Saturday, April 09, 2016

A third-party perspective on black/white relations in America


Dr. White has recently responded in his Dividing Line podcast to the false accusations of racism that were charged at him. As a non-white and an outsider to the American situation, I would think I have a third party perspective to this whole controversy over race, which I find ridiculous. In Singapore where I grew up, we have 4 main "races": Chinese, Malay, Indian and Eurasian, and we get along rather fine. What I find ludicrous about the whole "conversation" about race in the US is the binary it produces: that there are only "Whites" and "Blacks." "Whites" have the white man burden of proving they are not racist (which is again, why?), while "blacks" seem to get a free pass as being the default victim class. Just by stating this, we can see a whole host of problems. First, why the racial binary? How about other races like Korean-American, Chinese-American, and so on? And just in case one is tempted to lump them into one "colored" category, well, that is just plain ridiculous! The different "colored" people do not necessarily get along, and they do not necessarily see themselves as one monolithic bloc called "colored." I'm sorry if I actually believed in racial diversity! Chinese-Americans and Korean-Americans are not the same, and I refuse to treat them as one and the same thing!

1 comment:

  1. It was a great piece, replied to in the typical me-vic-you-perp manner by a RAAN reverse racist. The binary nature of race perspectives int e US has a political aspect,a s the last thing the black establishment wants is those mestizos who don't buy the "single drop of blood" buncombe being not counted as blacks on a census, which would result in less political clout for the establishment.

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