Post: #1

Had a discussion about this with a fellow member. I would like to get everyone else's opinion though. Why is America so weird and obsessed with skin color?

Post: #2

Most likely because of slavery, while other countries had it as well, it was never on such a grand scale.

Post: #3

It's not just Americans, it's all human beings. Every country I've been too has been about the same. However, Americans are far more conscious of the concept of racism, I think.

Post: #4

(12-09-2013 03:02 AM)houston Wrote:  Had a discussion about this with a fellow member. I would like to get everyone else's opinion though. Why is America so weird and obsessed with skin color?

Can't wait to see how this thread turns out.

Post: #5

Predictions on how this thread will end?

Post: #6

Racism helps to keep the plebs divided and keeps the ruling elite in power.

Post: #7

(12-09-2013 03:21 AM)2Wycked Wrote:  Predictions on how this thread will end?

Badly. I was going to try to give an honest answer, but then I found myself wanting to smash a wall with my fist and gave up.

Post: #8

I can't speak for anyone else, I don't care about race. But I will admit I started to misread this thread as "why is america obese" but that is a whole other conversation.

Post: #9

they ensured that the food supply is the cheapest in the world in the US of A
now to pacify the plebs every other thing is just another version of a circus

red/blue dempublicrat stage acts
hollyweird celebrity gang bang
football / baseball / basketball team sports with local idols
feminism / multiculturalism / gender / sexuality / race / fatacceptance / whatever other social science program that can be funded in the universities to be studied with grants and make phds that would write shit about shit

divide and conquer

Post: #10

(12-09-2013 03:07 AM)la_mode Wrote:  Most likely because of slavery, while other countries had it as well, it was never on such a grand scale.

Brazil.

Henry Louis Gates Jr. Wrote:Between 1525 and 1866, in the entire history of the slave trade to the New World, according to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, 12.5 million Africans were shipped to the New World. 10.7 million survived the dreaded Middle Passage, disembarking in North America, the Caribbean and South America.

And how many of these 10.7 million Africans were shipped directly to North America? Only about 388,000. That's right: a tiny percentage.

In fact, the overwhelming percentage of the African slaves were shipped directly to the Caribbean and South America; Brazil received 4.86 million Africans alone! Some scholars estimate that another 60,000 to 70,000 Africans ended up in the United States after touching down in the Caribbean first, so that would bring the total to approximately 450,000 Africans who arrived in the United States over the course of the slave trade.

Post: #11

(12-09-2013 03:21 AM)2Wycked Wrote:  Predictions on how this thread will end?

Post: #12

The best explanation I've come across:

The psychologists Jim Sidanius and Felixia Pratto have proposed that people, to varying degrees, harbor a motive they call social dominance, though a more intuitive term is tribalism: the desire that social groups be organized into a hierarchy, generally with one's own group dominant over others. A social dominance orientation, they show, inclines people to a sweeping array of opinions and values, including patriotism, racism, fate, karma, caste, national destiny, militarism, toughness on crime, and defensiveness of existing arrangements of authority and inequality. An orientation away from social dominance, in contrast, inclines people to humanism, socialism, feminism, universal rights, and political progressivism, and the egalitarian and pacifist themes in the Christian Bible.

The theory of social dominance implies that race, the focus of so much discussion on prejudice, is psychologically unimportant. As Tajfel's experiments showed, people can divide the world into in-groups and out-groups based on any ascribed similarity, including tastes in expressionist painters. The psychologists Robert Kurzban, John Tooby, and Leda Cosmides point out that in human evolutionary history members of different races were separated by oceans, deserts, and mountain ranges (which is why racial differences evolved in the first place) and seldom met each other face to face. One’s adversaries were villages, clans, and tribes of the same race. What looms large in people’s minds is not race but coalition; it just so happens that nowadays many coalitions (neighborhoods, gangs, countries) coincide with races. Any invidious treatment that people display toward other races can be just as readily elicited by members of other coalitions. Experiments by the psycologists G. Richard Tucker, Wallace Lambert, and later Katherine Kinzler have shown that one of the most vivid delineators of prejudice is speech: people distrust people who speak with an unfamiliar accent. The effect goes back to the charming story of the origin of the word shibboleth in Judges 12:5-6:

Quote:And the Gileadites took the passages of Jordan before the Ephraimites: and it was so, that when those Ephraimites which were escaped said, Let me go over; that the men of Gilead said unto him, Art thou an Ephraimite? If he said, Nay;Then said they unto him, Say now Shibboleth: and he said Shibboleth: for he could not frame to pronounce it right. Then they took him, and slew him at the passages of the Jordan: and there fell at that time of the Ephraimites forty and two thousand.

Post: #13

America not only has a long but recent history of segregation and racial tensions. When you have so many different ethnic groups living alongside eachother that have been both oppressed and/or segregated by law up until a few decades ago, people still aren't going to get over it so quickly. This doesn't make it any more acceptable, but at least you can see where it came from.

This is not to say all other countries are color blind, either. Probably all cultures have some form of tribalism and varying degrees with hangups over categorizing people, but it may not always be based on "race" in the classical "Black, White, ..." paradigm. In many cultures, this is drawn more along lines of nationality (some Chinese often demonized the Japanese, while in the US and Europe they'd both just be categorized as Asians. In other parts of the world, it may be religion or caste that people obsess over, while some countries have ethnic classifications that differ greatly from the standard US-American "Black", "White", "Asian", "Hispanic" boxes.

I'd still say, however, that Americans' obsession with race is particularly strong. Most Germans don't spend so much as half the time obsessing over race as Americans, for instance.

Post: #14

(12-09-2013 03:21 AM)2Wycked Wrote:  Predictions on how this thread will end?

7 day ban?

Post: #15

I would say America is actually less obsessed with skin color than other places...Def not the most obsessed with race in the world.

In America there are tons of bi-racial couples and for the most part no one bats an eye.

Also, not a lot of racist remarks amongst strangers or people you just meet. In Europe the amount of racism that gets thrown around among people you just meet is way worse than anything in America.

Post: #16

The only race I'm obsessed with is Asians.....feminine, young, sweet and petite Asians....preferably female, or at least very passable.

Post: #17

I'd rather have people being open about race like in the US rather than closed off and pretend like there's nothing going on like here in Europe.

Post: #18

I will say this, I have never been attracted to girls of my own race as I have from foreign women, there is something about banging foreign tail that never EVER gets old. I've had almost every colour now and the best ones are the ones that don't match.

I have a friend at home though that is disgusted by the fact that I 'race-mix'. He thinks colours should all stay to themselves, un-suprisingly he isn't getting any and hasn't for sometime.

Post: #19

America is obsessed with race because politicians buy votes from minority groups and special interest groups by convincing these people they've been victimized. It's a very cunning swindle. This creates conflict and divides people into opposing groups. It's exactly what Hitler did with the Jews and what Lenin did with the upper class. It's a story as old as history itself.

Post: #20

All races are equally worthless.