It's a real breakdown of empathy. People only see skin color for their interpretation of "like me". There is so much to being a person, but this is the first thing people see, so it becomes insanely overrepresented.
Agreed. This brings to mind a couple of other anecdotes:
* The Dutch translator who was hired to translate Amanda Gorman's work (AG is the youngest poet laureate in US history and while I'm not particularly informed on poetry, I liked her performance at the Biden inauguration). The deal was reneged because of significant complaints that the translator wasn't black and thus couldn't possibly understand Gorman (a black person) and thus couldn't possibly convey her sentiments. The translator noted that he was deemed fit to translate Shakespeare despite not being neither an Englishman nor alive during the 16th century, so the implication seems to be that race constitutes a greater distinction between humans than nationality and centuries of history.
* The San Francisco school board affair in which a gay white man was deemed unfit to serve as a volunteer because, despite being eminently qualified and having the support of the broader community, he was "redundant" in that there were already several white female volunteers. In this case, the explicit reasoning of the school board was that the candidate volunteer wouldn't be able to relate to students of color and thus wouldn't be fit to serve them. The implication seems to be that students would be better served by a volunteer their own race (irrespective of the experiences or qualifications of said volunteer) rather than someone who was qualified and perhaps had relatable experiences but of a different race.
> There is so much to being a person, but this is the first thing people see, so it becomes insanely overrepresented.
Perhaps, but skin tone differences have always existed, and this sort of emphasis on skin tone seems like a very recent phenomenon at least in the scope of my lifetime.
> The San Francisco school board affair in which a gay white man was deemed unfit to serve as a volunteer because [...] he was "redundant" in that there were already several white female volunteers.
That's kinda homophobic. Gay man so he HAS to be effeminate.
> The implication seems to be that students would be better served by a volunteer their own race
I bet the (closeted) students (of all races) would have probably preferred to see an openly gay man in a position of authority where he's not mocked for who is is.
> That's kinda homophobic. Gay man so he HAS to be effeminate.
FWIW, I didn't interpret it that way. I think the school board's message was merely that race dominates all other qualifications and since they already had two other white people (who happened to be female) they already had enough people with "white qualifications". Of course, this is by no means a less toxic interpretation than your "homophobia" interpretation.
> this sort of emphasis on skin tone seems like a very recent phenomenon at least in the scope of my lifetime.
This sounds like something that could only be true of a white person. It reminds of me of how I was horrified to learn that one of my gay friends had to deal with someone calling them the F slur once, and my friend said I was only surprised because I don't personally deal with homophobic slurs on a regular basis.
There has always been extraordinary emphasis on skin tone, it's just that more and more non-POC folks are starting to see it bit by bit.
> There has always been extraordinary emphasis on skin tone
No doubt this is true in some strict sense depending on how you define "extraordinary", but in whatever sense this is true I don't think it's very informative. Namely, while (esp in the US) there is a deep history of racism, to say that it has always been this way is pretty much untrue--American views on race (including the importance placed on race) have changed a lot throughout history, and while racism has never utterly disappeared, it's perfectly correct to note that the emphasis placed on race in the 90s and 2000s was much lower than the most recent decade.
Indeed, Google NGram corroborates this. Note the date range is 1990-2019 because ngram doesn't offer 2020 or 2021 data--though I strongly suspect the upward trend continues in 2020. Note also that I used "americans" as a suffix in all cases to disambiguate "white" and "black" which come up in a lot of non-racial contexts.
So I don't really buy into the "we've always been this obsessed about race; whites are just mysteriously unable to perceive it" argument. In general, people are often surprised that the variation within a race far exceeds the variation between races, and specifically that "people of color" do not have the views (on race or otherwise) ascribed to them by the popular media.
People writing about race more does not mean that race is necessarily playing a larger role in the various operations of society, it just means the myriad ways it affects society are being discussed more.
Race has always played this large a role, people just say it in books more. Our subconscious biases can reign supreme and yet never be discussed anywhere.
EDIT: There is also nothing mysterious about white people having a much harder time picking up on racism. You're making it seem like this mystical hippy-dippy nonsense. It's instead very simple: if you're white you won't often (ever) be the target of racism, so you'll have a skewed perception of how common and powerful it is. No mystery here, friend.
> People writing about race more does not mean that race is necessarily playing a larger role in the various operations of society, it just means the myriad ways it affects society are being discussed more.
Indeed, ngram isn’t conclusive proof that our society (or rather, certain elements there within) are race obsessed. But my claim is only that certain elements of society have become possessed by race, not that they have succeeded in restructuring society according to their segregationist designs.
> Race has always played this large a role, people just say it in books more.
I don’t think there’s any evidence for that, and there’s significant evidence that the role race plays has gone down considerably (we don’t have expressly racist policies like we did in the 60s and earlier, we don’t tolerate racist memes in the entertainment media, being perceived as a racist is the among the worst social offenses, etc). Note that there is no dichotomy between advocating for further progress and acknowledging the progress that has been made.
> Our subconscious biases can reign supreme and yet never be discussed anywhere.
And yet the evidence for subconscious bias is virtually nil. The implicit association test, long hailed to be proof of subconscious bias, turns out to be bunk and little additional evidence exists.
> There is also nothing mysterious about white people having a much harder time picking up on racism. You're making it seem like this mystical hippy-dippy nonsense. It's instead very simple: if you're white you won't often (ever) be the target of racism, so you'll have a skewed perception of how common and powerful it is. No mystery here, friend.
The idea that our society has always been this race-obsessed and white people are just unable to pick up on it is racist nonsense, and there is no evidence which supports it. Indeed, all evidence corroborates the hypothesis that our race obsession is a phenomenon that developed in the last 10 years. No need to gaslight the white folks. :)
It’s the anniversary of George Floyd’s murder, which sparked the largest ever protests seen in this country over the racist tendencies of of this country. One of the important take aways of those protests is understanding that these murders are not uncommon, but a part of what it means to be black in America. This has been the case for centuries. As long as we can safely say that the United States has an extremely racist past, it’s fair to say that skin tone has played a huge role in society.
How can you say that race’s role in the US has only recently become so large when there have been lynchings in the recent past, and it was legal to own someone who was black?
Surely we can consider those things as instances of skin tone being taken into consideration, no?
* The Dutch translator who was hired to translate Amanda Gorman's work (AG is the youngest poet laureate in US history and while I'm not particularly informed on poetry, I liked her performance at the Biden inauguration). The deal was reneged because of significant complaints that the translator wasn't black and thus couldn't possibly understand Gorman (a black person) and thus couldn't possibly convey her sentiments. The translator noted that he was deemed fit to translate Shakespeare despite not being neither an Englishman nor alive during the 16th century, so the implication seems to be that race constitutes a greater distinction between humans than nationality and centuries of history.
* The San Francisco school board affair in which a gay white man was deemed unfit to serve as a volunteer because, despite being eminently qualified and having the support of the broader community, he was "redundant" in that there were already several white female volunteers. In this case, the explicit reasoning of the school board was that the candidate volunteer wouldn't be able to relate to students of color and thus wouldn't be fit to serve them. The implication seems to be that students would be better served by a volunteer their own race (irrespective of the experiences or qualifications of said volunteer) rather than someone who was qualified and perhaps had relatable experiences but of a different race.
> There is so much to being a person, but this is the first thing people see, so it becomes insanely overrepresented.
Perhaps, but skin tone differences have always existed, and this sort of emphasis on skin tone seems like a very recent phenomenon at least in the scope of my lifetime.