Item — HN Reader

Not to invalidate OP's lived experiences, but they are Brazilian. Trying to extrapolate race and diversity issues in Brazil with those in the US is a bit of an apple to oranges comparison (and vice versa between the US and Brazil imo).

(Disclaimer - I have no opinions on either side in this issue).

1 comments

Presumably there are also people in the US who are “white” but who also have “black” close relatives.

If it matters I’m with the OP on this. I’m Romanian, I’m “white”, my mother is, for lack of a better word, “brown-ish” (between “black” and “white”, that is), my brother has the same skin “color” as my mum. My brother has been the victim of racist remarks over the years of which I was not, I suspect because of our slightly different skin “color”.

Nevertheless, I find the essentialist policy the US has when it comes to “races” quite baffling. For example I don’t know how me and my brother would potentially be “labeled” were we to move to the States. Like I said, technically we have different skin “colors” but, after all, we’re brothers.

My personal opinion is that this is an American problem and only Americans should discuss about this. The same way I am opposed to Russian electoral interference in 2016, in the same way I'd rather not have other non-Americans discuss about this topic UNLESS they have actual authentic experiences with these issues. It's the same way I won't comment about Antiziganism in Romania, Hungary, Czechia, Serbia, etc because I simply don't have the relevant context or authentic background to make an informed statement beyond the generic platititude of "Don't discriminate".

The thing is that what gets discussed today in the States then gets discussed tomorrow in Western Europe and the day after tomorrow further East (so, also in my country, Romania). To say nothing of the many US companies that have offices open here in Eastern Europe and whose HR policies mimick almost completely those from the US headquarters.

Don’t get me wrong, I wish you were 100% right on this, i.e. that US racial things should only be discussed by those directly involved with the same happening in the Romanian case (from where I’m from), but unfortunately that is not the case.

It's important to understand why race of all things is so foundational to systemic injustive in the US.

The original sin of the US was the Atlantic slave trade. It so happens that almost of the people swept up into that slave trade were dark skinned. And, because that slave trade was so monumentally huge in terms of how many people it brought to the US, a very large fraction of dark skinned people in the US today and all throughout history either were slaves or are primarily descended from them.

In order to morally justify the enslavement of millions of people, white slave-owners manufactured a justification that people of certain races are physically, mentally, and morally different from whites. They created a (factually false) narrative that skin tone didn't just mean skin tone but also implied all sorts of other things about the person.

That narrative is profoundly embedded in all aspects of US politics, culture, and institutions. It's been there since before the three-fifths compromise which is directly in the US Constitution. It's everywhere.

So it's not just about skin tone. It's about generations of Americans growing up in a culture that says people with a certain skin tone are less human, and then building social institutions predicated on that as fact.

Culture and institutions change very slowly (especially when many participating in them actively benefit from their current state) and it takes a lot of work to root something like this out.