09-24-2003, 12:48 PM
OK, I'll put on my serious hat for this one.
My mother was born in Morocco. It's an arab country (though she's Jewish...it's a long story) in Africa. Does this make me part African-American? No, not in the slightest. Similarly, I once heard Lennox Lewis (heavyweight boxing title holder) refered to as an African-American. This isn't true because, in case you don't know, he is British. He was born in England and lives there most of the year.
I think the politically correct terms we use now to cover race are actually worse than the old ones...but that's a discussion for another time. Still we like to be able to group people together, based on skin color, or where they lived, or what language they speak. This isn't the case so much anymore.
It used to be that this was necessary because people of a certain ethnicity stayed in cirlces mainly of their own, black people wiht balck people, Russian people with Russian people, Chinese with Chinese, etc. It's been about 100 years and now what do we have, I just had a daughter with my girlfriend who's family was born in Taiwan. We don't get too many weird looks when we walk down the street because it's not strange to see interracial couples anymore.
I think as a society, we're (very slowly) getting away from the need to put people into groups based on what they look like. I know it's still not a place where people will "not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character" but I do think it's getting closer. So to get ack to Kid's original question, what is race, I think it's a group society uses because we like things to be neat and orderly but our society is slowly growing out of that need and one day it may be an obsolete idea.
My mother was born in Morocco. It's an arab country (though she's Jewish...it's a long story) in Africa. Does this make me part African-American? No, not in the slightest. Similarly, I once heard Lennox Lewis (heavyweight boxing title holder) refered to as an African-American. This isn't true because, in case you don't know, he is British. He was born in England and lives there most of the year.
I think the politically correct terms we use now to cover race are actually worse than the old ones...but that's a discussion for another time. Still we like to be able to group people together, based on skin color, or where they lived, or what language they speak. This isn't the case so much anymore.
It used to be that this was necessary because people of a certain ethnicity stayed in cirlces mainly of their own, black people wiht balck people, Russian people with Russian people, Chinese with Chinese, etc. It's been about 100 years and now what do we have, I just had a daughter with my girlfriend who's family was born in Taiwan. We don't get too many weird looks when we walk down the street because it's not strange to see interracial couples anymore.
I think as a society, we're (very slowly) getting away from the need to put people into groups based on what they look like. I know it's still not a place where people will "not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character" but I do think it's getting closer. So to get ack to Kid's original question, what is race, I think it's a group society uses because we like things to be neat and orderly but our society is slowly growing out of that need and one day it may be an obsolete idea.
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Your pocket Bible will stop an assailant's bullet, but not before it passes through four innocent bystanders, a school-bus gas tank, and your genitals.
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Your pocket Bible will stop an assailant's bullet, but not before it passes through four innocent bystanders, a school-bus gas tank, and your genitals.