I know I am not in a position to complain (I am a “white” European) but I would be furious if I was so often grouped into a completely arbitrary race/ethnicity/skin color/country of birth based group and made assumptions about.
I have never met a single European who would differentiate between a Portuguese and a German based on their skin color. But if that Portuguese person moves to the US they are suddenly a PoC and a victim of white oppression.
Don’t count where? If a person looks like they are from a warmer region and speaks Portuguese - unless they object - they will be classified as a PoC by most people in the US. Maybe the government disagrees but that is relevant only in very few specific situations.
Also, if their parents moved to Brazil in the 1960s they somehow became a PoC? Does the actual ancestry matter or are we just assuming that everyone who is not from Europe is a PoC?
Americans don't consider Portuguese from Portugal to be non-white. Nobody calls Devin Nunes a POC, for example. They consider Brazilians to be people of color even if they are pureblood Portuguese, which is absurd. But that's how it works.
>Does the actual ancestry matter or are we just assuming that everyone who is not from Europe is a PoC?
Somehow the people who successfully colonized latin america get grouped in as marginalized because its too hard to do a color shade test or a blood quantum test.
Race isn't scientific. Even less so when you collapse the whole world into two races. White and not-white.
How is it describing it though? What does a white-looking immigrant Brazilian of European ancestry have in common with a Native American? How does labeling both as PoC address any inequality?
Funnily enough, according to official government racial classification scheme, the white looking immigrant Brazilian of European ancestry from your example is a non-Hispanic white, whereas native Spaniard immigrant from actual Spain is Hispanic white.
The federal government in its brilliance categorizes Afghani refugees as white and ineligible for, e.g., special small business loans, but categorizes Brahmin Indians as colored people eligible for such loans.
There is way more to race classification than the government classification. Talking to people, selecting the right choice in a questionnaire, applying for a job - no one is verifying person’s ancestry. If you are from Brazil you are a PoC by default, unless you object.
It’s ok to question any hiring discrimination and share personal observations about group behavior.
However I agree with you that some of the comments are close to being derogatory.
In my experience (as I have shared below) many Indians are more career oriented than, say, Europeans. No criticism here, I personally don’t care and love my Indian colleagues.
In my experience many Indians are very career oriented (mean that with no criticism). Ie they focus on promotions, career advancements, power consolidation, and not as much on work as the end goal in itself. Again, not criticizing, just an observation. In some cases I wish I was more career oriented too.
I disagree. This is just a different relationship with work - not better and not worse. Being focused on career advancements doesn’t make them (sorry for generalizing again) worse engineers or worse colleagues. Eg I don’t care about my IC level and enjoy coding, someone else cares more about their IC level and enjoys coding. Why should I care?
Huh I didn’t know that! So does it mean that websites internationalize even the salutations? Do they replace “Hi Joe” with “Good day Mr. Brown” in Germany?
It depends. If it started in an english speaking country, then more than likely not for a long time. If it started in a germanic one, it'd almost 100% be the last name.
It has less to do with where it started and more with the language and what field the business is operating in.
I was working for a UK steel supplier and they would address all their email recipients with their first name. We had to change this when internationalizing into German. If you want to sell to Germans you are much safer to use a more formal tone.
Slightly related to that is the formal and informal you that exists in a lot of languages.
I was also working for a German fashion startup mostly targeted at young women. In German it was fine to address everyone by first name and the informal you, but when translated the page to French, we could keep the first name but had to change the informal you to the formal one.
My understanding is that asking the sexual orientation question is illegal at least in some states. Personally never been asked that by any employer in CA.
Interesting, looks like some sexual orientations fall into the “underrepresented community” definition. I wonder how the gauge this type of diversity. Would it be “sufficient” if half of the board are bisexual white men?
Most of the time it does NOT mean skin color. Otherwise 'caucasian' wouldn't be there, a lot of latinos (or at least Brazilians) would be 'white' too, my wife (who basically reflects light) and myself included.
By the US federal definition, a lot of latinos are white. Hispanic/Latino is classified as an "ethnicity" not a "race" so you can be e.g. white/latino or native-american/latino
> Hispanic/Latino is classified as an “ethnicity” not a “race”
Hispanic/Latino (and not-Hispanic/Latino) are the only ethnicities in that context, and it exists specifically to enable categorization that reflects the social construction of Whiteness at the time it was created while not obviously breaking the (bogus, in any case) biological rationale for the construction of “racial” categories, which is why most categorizations of data using that ethnicity treat Hispanic/Latino as another bucket alongside the racial buckets, from which everything of either White or every race (usage differs) is transferred if Hispanic/Latino ethnicity is also indicated, leaving the effected race buckets with only the non-Hispanic/Latino elements.
