What do you make of all the race and gender questions on fluther lately?

Wis. people.

Questions seem to come in cycles. I’m just glad we aren’t getting all the “Could I be pregnant” questions that are happening on Askville right now.

Flutherers seem to be intelligent enough to understand birth control, although they may not understand who they are yet.

I don’t know about the other jellies, but I’ve been feeling like I haven’t been asking good questions, so I’ve been trying to come up with some good ones. Also, I have to ask them when I think of them or else I’ll forget.

And maybe people are getting sick of all the sex questions.

I think the cycles of similar questions is due to human nature.

When Ebay was just taking off a few years back it was a great place for an artist to self-represent and sell.

There were a lot of artists of all levels and many would take their painting inspiration from scanning what had sold. Thus if I painted a toad on a block wall and it sold within a day or two there would be at least 2–4 paintings posted of frogs on block walls.

I think Fluther has a similar following of folks who are inspired to ask similar questions from ones posted.

It is a bit tedious though

@Darwin lol4rl.

I don’t think we should be afraid of race questions. Didn’t our President ask us to open a dialog about race? I know that I have a lot of confusing feelings. I grew up with a lot of “white guilt.” Even though I was a child, I felt guilty for the sins of my ancestors. My heroes were Harriet Tubman and George Washington Carver. I read Black Like Me, and then heard that the Black community was angry at the guy for “posing” even though he brought a glimpse of what Black people were going through to white people. I read all these books in Grade School.
I am still confused about how I am supposed to deal with these “white guilt” feelings and feel like I still don’t have a good understanding of how to make myself color blind and, at the same time, acknowledge the pain and injustice that prevails today. Dialog is good. Maybe I will understand better if we are not afraid to talk.

Is Jewish a race, or just a religion?

@Zen ; I think Hebrew or Israeli is the race, and Jewish is the religion. Someone correct me if I’m wrong.

Hebrew is a language, like English. Israeli is a nationality, like American.

Found something interesting

Are Jews a Race?
In the 1980s, the United States Supreme Court ruled that Jews are a race, at least for purposes of certain anti-discrimination laws. Their reasoning: at the time these laws were passed, people routinely spoke of the “Jewish race” or the “Italian race” as well as the “Negro race,” so that is what the legislators intended to protect.

But many Jews were deeply offended by that decision, offended by any hint that Jews could be considered a race. The idea of Jews as a race brings to mind nightmarish visions of Nazi Germany, where Jews were declared to be not just a race, but an inferior race that had to be rounded up into ghettos and exterminated like vermin.

But setting aside the emotional issues, Jews are clearly not a race.

Race is a genetic distinction, and refers to people with shared ancestry and shared genetic traits. You can’t change your race; it’s in your DNA. I could never become black or Asian no matter how much I might want to.

Common ancestry is not required to be a Jew. Many Jews worldwide share common ancestry, as shown by genetic research; however, you can be a Jew without sharing this common ancestry, for example, by converting. Thus, although I could never become black or Asian, blacks and Asians have become Jews (Sammy Davis Jr. and Connie Chung).

relevant.

There’s the whole “cyclical nature of questions” explanation that probably holds some water, but I wonder if a certain type of question begets more of that type of questions. I mean for a while we had quite a spate of “God” questions that seemed to be feeding off one another. Now it seems a couple of questions about gender and race opened the floodgates for many more. I guess it is interesting for a bit, then it degenerates into posts going over the same things again and again. What’s worse is when people run out of useful things to say and resort to flaming in order to stay involved in a thread.

“Sorry everytime I see supermouse crafting…

I’m sorry, did I say that out loud?

Only Ben or Andrew could confirm this for sure, but didn’t we get a lot of lot of gender and sex questions last spring too? Maybe this particular cycle is seasonal.

@phoenix Spring fever perhaps? Great Theory!

@Judi Where’d ya go?

@Zen site note: Could a person who doesn’t follow Judaism, who doesn’t speak Hebrew and who wasn’t born in Israel, but who’s ancestry all goes back to Judah and Israel consider himself or herself Jewish?

I am waiting for @Zen to answer @phoenyx question!

@phoenyx Yes. Why? Cuz Judaism (being Jewish, i.e.) is what you consider your religion, and Judaism has (at least) three main classifications: Reform (do what you want, even a woman can be a Rabbi!) Conservative, (The Orthodox will consider you a Goy, but you’ll feel more connected to God than the Reform Jew, but I digress) and the Orthdox. who believe in Bill Gates and the west bank.

