resident Texan said:
You people who spend all day picking apart someone because they have a differing point a view make me stay on the Substance Abuse/Harm reduction side of the fence...You come voice your opinion on this sucker and someone is gonna make an ass of you.
Off-topic general exploration of parameters of discussion:
1. I don't spend all day doing this. I find this type of debate to be good recreation.
2. I am a sociologist, I'm currently grading students' work for a course in the sociology of race, and I'm considering a research project centering on racialization. Basically, I am into this shit, I am beginning to become competent with it, and I've been trained to interrogate logical and empirical validity.
3. Bracketing personal insults, why do you feel threatened when your views face interrogation? What sort of discussion do you want to have? Something like, "This is my view. . .", and then people will reply with "Yeah, me too," or "No, but I have experienced [some non-sequitor]. . ."?
Sounds kinda mundane to me. I tend to learn a lot more when critically examining, analyzing, synthesizing, etc. Please try not to take it as an attack.
4. Didn't you yourself try to discount someone's views because he was Japanese? People tend to come across more credibly when they do more to mitigate or conceal their hypocrisy (the latter being the human condition).
In sum, if you feel like an ass when someone criticizes your views without resorting to personal attacks or other forms of malice, you may feel like less of an ass after having scrutinized your own views.
I didn't try to make anyone feel like an idiot though.
This is not my intention here...ever...well, sometimes it's nice to make someone who insulted another's intelligence look like an idiot. Hey; irony is fun!
back on topic:
What language is our constitution and all other American law written in?
What bearing does this have on what current public policy should be? Sure, during that period, the American settler-populace, and especially the aristocratically linked politico-economic elites, mostly took English as their native tongue, so of course they authored political procedure therein.
Our demographics have changed, along with our cultures and speech communities, so English as a monolithic official tongue no longer makes sense.
Remember that appeals to tradition are logically fallacious.
Who founded our colonies before we were even america, the english!
So those who were most successful in invading North America were English. What does this indicate about what should be done now? Hell, in a sense this invalidates your argument in that the ubiquity of English language in the US area depended crucially on a campaign of genocide undertaken by external invaders.
I wish people would just see it's something that happens and it is so deeply driven into society (at least where I live) that we won't get around it in our lifetime and the best way to rid ourselves is to teach our children to have open minds...
A caveat:
Racism as individual prejudicial perception and treatment is in its death-throes (well, there's that new War on Terror driven hatred of "those A-rabs"). Rather, institutional and inter-institutional dynamics (that is, structured racism) create and reproduce most persisting racial inequities. Ideological color-blindness conceals such inequities, allowing them to persist.
But sure, teaching your kids to be open minded is a good thing...it's practically the best that one could do, but it's also important to teach them to scrutinize immediate appearances to reveal hidden processes. It will be only through the latter practice that contemporary racism will be addressed.
ebola