Don't they call you "white hispanic"? As far as I know they just have white, black, native american and asian in the main race categories, then you might add "hispanic black" or "hispanic white" to those two, but hispanic isn't a separate category.
Brazilians don't really associate themselves with the term "hispanic" given the country was colonized by Portugal, not Spain... and it's hard to argue the term is a drop-in replacement for "Latin American" when Brazil represents ~50% of LatAm population
I'm talking about how USA sees race and the forms you fill in there, not reality of human ancestry. USA has a very antiquated view on race, but that is the legal definition so that is what we talk about when we are talking about race with respect to US employment laws.
Hard to be hispanic when I'm 50% German, 25% Italian, 25% Portuguese (in terms of my grandparents/grand-grandparents). Where I'm from in Brazil, it's very common for people to be eligible for getting Italian and German citizenships (wife and myself included)
I'm in Canada, which I think it's similar. I'm not sure, but I would guess yes, because Latinos are considered PoC, independently of actual skin colour, AFAIK. If I say to anyone that I'm white, they'll think I'm wrong, because of accent+name
It sounds more and more like in the US (and, perhaps, in Canada too) people are being divided into essentially 2 categories: white and non-white. But to complicate things, people with identical ancestry and of identical skin color can be considered white or non-white based on the country of their birth.
Meanwhile, us Slavs, who were genocided 80 years ago for not being ‘Aryan’ enough, and not even considered ‘white’ 100 years ago are lumped in with WASPs…
I’m committed to anti racism but the US approach is charlatanism all the way down. The esteemed Dr King and Mr X would be rolling in their graves.
You should know that anti-racism means a specific thing, it's been co opted by a certain ideology. The rest of your comment attests that you do not ascribe to that ideology so you may want to update your nonclem to just "against racism"
Technically there are more options, I agree. Practically very often these options are divided into whites (includes Asians) and people of color (includes Latinos but blacks have priority).
> Most of the time in the US race means skin color.
No, it doesn’t. In fact, most of the time in the US, “skin color” is code for race/ethnicity. Light-skinned Black people, White non-Hispanics, mostly-White Hispanics, Native Americans, and Asians can have very similar or even identical literal skin colors; but the Black person is still Black, the Whites are still White (except maybe the Hispanic ones), and the rest are neither White nor Black.
I don't mean to be rude, but I suspect by "MLK's values" you mean the sentence "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character." as interpreted to mean support for racial neutrality and opposition to the use of racial categories in programmatic decision making.
It's fine for that to be the thing you believe in, but that is not a reasonable interpretation of "MLK's values". MLK scholars, his contemporaries he worked with, and his successors within his organizations would nearly categorically reject your characterization of that being his values. Like this is an entire area of academic study: what MLK said, thought, and wanted done.
Again, it's fine to conclude that MLK has it wrong and the left is wrong about race and social justice warriors etc. etc. etc. I don't think you should be made to care about what MLK thought or to study him. I am not interested in telling you you are right or wrong about any policy issue. It's just incredibly flip to engage so superficially with a guy who left such a voluminous archive of writing and thought and use him as a prop in the argument. I think if you are going to assert yourself as understanding what his values were, you owe it to him to spend a lot more time and effort trying to understand what they were.
This is sort of the equivalent of thinking you understand Nietzsche to be anti-religious because you half-remember the quote "God is dead" and although you've never read him you feel confident you know what it means.
You apparently have never read or listened to more than the "I have a dream" speech. King was very much about anti-racism, which is best termed "anti-racism". It's not sufficient to not add racism to the world, you should seek to counter it. And no, that's not the same thing as being racist in another direction. If you can't tell the difference, maybe you should go study what MLK actually said.
On the other hand, King's notorious speech sounds absolutely nothing like Kendi or other current anti-racists, so evidently there's quite a gap between the two stances, and it's dishonest to deny it.
That speech is just one of many. But anyway, MLK was at the forefront of anti-racism 60 years ago; it would be more alarming if there weren't a gap between him and the current vanguard.
