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The Curious Case of Trayvon Martin

PhDeac said:
The race of the shooter really doesn't matter except for white posters who want to distance themselves from this guy.
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You were the first person to post about the race of the shooter on this thread.

I agree it doesn't really matter. An unarmed child was shot but a fucking nutjob while trying to walk in his own damn neighborhood.
 
Liquid Karma said:
Agreed. If you're the self proclaimed "leader" of your neighborhood watch association you have a duty to know who lives in your neighborhood.
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Not that it makes anything okay, I don't think the father lived there:

"the boy’s father, who had taken him to visit a friend"
"Trayvon had left the house he and his father were visiting to walk to the local 7-Eleven."

An awful, tragic story, and terrible that Zimmerman seems to be going unpunished.
 
Dented is really going to be pissed at all you with your minutia knowledge of race and ethnicity.
 
DeaconSlim2.0 said:
White is a race...Hispanic is an ethnicity.

It is possible to be both white and Hispanic.


Check any questionnaire that asks for race, usually the responses include "White/Not Hispanic" and "White/Hispanic"



ETA: Was typing this before others said the same thing.
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But this all just illustrates the problem with "race" as a classification. WTF is it, if not the color of one's skin? I'm fairly certain (HTTD can probably provide some links here) that modern anthropology has come to the conclusion that "race" is a construct, not any actual difference between individuals. Insofar as race is just a construct, I'm not sure what purpose it serves.
 
TexasDeac10 said:
But this all just illustrates the problem with "race" as a classification. WTF is it, if not the color of one's skin? I'm fairly certain (HTTD can probably provide some links here) that modern anthropology has come to the conclusion that "race" is a construct, not any actual difference between individuals. Insofar as race is just a construct, I'm not sure what purpose it serves.
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Only point was that it isn't incorrect to designate a Hispanic male as a "28 year old white man"
 
"I'm not sure what purpose it serves."

Could you clarify what you mean by that?
 
PhDeac said:
"I'm not sure what purpose it serves."

Could you clarify what you mean by that?
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Sure. First, allow me to say that I'm not trying to be insensitive. This is just a question that I've had to think a lot about this year in some classes, and I've come away more confused than assured about anything. I'll try to answer your question, but I don't have any real crystallized thoughts about this so this isn't going to be very organized.

What purpose does race as a classification serve? I can think of a couple possible purposes, but I'm not convinced any of them are beneficial enough to want to continue the practice of classifying on the basis of race.

1) Race might serve as a classification used by government. In its worst form, this was just Jim Crow. Whites drink from one water fountain; blacks drink from another water fountain. The problem with these types of classification is they serve no legitimate purpose other than governmental animus.

But, the next form this takes might be something like: whites can get their driver's license at 16, blacks at 18. An (we assume) honest and well-meaning government says this is serves a legitimate purpose, since they have data showing that blacks are more likely to get into traffic accidents. You can imagine a government trying to do something similar with data about violent crimes (curfews for blacks!) or something like that. The problem now isn't that the government isn't working toward some legitimate purpose, since they actually intend to protect the health and safety of individuals. The problem now is that race as a classification is just a proxy for some type of conduct or behavior that we can get at through other means. The racial classification, therefore, is basically useless. It's just a crutch used by a lazy policymaker. It's tempting for a government to use racial profiling in these ways, but they can get at good drivers/bad drivers through other types of classifications/considerations that don't explicitly involve race.

The last use of race by the government might take the form of affirmative action. This is an entirely separate conversation, but suffice it to say that I think this isn't an ideal use of race either. It's still a proxy for something (disadvantaged, underserved kids, perhaps). There's a much stronger argument for this as a racial classification, but I'm generally unconvinced of a lot of these arguments since I fear the potential for harm is outweighed by the benefits, and where race is involved, I think we're better off eschewing these types of classifications. Don't use black/white/brown check-boxes; do use scholarship or recruiting programs for particular areas or high schools.

This post is about to get shorter b/c I'm enjoying this FSU-Cinci game

2) Race might serve as a classification by people themselves as a way of self-identifying. Children can say: I am X, she is Y, and we are different. Again, find this to be a harmful mode of thinking. Just like the well-meaning but ultimately misguided government, it's lazy decision-making. People are different for many reasons, and those reasons don't have to do with melanin levels in the skin.

3) A related point that my roommate likes to make: minorities that have undergone a history of persecution need a means of coping with that persecution, and one way they've often done that is through "sticking together" and appropriating pejoratives and categories for their own self-identification. Example: gays engage in gay-pride parades and may appropriate certain words for themselves, like gay, fag, or whatever; blacks can appropriate the word nigger for their own use as an identifier; women can commandeer the word slut. So on and so forth.

I'm really sympathetic to this argument, but I'm still unsure of it as an end-goal in an ideal world. The Rawls-ian in me wants to think about a "veil of ignorance" and how we'd all choose to arrange ourselves if we could begin carte blanche. I *think* that we'd choose to say we're human beings, of varying backgrounds, but that skin color is meaningless. Ethnicity might have some meaning, but certainly not for any policy purposes, and even then I'm unsure about why we'd want to consider ethnicity meaningful. It's usually only meaningful when used in conflict, when things are "us" vs. "them," and I think such things belie social harmony.

