
I’m a bit brown. But in America I’m white. Not for much longer - finid
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/mar/21/us-census-whiteness-race-colour-middle-east-north-africa-america
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mcv
I find this an utterly bizarre issue. Why does the government even need to
know this? How do you deal with people of mixed ethnicity? Do you tick all the
relevant boxes? Can't you just fill in "human"?

As far as I know, the Dutch government doesn't register any "race" for its
citizens. It used to, and in WW2, the nazis used that to easily figure out who
was Jewish, so a lot of people feel it's better not to register anything like
that at all. Some political parties are in favour of removing gender
registration as well.

~~~
slededit
I too found it a bit strange when I moved here. My understanding (gleaned over
time) is America is heavily focused on race metrics to measure progress
towards equality. My employer wanted all sorts of information for various
reporting requirements they were under. Identifying as disabled was optional -
I don't remember if race was.

America takes it to extreme, but in over places such as Canada a very public
battle was fought over elimination of the long form census which asks
questions on a number of personal topics such as religion. There the argument
was public services couldn't properly be provided without such information.

~~~
HarryHirsch
In Northern Ireland they ask for one's religion in the context of a job
application. Over there it's the Catholics that have traditionally been the
targets of discrimination and the Protestants are the ruling caste. That's how
the HR guy explained it.

It's understandable, the new "Middle Eastern" category. You do ask yourself
how a person of Jewish extraction would answer the question, though. "Jew"
isn't a race on the census right now, even though antisemitism was a thing in
the US up until WW II.

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ebcode
Like school grades, competitive sports, policemen, and war, race is an idea
that only serves to divide us. I want to see humanity reach its true
potential, and not be endlessly mucking about over rank and status (or
ownership of resources).

I've struggled to stop identifying as white, and to not think "black" when I
see a black person. But I was raised in the white supremacist society that is
the united states, and the programming/brainwashing runs deep.

This article reminds me of the work we still need to do. And how close we are
to presiding over another holocaust.

~~~
Sunset
You are already divided. Unreciprocated altruism will only be harmful to you.
Collective strategies win against individualist strategies.

You may want to deny this, but nothing will make reality conform to your
desires.

~~~
ebcode
> Collective strategies win against individualist strategies.

Sounds very "black and white" to me. Besides, I believe in magic.

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fred_is_fred
I'd like to address this specific portion of the article: "Ignatiev quotes
John Finch, an Englishman who travelled the US in 1843, saying: “It is a
curious fact that … the poorer class of Irish immigrants in America, are
greater enemies to the Negro population … than any portion of the population
in the free States.”"

On the surface it might seem that one downtrodden group would instinctively
support another one out of solidarity, but in reality a lot of racism has its
origins in economic competition. The Irish and African Americans were
competing for the same menial and manual jobs in many places, which lead to
distrust, anger, fighting, and racism. You could see some of this happening
when mining companies would bring in African Americans as scabs during strikes
which lead to violent brawls. The Irish weren't fighting a WASP for a job,
they were fighting other immigrants or ethnic groups.

This same reality continues to this day in many places. Ask someone who works
in a field where an undocumented immigrant might compete with them for a job
how they feel about it and compare that to someone working at Facebook or
Google who isn't worried about the cleaner taking their job as DBA.

~~~
mcv
I heard about an experiment once where a number of test subjects were ranked
from rich to poor, and everybody got some money that they had to give either
to the person above them in the ranking, or to the person below them.

In most countries, people tend to give the money to the people below them,
because they need it more. Only in the US, do people give the money to the
person above them. The explanation was that they tend to see the person below
them as competition.

It seems there's just something about the US that fucks up people's sense of
fairness. Maybe the US plays different downtrodden groups off against each
other so they fight each other instead of uniting and fighting the people
treading down on them.

~~~
fred_is_fred
Oh please. How do you explain lower class voters voting in droves for Brexit?
They did not like all the immigrants from the EU coming and taking plumber and
cleaner and other manual labor type jobs. This is not just a US issue.

~~~
mcv
Are you suggesting England is becoming more like the US? Maybe you're right.

Though in a sense, this might be the case for all cases where racism is
primarily supported by poorer classes: playing different lower class groups
off against each other, so they won't rise up against the people keeping them
down.

