That’s all ridiculous. You guys (the US) need to get past this race shit. She’s a US citizen by birth and that’s that.
For some reason none of you want to be just “Americans”. You want to divide yourselves up into little tribes that link you back to some place you’ve never been.
If you yourself emigrated, sure…call yourself Italian-American. If it was your parents…you are American and your parents were Italian. If it was your grandparents, you’re just American. Stop pretending.
See, here’s something that people outside of America don’t understand: when people immigrated to the US, they usually formed their own communities centered around the culture and traditions of their original country. This happens in other countries as well, but since most countries are like 5% immigrants at most, you just don’t see it unless you’re directly interacting with those communities.
The often spouted “melting pot” claim about the US has never been true - we’ve always been divided on a million things. It’s a micro-scale version of the countries of Europe - tiny timeframe, often tiny divides, but the same squabbles as there were between the former regions that now make up the countries of Europe. Invasions, racism, regional cultural differences, etc. They’re all there. In that sense, the US can be seen like the EU with a single unified language in some ways. On one end, it’s like the Scottish and Irish being British due to invasion and attempted genocide (the Nazis were inspired by how the US treated the indigenous people here, after all) and on the other it’s like the people of Paris and the Loire Valley arguing about who is or isn’t French. But you don’t have to go much further to find that you’re suddenly arguing about who’s French and who’s Belgian.
It’s the fact that it’s not a melting pot that I’m calling out. Americans need to see themselves as American first, and more importantly see each other as Americans first. All the time they separate themselves from each other, they’re letting “race” matter. Stop clinging onto what your family moved away from, and embrace what they moved to.
You want people that are systemically disadvantaged (e.g. over policed, redlined, underrepresented, etc.) to just get over it? All colorblindness does is let people ignore that. Please find a solution with a little more room for reality, history, empathy, and complexity. Thanks.
I don’t think I am really qualified to answer that adequately. The simple answer is people need to stop being racist and start being anti-racist, but that’s a multi-generational project to transform culture and not something that can really be imposed via political will alone. The obvious answer is replace the system, but again there’s the issue of this being the real world so the path to a new system is very messy and potentially involves another civil war given how re-entrenched the forces of racism have become. I’d like to think systemic reform is still possible but realistically Trumpism must be resolved first before reform could ever happen, and there’s a lot of serious issues arising from wealth concentration that potentially have to be dealt with too (i.e. even without Trumpism, we still have a bunch of ultrawealthy racists wielding their money to manipulate society).
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That’s all ridiculous. You guys (the US) need to get past this race shit. She’s a US citizen by birth and that’s that.
For some reason none of you want to be just “Americans”. You want to divide yourselves up into little tribes that link you back to some place you’ve never been.
If you yourself emigrated, sure…call yourself Italian-American. If it was your parents…you are American and your parents were Italian. If it was your grandparents, you’re just American. Stop pretending.
It would also help your politics no end.
See, here’s something that people outside of America don’t understand: when people immigrated to the US, they usually formed their own communities centered around the culture and traditions of their original country. This happens in other countries as well, but since most countries are like 5% immigrants at most, you just don’t see it unless you’re directly interacting with those communities.
The often spouted “melting pot” claim about the US has never been true - we’ve always been divided on a million things. It’s a micro-scale version of the countries of Europe - tiny timeframe, often tiny divides, but the same squabbles as there were between the former regions that now make up the countries of Europe. Invasions, racism, regional cultural differences, etc. They’re all there. In that sense, the US can be seen like the EU with a single unified language in some ways. On one end, it’s like the Scottish and Irish being British due to invasion and attempted genocide (the Nazis were inspired by how the US treated the indigenous people here, after all) and on the other it’s like the people of Paris and the Loire Valley arguing about who is or isn’t French. But you don’t have to go much further to find that you’re suddenly arguing about who’s French and who’s Belgian.
It’s the fact that it’s not a melting pot that I’m calling out. Americans need to see themselves as American first, and more importantly see each other as Americans first. All the time they separate themselves from each other, they’re letting “race” matter. Stop clinging onto what your family moved away from, and embrace what they moved to.
Otherwise you’ll just keep tearing at each other.
You want people that are systemically disadvantaged (e.g. over policed, redlined, underrepresented, etc.) to just get over it? All colorblindness does is let people ignore that. Please find a solution with a little more room for reality, history, empathy, and complexity. Thanks.
Get past and get over seem like distinctly different things. Get past suggests moving through and beyond to me.
So how do you suggest people move through and beyond systemic racism?
I don’t think I am really qualified to answer that adequately. The simple answer is people need to stop being racist and start being anti-racist, but that’s a multi-generational project to transform culture and not something that can really be imposed via political will alone. The obvious answer is replace the system, but again there’s the issue of this being the real world so the path to a new system is very messy and potentially involves another civil war given how re-entrenched the forces of racism have become. I’d like to think systemic reform is still possible but realistically Trumpism must be resolved first before reform could ever happen, and there’s a lot of serious issues arising from wealth concentration that potentially have to be dealt with too (i.e. even without Trumpism, we still have a bunch of ultrawealthy racists wielding their money to manipulate society).
Solutions are often simpler when they are made the someone unaffected.
You’re being ridiculous. Humans will never stop dividing ourselves into tribes. And guess what? Prejudice doesn’t have to be a part of that division.
uhhh, race as we know it wasn’t really a thing until well after the romans, before then skin colour was about as interesting as hair and eye colour.
afaik people cared somewhat about ethnicity specifically, but racism as we know it wasn’t a thing at all.