Curious why you described the speech as “notorious” rather than “famous”?
Why are you conflating interpersonal racism with systemic? Both exist. If a white person is racist towards a black person do you call that racial bias? If you do, you are just replacing the established definition of racism, not addressing the phenomenon itself.
Because the suffix "ism" doesn't really refer to interpersonal things. It connotes a system.
Some may not agree with the distinction, but the reality that racial bias without power and a system behind it is not really the same thing. Which is why there is not equivalent to things like the "n" word for white people.
I don't know that I agree with everything you're trying to get at, but shouldn't it just be called "racism". The term reverse-racism seems nonsensical. The term itself seems racist, implying that you can't be racist toward certain races. You can only be "reverse-racist".
"Racism" can mean interpersonal ("I don't like black people") or it can mean systemic ("society disadvantages black people"), and lots of people in social studies focus on the latter. Because there's not really any systemic disadvantage to being white, that focus on the latter effectively defines racism against white people as non-existent (there's not systemic racism against white people, so there's not "racism" against white people). Given that, "racism against white people" is definitionally not "racism", hence "reverse racism".
Of course there are multiple steps in there which can be criticized, but within the set of terms they've defined, it makes the language less ambiguous. It's like how astronomy often defines "metals" as "anything bigger than helium". The terms have a useful meaning in the proper context.
Racism by default means interpersonal racism. That’s why when we talk about systemic racism we add this qualifier.
There might not be systemic anti-white racism in the US but there is certainly interpersonal racism against whites in the US. Insisting on dismissing that is not helpful to literally anyone: whites or people of color.
Which of MLK's values did we once hold that we've now abandoned?
Anti capitalism and pro economic redistribution?
> The evils of capitalism are as real as the evils of militarism and racism. The problems of racial injustice and economic injustice cannot be solved without a radical redistribution of political and economic power. [1]
That white people should radically support racial justice?
> I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice. [2]
That riots are understandable in the face of oppression?
> But it is not enough for me to stand before you tonight and condemn riots. It would be morally irresponsible for me to do that without, at the same time, condemning the contingent, intolerable conditions that exist in our society. These conditions are the things that cause individuals to feel that they have no other alternative than to engage in violent rebellions to get attention. And I must say tonight that a riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it America has failed to hear?...It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice and humanity. [3]
The fact is that MLK was a radical who was opposed by most white people. When he died, 75% of the American public disliked him. It's only in retrospect that conservatives have tried to whitewash his legacy, pretending to support racial progress while opposing the very things he stood for.
“I have a Dream” was delivered to an audience of a quarter million and televised to millions more and has continued to be a cornerstone of public school education at least where I grew up where we would listen to the audio and later stream the video. That’s the breakthrough hit.
We don’t treasure everything even about the people we like. MLK was a man, and therefore it is safe to assume a complicated person who developed and changed his beliefs a lot throughout his life. When he seized the opportunity to deliver a speech to the nation, it wasn’t “Letter from Birmingham Jail” and it wasn’t sympathy for rioters, it was “I Have a Dream”.
Do you see the implications of what you’re saying? The reason that speech is cherry-picked to be the cornerstone of public school education — the reason it’s the “breakthrough hit” — is that it allows people to avoid confronting the radical and uncomfortable aspects of MLK’s demands.
This is an example of survivorship bias. MLK obviously didn’t anticipate when he made the “I Have A Dream” speech that he would have only a few more years to live. It’s seen as representative not because he thought it was a unique opportunity to make an impact, but because it’s what people chose to highlight once he was gone.
> Do you see the implications of what you’re saying?
Yes.
> The reason that speech is cherry-picked to be the cornerstone of public school education — the reason it’s the “breakthrough hit” — is that it allows people to avoid confronting the radical and uncomfortable aspects of MLK’s demands.
Sure it’s cherry picked, but it was also the message he delivered with the most weight to the largest audience with the largest resonance to that audience that we valued enough to continue carrying forward.
We don’t carry forward every message by every person, and we don’t carry forward every message for every person we do carry messages forward for. This was what he had to say that we valued the most.
> This is an example of survivorship bias. MLK obviously didn’t anticipate when he made the “I Have A Dream” speech that he would have only a few more years to live.
