(11-06-2024, 12:56 PM)mikesez Wrote:

(11-06-2024, 11:34 AM)homebiscuit Wrote: I don’t find the conversation awkward at all. The point I’m making is claiming a racial identity for advantage is racist in itself. Could a white person say they are proud of their European heritage and not be pilloried by the same people who claim racial identity is important? 

Take Obama. How much was his white heritage celebrated? It wasn’t. The racial identity people, including Obama, only focused on his African father who abandoned him as a child. His white mother who raised him and inculcated into him his liberal values was largely ignored. That is true racism.

Everyone claims a racial identity.  You say that she claimed it "as an advantage." Here you claim to know her heart.  She is what she is.  She's supposed to tell us what she is. 

To your second point, very little was said about Obama's father. The book written about him makes it clear that his father was not very influential and some of his influence was bad.

Obama simply identified as black once he came to the mainland.  His choice.  He's actually a third culture kid who grew up in Indonesia and Hawaii, but he decided to emphasize the black after that.  No one questioned him about what his racial identity really was at the time, why he didn't identify equally as white, because we were a nicer country back then, with nicer candidates.  We used to care about graces and virtues.  Wasn't long ago.  But it's far away now.  You know this.  You know Trump's meanness and classlessness is new, but you embrace it and defend it.

That's not really the reason. It wasn't questioned because identity politics weren't a thing and it didn't become one until he became POTUS. 

Also, black folks in predominantly black countries don't identify themselves by their race the way they do in more diverse countries. Race isn't really a thing the way it is here. This is true of people of color in their countries. I personally know folks who live in Africa, India and the Philippines and they all say this. In their countries it's a class or social/economic issue, not a racial issue. Think of India's caste system. It's not a matter of race because they're all Indian, it's about social and economic status. 

We have a social and economic system is here but no one wants to talk about it because it doesn't serve a purpose. Because of this country's racial history it's just easier to milk that cow. If we start talking about clas warfare it makes the folks in charge uncomfortable because there are more of us than there are of them and that could cause problems for them if people actually got fired up about it.

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