Gender questions: maybe spring actually does affect human organisms! Seems to affect all of the other species :)

Questions do beget similar questions. Sometimes it’s because you learn a little bit about something in one, and want to explore the topic deeper in another. Sometimes it’s just a lack of originality.

I actually appreciate the recent flow of questions dealing with race.

Hey @squirbel – I’ll race ya to the buffet over there >>>>>>>>>>>>- they’re serving coffee cake.

people just want to start fights. and whats more bitter than race wars?

:O

you’re on!

@squirbel You have missed a few. Your contibution would have been very enlightening.

Can’t speak for anyone else, but they are both subjects i happen to be passionate about, and studying. Not sure, but at least some of my favorite wis.dmrs were quite interested in exploring gender. With race, aside from having recently discovered the whole dimension it adds to social life (not in terms of socializing, in terms of understanding society), the thing that keeps me here most, by far, is the few other jellies who are similarly interested in race, as frustrating as the concerns it brings up can be.

There will always be gender & race. There continues to be problems surrounding them, mostly felt by minorities… not discussing them does not make them go away, it just leads to frustrating silence for the minorities, and self-contented ignorance among the dominant group.

@tinyfaery: if it has been in the past few days, i’ve seen all of those. some were simple repeats of another question… sigh

i’m honored

I’m actually really sick of the race questions, because everybody goes on a field day using the word ‘race’.

It’s a social construct, a political one. There is only one race – human.
You can have ethnicities, that’s all well and good but ‘race’ is not a nice word in history.

@asmonet I can see a future where applications read Check one: “Human” “Non-Human”

@asmonet I agree with you in many ways. I wish we could view each other as all being of the same race, the human race, like you said. That’s my dreamy idealist side. Then my realist side pops up and says, “But the fact is, so many people in the world don’t view it that way yet.” The fact is, race is still an issue and probably will be for a while. In the meantime, I think it’s good to discuss it respectfully and work out the kinks in our own little way. Not talking about it just leaves that huge elephant in the room. Pretending something doesn’t exist doesn’t make it go away. So, I think it’s good that we occasionally hash it out.

@A_Beaverhausen I have enjoyed reading peoples opinions and feelings to such topics. I haven’t seen an answer yet that I have thought was only added to be contraversial. Every answer I have seen has been relevant and mostly well written.

I seriously believe we all need to talk about this in order to understand. I try and look at it from everyones point of view when reading these threads.

we need more people like you @Leanne1986

That’s just it, there’s no such thing as different races. I’ll deal with ethnic and cultural differences all day. But I can’t stand it when people can’t see the difference. Race isn’t an issue, the word is. The word will continue to be a problem for a while, yes. Maybe I’m being nitpicky but I don’t really care. I think it’s one of the most obvious and easily fixed issues.

@asmonet AGREED.

@asmonet
Wow and if you actually stuck with the thread that I raised about gender and race you might actually see that your ideas are essentially mine. So ironic? One thing is certain and that is you are certainly a politician.

@asmonet In the biological sense, of course race is essentially meaningless. Heh, that actually makes racial inequality even more wickedly frustrating, even speaking as someone who isn’t harmed by it! It’s nice to bump into someone who’s aware of the lack of biology behind it, btw… that’s sadly uncommon. (-:

@everyone Yet socially, ‘race’ – whatever one a person may be – plays a huge role in the opportunities they have, in how they’re treated… even in whether or not they think about race more than just occasionally (if that). Many have no real choice but to pay attention to how race affects society, not just society at large, but the social world around us.

I think, among my fellow ‘white’ people, this lack of having to to be conscious of how race, in some form or another, permeates their regular experiences… and all the problems of inequality, and the disharmony that stems from that (& reinforces it) has help establish an unspoken taboo on the whole subject.

So, for lack of being used to talking about it – even just once in a while – makes it hard for most ‘white’ people to know how to deal with the subject. Further, we’re more than free to avoid it entirely.

It’s already uncomfortable, since there’s no satisfying reason why we are free from experiencing a whole category of dehumanization while others are not. Further, as much as many of us are against it, this type of inequality benefits us by default… so we both feel the need to defend those benefits (usually this is subconscious), but also unsure of how to deal with having them.