It’s not just survivorship bias though. This was the culmination of the March on Washington. It was kind of a big deal. You have the biggest live audience you can ever expect to have in your lifetime, even if you’re Martin Luther King Jr, so what do you think he should have said instead with the fantastic advantage of hindsight that you possess? Nowadays we can post on YouTube and get tens of thousands of hits every day as long as we’re better than mediocre. Limited opportunities for engagement force you to focus on what you think is most important to say at that moment.
> Sure it’s cherry picked, but it was also the message he delivered with the most weight to the largest audience with the largest resonance to that audience that we valued enough to continue carrying forward.
I agree, but I don’t think it reflects particularly well on the audience! Like, carry this one step further. Why is this the message that resonated with everyone? Why not white moderates being the stumbling block to racial justice, or capitalism being evil?
I’ll give you a hint: it’s not because people actually want or care about racial equality.
> You have the biggest live audience you can ever expect to have in your lifetime, even if you’re Martin Luther King Jr, so what do you think he should have said instead with the fantastic advantage of hindsight that you possess?
I have to imagine that, had he seen this future, he would not have said the line about judging people by the content of their character, because the result has been the co-opting of his image to undermine everything he stood for. Like, people will literally use that quote to argue that MLK would have opposed affirmative action, when the exact opposite is true.
> I agree, but I don’t think it reflects particularly well on the audience! Like, carry this one step further. Why is this the message that resonated with everyone? Why not white moderates being the stumbling block to racial justice, or capitalism being evil?
I can think of several reasons:
1. It was sincere.
2. It was likely the only speech anyone had ever seen from MLK, statistically speaking. It’s not like they were serialized.
3. It was correct. If we are to judge people at all, we should do so on the basis of their character, not the color of the skin. One takes consideration and trust in one’s own judgment, the other you only need at least one working eye for.
4. It was non-confrontational: “I have a Dream” not “I have a Problem”.
5. It was the culmination of the 1963 March on Washington. Marching on Washington wasn’t exactly a common affair back then: it drew attention, as it was designed to.
6. It was the speech he chose to deliver to the largest audience he had ever had in his life and was likely to ever have as far as he knew. Basically in effect “do or die” for at least that set of participants. If it had been a failure, there were no take-backsies, no second chances, no just trying again next year. So the right message, at the right time, delivered to everyone he could to try and compel them to at least meet in the middle.
I mean, he could have said something else, but he also probably wouldn’t have been as effective and I probably wouldn’t have learned about him in school. Maybe you have a case to make that it would have been better that way.
> I have to imagine that, had he seen this future, he would not have said the line about judging people by the content of their character, because the result has been the co-opting of his image to undermine everything he stood for. Like, people will literally use that quote to argue that MLK would have opposed affirmative action, when the exact opposite is true.
Best line in the speech and you would want him to gut it! Who knows, maybe with foresight that matched your hindsight he would have. The problem isn’t that he said it, the problem you have is that people are citing that specific passage to make an argument about what his position would be.
He’s dead, and has been for a long time. He doesn’t have any arguments to make anymore, not against capitalism and not for affirmative action and not about how the moderate whites in his opinion just might on a bad day need some non-non-violent direct action shaped suspiciously like the good Reverend’s boot. The tradeoff against people misrepresenting his words to argue against something he probably would support decades into the future is that he got to be persuasive when he needed to be persuasive, but feel free to hop in the TARDIS and tell him that his needs at the time are less significant than your needs in the potential future. Only the living get to keep arguing, for everyone else the case is submitted.
I have a dream in which we are all marathon winners. We are done running. We have medals and confetti and cake. It’s a joyous time, and whether we finished the race in four hours or fourteen hours doesn’t matter, because we have all finished it. That’s my dream!
Right now, though, right now some of us are moving at a good pace, while others aren’t even moving in the right direction. Some of us are incapable of moving on our own. Others are being held back. Helping those who are struggling most right now makes sense, right?
You wouldn’t interrupt a marathon to object that encouraging the slowest runner isn’t fair, since the dream is for everybody to have a medal and cake.
Agreed. The dream is for everyone to have a medal and cake. Even for disadvantaged while people in the US, who are not “colonizers” or some lucky “white privilege” beneficiaries.
I have never met a single European who would differentiate between a Portuguese and a German based on their skin color. But if that Portuguese person moves to the US they are suddenly a PoC and a victim of white oppression.