You ever see an argument about copyright issues on the internet where some genius who thinks he's making a salient and original and clever point that will utterly blow everybody's mind and stop the stupid argument in its tracks pipes up and goes, "You know we're just talking about 0s and 1s, right? There is no actual movie/picture/song here. It's all just 0s and 1s."
That's pretty much what you're doing here.
You're going, "Man, I keep hearing people talk about this National Forest, and I went out there, and I paid for an entry sticker for my windshield, and DAMN IT if I wasn't ripped off... there was no forest, just a bunch of fucking trees."
Okay. Yes. From a certain point of view, there really is actually no such thing as race. We are not a planet of Vulcans and Elves and Gelflings. We are all members of the human race.
And the thing is, the human race is fucking complicated. We have an organ inside our heads that is more complicated than most life forms. One organ. Each individual one of us is more complicated than some entire species. Six billion of us on a planet... or even three hundred million of us in a country with two centuries of its own history which built on three more centuries of colonial/imperial history are so fucking complicated that the sciences that describe and predict our behavior are called "soft sciences" because we don't have the information or the processing power needed to understand it.
So we have this complicated intersection of class and ethnicity and culture, all these different things that are themselves "noexistent" in the same way as race, in that they are socially contructed concepts that are once arbitrary and at the same time very ill-defined... and they are all inextricably bound together because we never get them in a vacuum, and so in order to be able to deal with this, in order to be able to talk about and experience it on a conscious level, we treat the point where all this stuff of cultural and personal identity crashes together as a singular thing, a concept, and we call it "race".
Because we need a way to talk about it. The same way that we need a way to deal with a whole unit of trees as a forest, the same way it's far more useful to deal with a discrete collection of data as the file it represents than as the raw binary.
And then there's the fact that saying "NO, IT'S NOT RACE, IT'S ETHNICITY AND CLASS" is all too often a convenient way of shutting down conversations that need to happen by challenging the grounds on which they're being held.
And I hate to say it but classism and ethnocentricism have always, and most likely will always, be around.
You're absolutely right. We will never get rid of them.
That's why we must never stop trying to get rid of them.
Because that's the only way things can get better.
And more than that, it's the only way to fight the tendency of things to get worse.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
ninetydegrees
No, I won't block you. I'll just give you the response you merit.
on 2009-07-10 08:54 am (UTC)That's pretty much what you're doing here.
You're going, "Man, I keep hearing people talk about this National Forest, and I went out there, and I paid for an entry sticker for my windshield, and DAMN IT if I wasn't ripped off... there was no forest, just a bunch of fucking trees."
Okay. Yes. From a certain point of view, there really is actually no such thing as race. We are not a planet of Vulcans and Elves and Gelflings. We are all members of the human race.
And the thing is, the human race is fucking complicated. We have an organ inside our heads that is more complicated than most life forms. One organ. Each individual one of us is more complicated than some entire species. Six billion of us on a planet... or even three hundred million of us in a country with two centuries of its own history which built on three more centuries of colonial/imperial history are so fucking complicated that the sciences that describe and predict our behavior are called "soft sciences" because we don't have the information or the processing power needed to understand it.
So we have this complicated intersection of class and ethnicity and culture, all these different things that are themselves "noexistent" in the same way as race, in that they are socially contructed concepts that are once arbitrary and at the same time very ill-defined... and they are all inextricably bound together because we never get them in a vacuum, and so in order to be able to deal with this, in order to be able to talk about and experience it on a conscious level, we treat the point where all this stuff of cultural and personal identity crashes together as a singular thing, a concept, and we call it "race".
Because we need a way to talk about it. The same way that we need a way to deal with a whole unit of trees as a forest, the same way it's far more useful to deal with a discrete collection of data as the file it represents than as the raw binary.
And then there's the fact that saying "NO, IT'S NOT RACE, IT'S ETHNICITY AND CLASS" is all too often a convenient way of shutting down conversations that need to happen by challenging the grounds on which they're being held.
And I hate to say it but classism and ethnocentricism have always, and most likely will always, be around.
You're absolutely right. We will never get rid of them.
That's why we must never stop trying to get rid of them.
Because that's the only way things can get better.
And more than that, it's the only way to fight the tendency of things to get worse.
(To be continued)