|sεnduQ|
mind entropy of the ethiofricanArchive for race
Chinese people are Black!… Race is wack!
Race, ethnicity, nationalism…are all social creations with gooey slimy fluidity. All are… Whaaaack, frankly…:)
Waaack (n.) = Completely transient cultural construct with the utility of making sense of the world around us. Such waackdom is usually on the quest to emulate another mindboggler – ‘truth’. Said wackdom aspires, at times succeeds to appear heavy enough to stand as ground for years and years of suffering, conflict, tension and chaos! Said waackdom is gooey, fluid, ridiculous madness …but never silly and flimsy given its powerfully divisive and instrumental ability to ignite perplexing flames of suffering!
Recently, in a humorous turn of decision-making by the Pretoria High Court/south african government, the race farce was exposed!
Brace yourself to drive off into some utter madness!….these turn of events get beyond intriguing in light of the history of apartheid, and some iffy history with worker immigrants in Africa (read: Indians in Eastern Africa). Lo and behold, SA pulls that RACE card! And the racers are off….
The High Court in South Africa has ruled that Chinese South Africans are to be reclassified as black people.
It made the order so that ethnic Chinese can benefit from government policies aimed at ending white domination in the private sector. The Chinese Association of South Africa took the government to court, saying its members had been discriminated against.
An estimated 200,000 ethnic Chinese live in South Africa. more
In a landmark ruling the Pretoria High Court accepted the Chinese as a “previously disadvantaged” group. This means that – at least in legal terms – Chinese South Africans will now be included in the definition of black people in legislation covering lucrative black economic empowerment (BEE) deals.
The controversial BEE policy, under which large companies have to surrender a percentage of their equity to black-run entities, is aimed at reversing decades of apartheid bias. It covers Africans, Coloureds (mixed-race people) and Indians but has been criticized widely as a politically correct form of theft by ruling party cronies.
Under white minority rule the Chinese were classified as Coloureds. In a decision that illustrated the difficulty of applying racial segregation Japanese people were given “honorary white” status – partly because they were wealthier and fewer in number than the Chinese.
*gasp* |stunned|…what money doesn’t do, eh? money can probably even turn me into a blue eyed blond haired white ice princess barbie…*batting eyelashes*
Interesting thing is only SA citizens before 1994 and their descendants are eligible; making about 10,000-12,000 Chinese people BLACK! 
and Japanese – NOT!
Race is a social concept without valid basis in biology, say our beloved geneticists. Group differences between races are so minuscule as to be relatively insignificant, and have little or no biological validity.
~ Scientists estimate that 99.9 percent of the human genome is the same in everyone.
~ The proportion of a human’s genes reflected in external appearance seems to be in the range of .01 percent.
~ By contrast, traits like intelligence, artistic talent and social skills are likely to be shaped by thousands, if not tens of thousands, of the 80,000 or so genes in the human genome.
~ Human genomic history indicates modern Homo sapiens originated in Africa 200,000 to 100,000 years ago, at which point a relatively small number of them began migrating into Europe, the Middle East, Asia and across the Bering land masses into the Americas.
Since the African emigrations began, a mere 7,000 generations have passed. Because of the limited founder population and the short time since dispersal, humans are strikingly homogeneous — differing from one another only once in a thousand sub-units, called bases, out three billion. And of the differences between individuals, 88 to 90 percent can be found within a local population, while only about 10 to 12 percent distinguish one race from another. read more…
Ethnicity is a social construct, though geneticists can track it. But in all finality, we are all intermixed immigrants ..Unless our ancestors were the genius inventors of human affection or toothpicks!!
Power…taking her son barack
“”During the purge, all students studying abroad had to be summoned without explanation, their passports revoked…Students studying in Eastern Bloc countries did much worse. Many of them are still in jail. Or vanished. “You shouldn’t be too hard on Lolo,” the cousin repeated. “Such times are best forgotten.”
My mother left the cousin’s house in a daze… She began to walk without direction. She found herself in a wealthy neighborhood where the diplomats and generals lived in sprawling houses and wrought-iron gates. She saw a woman in bare feet and a tattered shawl wandering through an open gate…One of the men shouted for the woman to leave. Another man dug in his pocket and threw out a handful of coins. The woman ran after the coins with terrible speed, checking the road suspiciously as she gathered them to her bosom.
Power. The word fixed in my mother’s mind like a curse. In America, it had generally remained hidden from view until you dug beneath the surface of things until you visited an Indian reservation or spoke to a black person whose trust you had earned. But here power was undisguised, indiscriminate, naked, always fresh in the memory. Power had taken Lolo and yanked him back into line just when he thought he’d escaped, making him feel its weight, letting him know that his life wasn’t his own. That’s how things were, you couldn’t change it, you could just live by the rules, so simple once you learned them. And so Lolo had made his peace with power, learned the wisdom of forgetting. Just as his brother-in-law had done, making millions as a high official in the national oil company…
She remembered what Lolo had told her once when her constant questioning had finally touched a nerve “Guilt is a luxury only foreigners can afford” he had said. “Like saying whatever pops into your head.”
He was right, of course. She was a foreigner, middle-class and white and protected by her heredity whether she wanted protection or not. She could always leave if things got too messy. She looked out the window now and saw that Lolo and I had moved on, the grass flattened where the two of us had been. The sight made her shudder slightly, and she rose to her feet filled with a sudden panic.
Power was taking her son.
…She had taught me to disdain the blend of ignorance and arrogance that too often characterized Americans abroad. But she now had learned, just as Lolo had learned, the chasm that separated the life chances of an American from those of an Indonesian. She knew which side of the divide she wanted her child to be on. I was an American, she decided, and my true life lay elsewhere.
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In America, it…remained hidden from view until you dug beneath the surface…spoke to a black person whose trust you had earned…
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“…We were always playing on the white man’s court, Ray had told me, by the white man’s rules. If the principal, or the coach, or a teacher, or Kurt, wanted to spit in your face, he could, because he had power and you didn’t. If he decided not to, if he treated you like a man or came to your defense, it was because he knew that the words you spoke, the clothes you wore, the books you read, your ambitions and desires, were already his. Whatever he decided to do, it was his decision to make, not yours, and because of that fundamental power he held over you, because it preceded and would outlast his individual motives and inclinations, any distinction between good and bad whites held negligible meaning. In fact, you couldn’t even be sure that everything you had assumed to be an expression of your black, unfettered self- the humor, the song, the behind-the-back pass – had been freely chosen by you. At best, these things were a refuge; at worst, a trap. Following this maddening logic, the only thing you could choose as your own was withdrawal into a smaller and smaller coil of rage, until being black meant only the knowledge that your own powerlessness, of your own defeat. And the final irony; should you refuse this defeat and lash out at your captors they would have name for that too, a name that would cage you just as good. Paranoid. Militant. Violent. Nigger.
In every page of every book, in Bigger Thomas and invisible men, I kept finding the same anguish, the same doubt; a self-contempt that neither irony nor intellect seemed to deflect…
Only Malcolm X’s autobiography seemed to offer something different. His repeated acts of self-creation spoke to me; the blunt poetry of his words, his unadorned insistence on respect, promised a new and uncompromising order, martial in its discipline, forged through sheer force of will.”
from Barack Obama’s book ‘Dreams of My Father‘.
