Or to America of the past where there were terms for different degrees of "white blood" in a slave. And the idea of "passing as white" if you were "really black" but say only a sixteenth and thus "looked white".
I think race as we use it has many elements. There is the issue of identity, which race you identify with. There is also the issue of how you are perceived. If people look at you and think "white" your experiences will be different than if people look at you and think "black". Then there is also the issue of culture. Then there is the issue of genetic heritage... the racial divisions we make are kinda crap from that perspective, but there are some medical things known to be correlated with race, and if you're working out what medical care to have with your doctor then you care a lot more about the genetics (and maybe the culture if environmental effects are relevant...).
There may be other issues as well. but that's what comes to mind. I actually first saw listings like that breaking down the components of an identity using categories like that for sexuality, but I think it can apply to a lot of ways in which we loabel people.
We think the labels are simple, but they never are.
But then, I still am not sure what answer to give if someone asks me if I'm Jewish, since Jewish is used to mean multiple things.
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Date: 2008-11-25 02:23 am (UTC)I think race as we use it has many elements. There is the issue of identity, which race you identify with. There is also the issue of how you are perceived. If people look at you and think "white" your experiences will be different than if people look at you and think "black". Then there is also the issue of culture. Then there is the issue of genetic heritage... the racial divisions we make are kinda crap from that perspective, but there are some medical things known to be correlated with race, and if you're working out what medical care to have with your doctor then you care a lot more about the genetics (and maybe the culture if environmental effects are relevant...).
There may be other issues as well. but that's what comes to mind. I actually first saw listings like that breaking down the components of an identity using categories like that for sexuality, but I think it can apply to a lot of ways in which we loabel people.
We think the labels are simple, but they never are.
But then, I still am not sure what answer to give if someone asks me if I'm Jewish, since Jewish is used to mean multiple things.