

If they're all that transparent, how come you guys are having so much trouble recognizing them?

The relevance, btw, remains: the consequences of dividing the population of the US into these bogus "races" are among, and possibly dominant among, the major obstacles to the establishment of community in the US. And such community is - according to several posters here - necessary for the long term health of democracy in America.

 

I understand completely, iceaura.
"There's no such thing as races, but whites are racist". That's been you for quite a while now.

To give you the benefit of the doubt, I wondered if I should mention that I'm a little confused, but in reality I can't even do that. I'm not.
You're categorising. Obvious. A hypocrite. Self serving.
I didn't have any trouble recognising that at all.

Cease with the prevarication and be yourself, and stop pandering to the functions of your own particular ideal.
Be you. Be honest. Get out there, man.

Or admit you're just a cardboard cutout.

 

Except for the posts where I insist on the reality of racial division in the US, not only the reality but the specific nature of the established races, and who established them, and something of why. Like, say, in every post from me in every thread on the matter you have ever read in this forum.

Which you transform in your mind into "no such thing as races", because you have a serious thinking disorder on this topic, and it interferes with your ability to comprehend not only my posts, but ordinary US political reality.

And this thinking disorder is not only yours, but a common and systemic characteristic of the US political discourse. And so when people subject to this disorder advocate for "community", as they should of course, other people are then occasionally - as the mood moves them - motivated to point out that among the major obstacles to the establishment of community in the US are the continuing and dominant consequences of the prior establishment of the continuing racial division. And denying these consequences does not make them vanish. If you want community, you have to deal with them.

 

And we still have black civilians shooting at white civilians. That's a dangerous road to go down. No one is pure here. No race is without fault. There is plenty of fault to spread around. Race is still and issue in this country, and probably will be for some time to come, although much progress has been made. We need to be honest with ourselves.

 

Some are, most aren't. Just like white women, black men, Asian women . . . .

 

Individuals created the labels, not white men. This is a simple objectively true fact. White men did not have a say in it either.

And I've already pointed out why labels are not bad and are needed.

And again iceaura, I don't need you to credit my statement, it's a self attesting truth. And it's true regardless of your crediting it or not.

 

Some US races have had, and still have, much more power than others. That amplifies their faults.

Illustration, from a recent small collection of historical gun accident accounts in Harper's Magazine:

There have been no Trayvon Martin/George Zimmerman type events with the races reversed.

Which you can support, any time, by pointing to the time and place in which those supposed few individuals - not yet "white men", of course, since they hadn't yet accomplished their labeling - did that. That would persuade me, btw.

To be even more impressively persuasive, you could help us understand the means by which these few individuals got everybody else in the entire North American civilization - including those to be classified in the proposed black and red and yellow races, as well as the millions in the rest of the proposed white race - to adopt their proposed racial classification scheme and its consequences.

Of course they did - at the time. White men wrote the laws involved - the gold standard for "having a say". White men established the criteria of racial identification. White men controlled the punishments and mediated the enforcement of the divisions, determined the social consequences of racial membership, etc. White men did this collectively over a period of about two hundred years.

The decision to include the Catholic Irish in the "white" race, for example, was made (however unconsciously, and that is currently up for debate) entirely by discussion and exchange among self-labeled white men - a couple of million of them, acting collectively, over a period of about fifty years prior to the Civil War.

Nobody else had any say in the matter.