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submitted 2 weeks ago* (last edited 1 week ago) by Social_Discussion@lemm.ee to c/nostupidquestions@lemmy.world

Hey there, I was wondering if I'm the only one who feels like this or not.

So I grew up thinking that we people all look different and never had a concept of something such as "white" and "black" people.

But especially in the last years I noticed more and more that a lot of people make such a big thing out of whether someone is "black" or "white" and what their ethnicity is.

It feels like it's to the point where they make this define their core identity as if it's very relevant how people look and how bright/dark their skin is as if this changes their personality.

It's like so many of these people constantly bring this up to the point where it's brainwashing and they literally even use racial slur as slang that was used in the past to devalue and enslave people based on their skin tone.

Since I experienced this it made me very uncomfortable since I never had this concept before and now I constantly have to obsessively think about it and feel like it's manipulating me and these people still bring it up all the time.

I think this is driving me insane cause I never would think about humans so strongly because of their skin or something since it simply isn't relevant and it just feels wrong but I can't escape it since so many people continue to make such a big deal out of it.


Edit: To the people saying people have different advantages because of their skin, I'm fully aware of that and I wasn't intending to debate that. My question was primarily about if other people have the same uncomfortable feeling that many people differentiate between people based on their skin and make such a big deal out of it (so more a personal feelings question than a generale debate about why it exists) because imo in a healthy society this shouldn't be the case. But in my opinion the fact that we continue this behaviour instead of changing it is the exact reason we have racism and the issues of inequality based on someone's skin in the first place. We need to start to change at some place and not just give up on it. If we continue to see people as "black" or "white" instead of just seeing them as "people" and only look at the past we will never end this issue. Ignorance is certainly not the solution. I found these videos where I think Elon Musk and Morgan Freeman are pretty much hitting the nail on the head.

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[-] SplooshArmstrong@lemmynsfw.com 3 points 2 weeks ago

Though not "black" and "white", I know that some black people do not like being considered African American. There is a difference between someone who has family come over through slave trade, and someone who came to America willingly from Africa.

I can understand why they might feel that way, they had family sold into slavery by others in their countries. They've lived on unable to express themselves for generations, and are culturally different from people from their ancestors homelands.

So being black and calling them African American may not acknowledge what they see as clear differences between the two.

[-] Social_Discussion@lemm.ee -3 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

This reminds me of this interview of Elon Musk and Don Lemmon where I think Elon is hitting the nail on the head. And the irony being Elon is more African American than Don Lemon since Elon actually is African and Don just is American.

Here Morgan Freeman is saying the same thing.

[-] bear@lemmynsfw.com 2 points 2 weeks ago

You're right. Identity politics is itself what fractures the civil polity, working against creating real opportunities for ending marginalization, and perpetuating that marginalization through affirmations of difference.

[-] RegalPotoo@lemmy.world 1 points 2 weeks ago

I don't have a good answer to your question, but to me "white" as an ethnicity makes about as much sense as "Christian" does as a religious description - they both cover such a wide range of backgrounds and beliefs to be essentially useless. Do a Catholic, a baptist and a modern evangelical actually believe the same things beyond how they frame those beliefs?

To my mind, same goes for ethnicity - "white" can mean anything from the baltics to western Europe to north America, and to my mind, is kinda racist. It lumps people from as diverse places as Ireland and Russia together purely based on appearances. I get "black" as a self-selected descriptor of people who do have a big cultural touch-point in common - our ancestors were enslaved, brought here against our will, and we still feel the impacts of that even if our ancestors themselves were from a wide background.

I guess "white" is an easy antonym to "black", but then that still comes back to a racist tint - "we are white because we aren't Them" - and lumps in people who have nothing to do with the lasting impact of slavery in the US into this "oppressor vs oppressed" false dichotomy.

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this post was submitted on 04 Dec 2024
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