no more hate, already

[chhotii]

I am very dismayed to hear reports of anti-black backlash because of Prop 8's passage. Apparently some misguided people are blaming "black people", collectively, for Prop 8. This is wrong: the collective one might refer to as "black people" is not a thing, ontologically. I'd hesitate to even call "black people" a category-- too fuzzy. The noun phase "black people" is an abstraction. Many individual people exist, and some of them are more-or-less black*. Sure, there's some statistical correlation between blackness and voting on Prop 8, which is relevant only to thinking about political strategies. But to translate from the statistical mean of a fuzzy collective to any one individual, and hate the individual, that's racism. That is the essence, the definition of racism. Racist assholes need to shut the fuck up.

This is different from blaming a collective such as Mormons, Republicans, or Orange County. These are collections of individuals who have more or less chosen to belong to these groups. Yeah, someone might have been born in Orange County or to a Mormon family-- but if there's still where they were born at voting age, at least they weren't repelled enough to bolt. Black people stay as black as everyone else perceives them, regardless of how they feel about Prop 8, oversized pants, or whatever.

* more-or-less black: I love how having a biracial individual so prominent in the news demonstrates to the world something I've been muttering to myself about for a long time: the silliness of treating "race" as categories with crisp boundaries. (Or any boundaries at all.) Since the election we've been having silly fun discussions at home such as "who is more Black, Barack Obama or Colin Powell?"

Comments

I share your dismay

[blipvert.livejournal.com]

I am astounded and appalled that some people would be open minded enough to support same-sex marriage yet fail to grasp this rather glaring racist fallacy. I assume it is a very, very small subset, who will hopefully receive emergency clue-insertion before they cause too much more harm.

Re: I share your dismay

[chhotii.livejournal.com]

I sure do hope so (about both the subset being very very small, and the emergency clue-insertion).

[gosling.livejournal.com]

This.