srothstein wrote: ↑Sun Feb 21, 2021 12:22 am
Deitz83 wrote: ↑Sat Feb 20, 2021 9:33 pmBlack people never had an opportunity to pick anything. Color was determined by the slave owner. My daughter is married to a white german. My grand kids will always be black.
I do understand what you are saying about the Black people never got to choose, and that was true until about 50 years ago. I can't dispute what the slave owner said because there is no record of that, but the law in many of the Southern states used to say that any person with at least 1/8th Black blood was considered Black.
I have always wondered how that works if a person has exactly one Black and one White parent, like my granddaughter or President Obama. What makes them more Black than White? In some cases, such as Obama and my great-nephew, they seem to have had much stronger Black genes because they look more Black than White. In my granddaughter's case, about the only "Black" person who looks more White than her is Rachel Dolezal (if I spelled it right and anyone remembers her case - I saw she made the news again recently so I must not be the only one). If my granddaughter claimed to be Black, she would probably get laughed at more than Warren claiming to be an Indian.
Kamala Harris' case is much more interesting. Since she is a mixture of Black and Asian, she has dark skin no matter what. I think she could claim to be Indian (as in Asian Indian) from her mother or Black from her father and be making an honest statement unless multi-racial had also been given as an option. And I do think she is choosing to be what favors her most politically, because she has made some ridiculous (at least to me) statements about it. The one that sticks in my mind is how her Indian mother raised her as a single mother and raised her to be a strong Black woman. Either her mother was prejudiced against her because of her father's race, or her mother recognized where the politics would pay of, or Harris is lying (my personal belief).
Obviously, this whole matter is based in deeply seated prejudices that we need to work on ending. I do not think I am too unusual in not caring what race a person is, but caring more about their attitudes. I could be wrong on that, but I feel that any time someone claims to be Afro-American, Hispanic-American, Asian-American or any other hyphenated American then they are saying they are not a real American. You may not be able to stop other people from trying to marginalize you, but you do not have to buy into it and marginalize yourself.
My belief is that the way to end discrimination is to stop all classification and record keeping of that type. Then we force the government, at every level, to treat every person the same no matter what. I don't care if they are White, Black, Asian, Jewish, Gay, Transgender, or anything else, the government MUST treat every person equally. The only two demarcation lines that are acceptable are citizenship may be required for certain things like voting, and having reached the age of majority to be classified as an adult. But that also requires we only have ONE age for that demarcation point. No more you have to be 18 to vote but 21 to drink kind of stuff. If you are 18 (if that is the age we choose) you can do anything you want that any other citizen can do. And if you are not an adult, you are not an adult and cannot make those types of decisions, which includes voting, drinking, having sex, dropping out of school, getting married, enlisting, going to adult jail, etc.
