Gurgen wrote:
People who are hungry for representation can take comfort in the fact that human beings all over the world are 99.9% genetically identical and classifications based on non-existing notions like "race" or existing differences like skin colour are completely meaningless.
Gurgen, it’s great to have this idealist view from sociology 101, but that is not our lived experience. And it is not choices that minorities make. They just go through it everyday. Growing up in a largely Black Country in Africa, I did not have to think to think about being black until my late teenage years when I first moved to the USA. It was on my second day there that I became consciously aware that I was black, when I was lost and looking for directions in a pre-GPS world, and white women were actively crossing the street to get away from me. Since then, I’ve seen it all. From being followed around at close quarters in gas stations, having arguments with police about having to move my car when nobody else is targeted. That’s the petty stuff. The more obscene acts I’ve seen committed against others. And then I myself have dealt with issues at a much more personal level, the kinds of things that you will never hear in a black lives matter march, but these are the things that shape your life daily as they impact your most important interactions.
In terms of the more obscene things you see: first day moving into San Francisco and seeing a man who looks like me standing in the street suddenly surrounded by police cars and hassled with the following conversation “yo, why you bothering me?”, “if you walk around with no shirt and a Thug Life tattoo, of course we are going to want to talk to you”. I hung around. There was no crime to speak of.
On a more personal note: every time you date a white girl it’s fine until you deal with their parents, usually their mothers. I’ve heard everything from don’t visit him in Africa, it’s not safe, to seeing mothers going on actual hunger strike and admonishing their daughters for dating men who will beat them because that’s what black men do. Or the best “we didn’t send you to XYZ universities so you could throw it all away and date a black”. Not that I care about such pedigree for classifying people anyway, but you sit there thinking, okay, my college is better anyway you slice it. However, you never use that retort, because you do not want to feed classist politics.
I could write a book. And that’s just a sliver of living in the US. Everyday is like that. And I was somebody on the way to being decently well off in that country, certainly no 1 per center but not wanting for anything. Imagine what it’s like for people like the gentleman stopped needlessly in San Francisco. How do you think he will take to your 99% aspiration that race is meaningless when the people around him aren’t espousing it?
