People may claim they want to dismantle hierarchies but mostly they want to overturn the hierarchy so they're on top and their enemies on the bottom and/or they want to be the ones who create and police the hierarchies.
But you can't get to love from hate, you can't get to creation from destruction, and promoting racial division doesn't achieve racial harmony.
The American liberal obsession with race and racial classification (especially applying a moral weight to skin color) may have served some purpose forty or fifty years ago, but it's now devolved into a creepy fetish of sacralized tokenism.
"The racialization of the world has to be the most unexpected result of the anti-discrimination battle of the last half-century. It has ensured that the battle continuously recreates the curse from which it is trying to break free." Pascal Bruckner
Yabbut... the racialization of the world was entirely predictable (except perhaps to Pascal who perhaps never watched the movie, The Blob).
As soon as you establish category rules (in this case race category) then it guarantees the invention of Category Tracking Bureaucracies. And the endless creation of Category Tracking Bureaucracies guarantees the concomitant invention of Category Tracking Tools, Tallies, Trends, Forms, Summaries, Annual Reports, Quarterly Updates, Federal Reporting REquirements, et al. Wait 50-60 years and you have a Gigantic and Passionately Self-Righteous Bureaucratic Blob which has expanded to fill any and every space available at the local, state, and national levels. Millions of employees who live, breathe and eat 'race categories'.
This Blob, in turn, depends existentially upon the endless racialization of the world. Without such a racialization (and anti-racialization! per Kendi) the Blob withers and dies....and, as Steve McQueen quickly learned back in 1958, the Blob will do anything in order to continue to survive.
Pascal should have known that.
That's why, as long as the Race Bureaucracy exists (and it's deeply embedded in almost everything) we will never be a post-racial society.
Eli, perhaps you should have drawn a separate box , called it mosaic and checked that. Jack is perhaps t he perfect example of the stupidity of the question because no.rules are specified for multi racial kids nor does the question provide guidance about how many generations are to be taken into account in determining one's race ( the generational question of course being used a little less than 100 years ago by a nation dedicated to identity politics)
Eli, you say, "My father is black and my mother is Jewish and I thought which side is the primary race? My son Jack is black, Jewish, white, Native American, and, through his mother, Mexican." And all those things are facts. But you're only going 2 generations back.
20 generations back and you have over 2M directly bloodline ancestors. And the truth is, we (you, any of us) don't know the names of probably 99.9% of those 2M. So what was their racial make-up? We have no idea. Heck, go just 4 generations back and we have 30 cumulative direct bloodline ancestors. Most of us can't name half of them, let alone identify where they lived, what they did, or what their various mix of ethnicities might be.
The whole idea that any of us know our 'primary' or 'secondary' race when our grasp of personal history is so exceedingly superficial is simply pathetic. And it is of interest only to those Kafkaesque Bureaucrats who pride themselves on counting whatever can be counted no matter how fallacious those counts might be.
Outside 'The Castle' no one really cares; nor should they.
"I was not willing to cost or delay Jack his education over a box so I checked black. That was how Jack became black."
Why didn't you simply check white? Jack's obviously far more white than "black" anyway (especially since his paternal grandfather is only HALF black). It would have been a nice middle finger to the black and liberal bureaucrats who wanted to force a "race" on your child.
People may claim they want to dismantle hierarchies but mostly they want to overturn the hierarchy so they're on top and their enemies on the bottom and/or they want to be the ones who create and police the hierarchies.
But you can't get to love from hate, you can't get to creation from destruction, and promoting racial division doesn't achieve racial harmony.
The American liberal obsession with race and racial classification (especially applying a moral weight to skin color) may have served some purpose forty or fifty years ago, but it's now devolved into a creepy fetish of sacralized tokenism.
"The racialization of the world has to be the most unexpected result of the anti-discrimination battle of the last half-century. It has ensured that the battle continuously recreates the curse from which it is trying to break free." Pascal Bruckner
Yabbut... the racialization of the world was entirely predictable (except perhaps to Pascal who perhaps never watched the movie, The Blob).
As soon as you establish category rules (in this case race category) then it guarantees the invention of Category Tracking Bureaucracies. And the endless creation of Category Tracking Bureaucracies guarantees the concomitant invention of Category Tracking Tools, Tallies, Trends, Forms, Summaries, Annual Reports, Quarterly Updates, Federal Reporting REquirements, et al. Wait 50-60 years and you have a Gigantic and Passionately Self-Righteous Bureaucratic Blob which has expanded to fill any and every space available at the local, state, and national levels. Millions of employees who live, breathe and eat 'race categories'.
This Blob, in turn, depends existentially upon the endless racialization of the world. Without such a racialization (and anti-racialization! per Kendi) the Blob withers and dies....and, as Steve McQueen quickly learned back in 1958, the Blob will do anything in order to continue to survive.
Pascal should have known that.
That's why, as long as the Race Bureaucracy exists (and it's deeply embedded in almost everything) we will never be a post-racial society.
Eli, perhaps you should have drawn a separate box , called it mosaic and checked that. Jack is perhaps t he perfect example of the stupidity of the question because no.rules are specified for multi racial kids nor does the question provide guidance about how many generations are to be taken into account in determining one's race ( the generational question of course being used a little less than 100 years ago by a nation dedicated to identity politics)
The democratic party has a perfect record of putting institutional racism at the center of its existence.
Eli, you say, "My father is black and my mother is Jewish and I thought which side is the primary race? My son Jack is black, Jewish, white, Native American, and, through his mother, Mexican." And all those things are facts. But you're only going 2 generations back.
20 generations back and you have over 2M directly bloodline ancestors. And the truth is, we (you, any of us) don't know the names of probably 99.9% of those 2M. So what was their racial make-up? We have no idea. Heck, go just 4 generations back and we have 30 cumulative direct bloodline ancestors. Most of us can't name half of them, let alone identify where they lived, what they did, or what their various mix of ethnicities might be.
The whole idea that any of us know our 'primary' or 'secondary' race when our grasp of personal history is so exceedingly superficial is simply pathetic. And it is of interest only to those Kafkaesque Bureaucrats who pride themselves on counting whatever can be counted no matter how fallacious those counts might be.
Outside 'The Castle' no one really cares; nor should they.
"I was not willing to cost or delay Jack his education over a box so I checked black. That was how Jack became black."
Why didn't you simply check white? Jack's obviously far more white than "black" anyway (especially since his paternal grandfather is only HALF black). It would have been a nice middle finger to the black and liberal bureaucrats who wanted to force a "race" on your child.
forwarded to so many friends dealing with the same issue.
I so enjoyed this movie. I’m glad more people will get to see it!