There are ways, tho, we can grasp some ability to affect this system of inequality… which is why, despite the discomfort, discussing race can be very empowering – and inspiring!

I take this spate of race- and sex-related questions as an attempt to be provocative using some of the most obvious and readily available subject matter around. Perhaps in time we’ll see a little more refinement of subject matter.

@tinyfaery geez, what an asian male thing to ask.

I think that threads just follow from question to question and as they follow lines of reasoning they naturally start to raise similar questions. Even this kind of question! There will be a whole bunch of questions on religion say and then there willl be a question that says “What’s with all these religious questions?” It would be interesting to see someone actually graph the questions and subjects to see what patterns emerge.

@tonedef

I don’t get it.

@Jeruba Do you think it’s possible (or even likely) that the controversy people attribute to the whole subject may actually hold some people back from broaching in, when they have a genuine interest in exploring the subject?

@resmc: “Yet socially, ‘race’ – whatever one a person may be – plays a huge role in the opportunities they have…”

Ethnicity.
You could start there.

@asmonet That works… tho, and i may be off here, but it seems ethnicity doesn’t carry with it the connotations of some groups being denied unearned advantages granted others that race does.

Maybe for those who understand the biological meaninglessness and social significance of ‘ethnicity/race’/whatever, race could be used… and for those who think the social meaning stems from [non-existent] biological stuff, ethnicity would be a better term. But, how to tell what someone’s schema of the topic is?

If that’s what people are interested in and want to discuss, so be it.

@resmc, quite possible. I have shied away from many of them myself because they looked like bait to me and/or like they were probably going to generate a lot of heat without much light.

Gender and race are aspects of society that I’m interested, that are social constructs based on certain biological markers, that are similar in many ways in terms of organizing society into groups that have more than other groups (the haves and the have nots)...I’ve always been involved with activism that breaks down these concepts and deals with intersection of oppression…so I am into discussing them as much as I’m into discussing plenty of others things I like discussing

@resmc: You’re missing the point. And your idea is just going to lead to further confusion between the two. The point is, race was used to keep people down, to segregate. Continuing to use it, keeps those ideas alive, continuing to use it for that purpose consciously is ridiculous.

Stop using it. Period.

That’s my opinion.

@asmonet
perhaps you’re right
we can stop using it
but we should acknowledge the history

No, I agree.
We should acknowledge it, but we should also move on. :)

I haven’t read all the responses yet. But you know what it is a bit tedious for me too. I always engage when I read one because as a person from a “minority” culture I feel I have some important information to add and it is a bit personal for me. I think I might need to pull back some though because it can leave me quite stressed out. I want to have educated conversations where we can find common ground and work from there but often it just doesn’t turn out that way and thus becomes distressing. I guess unless you are coming from the “other side” it is hard to understand how much you feel the need to respond and have people understand your point of view. I am interested in others opinions, I just wish it were a bit easier to find common ground.

@asmonet

I’m actually really sick of the race questions, because everybody goes on a field day using the word ‘race’. It’s a social construct, a political one. There is only one race – human. You can have ethnicities, that’s all well and good but ‘race’ is not a nice word in history.

Very well said. I know I have been guilty of using the word race but only because the conversations are already so complicated. Perhaps it would have made them less so though if I had started by emphasizing this point.

I guess unless you are coming from the “other side” it is hard to understand how much you feel the need to respond and have people understand your point of view.
We’re all coming from the other side.
‹(•¿•)› <—- Vomiting while violins are playing.
****888===

@SeventhSense I suppose that could be true. Of course that isn’t quite what I meant and I concede that perhaps I should have used better wording. But I don’t want to get into another “debate” over the issue.

Soon Race will be synonymous with Racism. Cultural differences alone will be celebrated.

If we no longer use the word race then does that mean my daughter will have to run the 800 meter running competition from now on?

@Darwin
No it will just be the Racism 800. :)

@RedPowerLady: Thanks. :)

Very well said, yourself.

@asmonet
Who’s that your father?

What?

The avatar….it can’t be you.. from the photobucket, I know you’re more photogenic than that

Ahaha, no it isn’t me, it’s from this. :)
It’s one of my favorite panels.

LOL
Sugarpie and Kittentits :)

:)
Enjoy!