Whew. ok. I hope that helps Ph. I really look forward to your responses.
 
Brief response since I'm also watching the game, although I'm more bored than I should be by a game with so many lead changes.

We don't live in an ideal world and never will. So the idea that "in an ideal world, race..." is meaningless. In the world we do have, race is a primary way society is organized whether it be where people live, where and how they worship, who they date, what they eat, etc. So although race is not a hard and fast biological construct, it clearly matters.
 
Another brief response:

I concede that we don't live in the ideal world, and pragmatically race matters. It just does. But should it? I understand this isn't pragmatic, but I'm more curious about this as a normative question.

And, conceding again that we don't live in an ideal world, does the acknowledgment of race hurt more than it helps anything? Acknowledging race/sexual identity helps a lot of people: people can be proud of their blackness, their gayness, their femininity. But as soon as you say it's ok for people to classify along those lines (i.e., "he's black, therefore..."), doesn't this non-ideal world just flip what could be a good thing into a horrible, racist thing? Even acknowledging that there might be some beneficial uses for race as a classifier among individuals, I still worry that accepting such classifications gives ignorant and prejudiced individuals implicit support for their racism. Joe Bob of WV will think to himself: "if the state says blacks are different (affirmative action), and blacks think of themselves as a distinct group, why can't I think of blacks as distinctly different? I've seen that data where they're more violent, anyway!"
 
But what's wrong with being different? The problem isn't being different, it's assigning a value to difference.
 
PhDeac said:
But what's wrong with being different? The problem isn't being different, it's assigning a value to difference.
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Agreed. The skeptic in me just thinks that this happens far too often (almost always) by ethnic groups of all stripes.
 
But how does not acknowledging race change that?
 
PhDeac said:
But how does not acknowledging race change that?
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Well, it would eliminate the issue if everyone stopped acknowledging race. That's the answer to the normative question, I think.

On a more practical level, I think the problem is alleviated if influential leaders within all communities extend the message that "we're not white, black, or blue: we're humans." And, at a state level, I think one of the biggest trendsetters is the government. So, I'd just eliminate any use of race by the law.
 
You're getting into the "ideal world" territory with the first point.

" I'd just eliminate any use of race by the law"

Examples?
 
PhDeac said:
You're getting into the "ideal world" territory with the first point.

" I'd just eliminate any use of race by the law"

Examples?
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But you can't just dismiss the first point like that. It's a normative question, not a policy question. The question is "should we," not "can we." So far, I take most of your responses to concede that we shouldn't acknowledge race, but since this is impossible, we just deal with the side effects.

To your second question: racial quotas in affirmative action is an easy one, and the Supreme Court's basically done that. Hate crime legislation is another questionable category. This point is immaterial though, since I'm not as concerned about the policy implications right now. I'm more curious about the matter on a more general level, not as applied to the current race-conscious America.
 
I don't think we shouldn't acknowledge race. People are different. That's a good thing.

I think your argument that acknowledging race is a problem is a causation issue. Your arguments overall place the onus for racial animosity on minorities. Take your examples for instance. The idea that people take their cues from the government is flawed, especially where we are now politically. The laws that you seem to want to get rid of were put into place because people did not take their cues from the government.
 
"I don't think we shouldn't acknolwedge race. People are different. That's a good thing."

Is it? Or do we just think it's great, since that's the way things are. Why is it a good thing that some people have higher IQs than others? That some people are taller than others? That some people have freckles and others don't? I'm not sure why those are inherently good things. Other than aesthetics and ease of recognizing your friends, I'm not sure what the net benefit of these differences is.

Going to bed, but I'll write more in the morning. I don't think I've placed any onus for animosity solely on minorities; I think racial animosity is circular. It might start with a racial majority, or it might start with a minority. But the response of the corresponding majority/minority can reinforce the animus, and so on and so forth. Racism is a vicious cycle, and while it's easiest to identify the victims, I think it's harder to apportion "blame" (if it's blame) for the current state of things. A metaphor: racism is a melee. It's a horrible brawl. One fucktard might start the brawl with a punch, but that can't absolve others from responding with greater force or subsequently involving others in the brawl.

Re: the government issue, I'd point to the writings of some people (Justice Kennedy is one) who caution that it's been historically difficult to sort out when a government is invoking race for good reasons or bad reasons. Because we've been really shitty at this historically, we should tie our hands, so to speak, and put an incredibly high burden on ourselves when we wish to make laws that classify based on race. Countries like South Africa got away with racial segregation for years by saying (in their Constitution, iirc) that such separation was "for the benefit of all involved" since the groups have "inherent differences." The same can be said for much of the defense for Jim Crow.
 
This argument is getting circular.

Here's a question to you. If we stripped government influence, would we have a society that did not advantage any group over another based on race?
 
Just heard the story on Morning Edition (npr for non snobs)

Hopefully that helps turn the heat up.
 
The human brain categorizes things on its own, non-consciously. It's an evolutionary byproduct. People group themselves at a very basic biological level. I don't think we exist as a species at a high enough level to think beyond that. Assuming that is true, I think it's important to acknowledge these differences and celebrate them. For people in my generation, we were taught by school (and in my case, my parents) that everyone is the same and we're all equal. True, we all have equal rights, but we are not all the same. I think that kind of thinking has damaging effects.
 
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