Racism

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
yeah, apologies for being vague. you're right, americans do tend to mean East Asian when they say Asian. Has then been any reported rise in anti-East Asian violence over there?
Not that I know of, but I wouldn't be surprised.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
Depends what you mean by "Asian". I've found that in America it tends to mean East Asian. There's a fair-sized British Chinese population (many from HK, of course), but it's dwarfed by the South Asian population.

to complicate the Asian identity even more, I'm technically West Asian, but as that is neither recognised by the UK and US establishments as being legitimately Asian I'm middle eastern (read: terrorist.)
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
How do you feel about the term, @catalog? Obvs it doesn't impact me personally, but I've always thought it sounded horribly bureaucratic and box-tick-ish.
 

catalog

Well-known member
Yeah not a fan and I'm sure ive said on here before I dont like that or POC.

But I know there are other non white people I've spoken to who are either not arsed or think it's helpful
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
It just seems self-evidently ludicrous to create a category defined as "everyone who isn't white", as if the experiences of being, say, Chinese, Jamaican or Bangladeshi in Britain are more or less interchangeable. And who gets to decide who is and isn't "white"? Where do light-skinned Arabs stand? Orthodox Jews? Greeks?

In America it's even worse/funnier because lots of people there think speaking Spanish and being brown-skinned are the same thing. Variety magazine suffered some epic (and richly deserved) pisstakery last year after it described Anya Taylor-Joy as a "woman of colour", apparently because she was born in Argentina and grew up speaking Spanish.

anya.jpeg


Edit: apparently she wasn't even born there but lived there for a while when she was little.
 

Leo

Well-known member
just as bad are politicians here who think the only thing hispanic families want to hear about is immigration, when they care about the same things every family cares about: health care costs, education, the economy, etc.
 

version

Well-known member
I'm wary of that sort of, I don't really know how to describe it, professional language? Technical language? There's someone currently getting piled on on Twitter for making a thread about their kids with that sort of phrasing, like they're talking about clients or customers. They described washing their daughter's hair as "emotional labour" and complained that the teenager they'd fostered coming to them for support was unhealthy and treating them - the parent - like a therapist...
 

Leo

Well-known member
people have always been fucked up, prone to misunderstanding and miscommunication, ill-equipped to raise kids, etc. it's just that now, they can broadcast the latest version of it -- the professional language -- to the world on social media.
 

version

Well-known member
I've noticed more and more complaints on social media about people using these terms as an excuse for selfishness, e.g. ditching friends when they're in a rough spot then justifying it with claims of not owing them their emotional labour.

As I understand it, the term's supposed to refer to stuff like being forced to put on a happy face in a service job, but some people have taken it and applied it to basically anything that makes them feel uncomfortable or requires some sort of effort, like raising kids or supporting a friend.
 

shakahislop

Well-known member
I've noticed more and more complaints on social media about people using these terms as an excuse for selfishness, e.g. ditching friends when they're in a rough spot then justifying it with claims of not owing them their emotional labour.

As I understand it, the term's supposed to refer to stuff like being forced to put on a happy face in a service job, but some people have taken it and applied it to basically anything that makes them feel uncomfortable or requires some sort of effort, like raising kids or supporting a friend.
there was definitely a point at which these kinds of slightly conceptual terms that broadly come from 'left discourse' went from being something that i knew about, had read about in one or two places, would never have mentioned in real life because no-one would know what i was on about......became fairly commonly understood.

'emotional labour' is one of them but there's loads of stuff like that. the online world is incredibly good at popularising new concepts of that kind, stuff which relates to everyday life
 

version

Well-known member
There's something dehumanising about it, like talking about components or objects rather than people. Someone talking about raising their kids like they're writing a paper for a think tank.

A continuation of this stuff,

 

Clinamenic

Binary & Tweed
there was definitely a point at which these kinds of slightly conceptual terms that broadly come from 'left discourse' went from being something that i knew about, had read about in one or two places, would never have mentioned in real life because no-one would know what i was on about......became fairly commonly understood.

'emotional labour' is one of them but there's loads of stuff like that. the online world is incredibly good at popularising new concepts of that kind, stuff which relates to everyday life
In light of stuff like this, I think right-wing claims that the (academic) "far left" is corrupting our country are somewhat understandable. My main counterargument, having embodied this kind of woke academia before, is that much of it is done in good faith, but is just out of touch with how academic and nitpicky it seems to people who don't purely live in their heads.
 

Clinamenic

Binary & Tweed
I understand how, from a more conservative perspective than the one I'm predisposed to, the spreading influence of stuff like critical theory (especially when employed to analyze things like race) can be seen as a corruption. Certain extents of critical thinking can threaten to undermine tradition and social stability, which is arguably the point of such critical thinking. Presumably the same situation that led to the fate of Socrates, even if that has been mythologized to whatever extent.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
I'm wary of that sort of, I don't really know how to describe it, professional language? Technical language? There's someone currently getting piled on on Twitter for making a thread about their kids with that sort of phrasing, like they're talking about clients or customers. They described washing their daughter's hair as "emotional labour" and complained that the teenager they'd fostered coming to them for support was unhealthy and treating them - the parent - like a therapist...
They sound like a cunt and I hope their kids run away and save themselves.
 

Clinamenic

Binary & Tweed
This also ties into a salient theory that I remember @poetix sharing here, which as I recall associated neuroticism with liberals and paranoia with conservatives, almost like a dualistic model of anxiety. I'm extrapolating here, but the paranoia would be an externalization, anxiously overthinking the world around you, and neuroticism would be more of an internalization, anxiously overthinking oneself.

Poetix made a matrix with neuroticism/paranoia as one binary axis, and based/cucked as the other. EG cucked would be, say, an overwillingness to wear a mask, and based would be an underwillingness, a refusal to concede one's "liberties" anymore than absolutely necessary.
 
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