o for god's sake, pan...
this is the actual argument:
Quote:
to expand on 53 a little--which, modesty aside, seems to me important--african-american as a category is a creation of the particular history of american racism---you can look at it as a consequence not only an initial erasure of distinctions between ethnicities/groups/backgrounds/histories during the period of slavery, and so as a kind of residuum, an index of the crudeness of euro-american perceptions of Others, one which reduces them to the color of their skin---but also as a category that has not gone away, but rather has continued and is reinforced and perpetuated through the history of segregation---of separation geared around this same crude one-dimensional category--that has been in a sense taken over and made into a source of positive identification over time---and so can refer to the much of the cultural experience that has been separated and shaped through separation.
so the category functions in a way that "white" simply does not: think about it--you ask a group of white folk (myself included) about their ancestry, say, you'll probably get answers that refer to irish or french or italian or russian or ukranian or whatever backgrounds that then get the hyphenated american thing--so the histories have not been erased systematically, the grouping is not the same--this is a function of having power, of having had power, of having used that power--maintaining one's history in this case is an index.
you can figure it out from here: this is not difficult and if you think about it, it corresponds in a general sense to experience.
mlk and myriad others looked forward to a day when this history would no longer matter--BUT WE ARE NOT ANYWHERE NEAR THAT.
i mean, look the hell around you. jesus.
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you skipped it.
this directly addresses the premise around which the op is built.
the second part of the post--which for some reason is where you started--was about linking the premise to the politics that lay behind the op claim.
it seems to me that if you accept the premise which i quote AGAIN here, you can't move to your argument in the op at all.
maybe that's why you skipped it.
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side note:
i don't write this way here to do anything beyond relay information that i think is relevant in the form of an argument.
i write other ways in other contexts.
so this:
Quote:
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I didn't reply, because to be quite honest, i don't like the style you type in, to me it's very degrading and pompous.
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i didn't know there was a writing workshop dimension to the forum.
i'll just ask you whether you're sure you want to go down this route with me.
i'm not sure you do, pan.