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And just to clarify, the thing that bothers me is that it seems that only non-white ethnic groups create organizations
I don't know... Skull and Bones?
I think you've answered your own question. Why do you need a white person's club when the US kind of *is* a white person's club, whether that white person is French-American, British-American or German-American. Likewise, you get to identify as simply a "person" partly because the mechanisms by which personhood are constructed are canted towards assuming that you are the default.
So, first up I would question your idea that in a perfect world race is not thought of at all, just because I don't understand exactly what you mean by this. Race, and the differences between race, provide us with cultural diversity, and boiling everything down to a default "non-racial" mass may not be desirable. That is, somebody might actively enjoy the sense of attunement to a broader culture that they get from being an Asian-American, or from having been born to parents who grew up in a different country. Likewise their identity as Muslims, say, might be supplemented by their identity as Arabs or African-Americans. Question being, is this a good, positive thing, or is it culturally divisive? And if so, whose culture?
I would be suspicious of the idea of everyone just being "people", unless one could be absolutely sure that the metric being applied was not actually white, straight, normal people, which right now I don't think would necessarily be the case - that is, this may not be a reaction to "racism in the old days", but to racism going on right now. For example:
This is one of the problems I have with the BET channel, which is the idea that somehow there's a sort of programming that will inherently appeal to black people.
Might it not be that black people might want to watch black people on television? And, since the mainstream channels wnat to get the best possible value out of their advertising, and their advertisers tend not to want shows with a primarily black focus, because they are worried that a primarily black focusd means a primarily black audience, and black people are traditionally a lousy demographic for advertisers. BET started off as a channel playing music videos by black artists at a time when MTV basically didn't, remember. Again, if everyone was to watch "People TV", then the economic and social factors currently governing how television functions would have to change. I'm not sure ethnic minorities in the USA should make the first move by accepting uncritically media in which they are represented as supporting characters, on the grounds that, hey, everyone's just people and it just so happenes that the people who get the starring roles are a bit less tan than their wisecracking people chums... |
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), and feeling grateful to all the people who explained where I was going wrong. (Admittedly, sometimes they did it by calling me names, but more often not.)