[mcphage]

> Yet the author is completely unaware, totally conditioned to believe unquestioningly that the US has uniquely "pervasive" focus on race.

That’s weird, given in the very article she described an incident where she was called ugly names for being black while in Korea. Crazy how she didn’t even notice that happening to her, and so obviously believes it’s entirely a US issue.

[car_analogy]

It is weird. She didn't write just "race is a pervasive concept" - she explicitly added "in the U.S." to it, singling out the U.S. despite her own experience telling her it's just as or more pervasive elsewhere.

[mcphage]

Well, that’s why I’m glad we’ve got you here, so she can better understand her own experiences.

[car_analogy]

I'm not explaining them to her, but to others. If the story had been about two assaults, one by a black man and one by a white man, and then she had singled out only one of them with "violence is pervasive in the black community", you would be perfectly capable of understanding the difference.

Yet make it about countries, and this kind of double-standard exceptionalism gets a pass.

[jltsiren]

You are taking American conceptual categories and applying them to explain things elsewhere in the world. I think that's a mistake.

"Races" are fundamentally colonial categories. When you are in a world of ethnic nation states, the lines separating the ingroup from various outgroups are based on combinations of ethnicity, culture, religion, language, and history. The differences are often very subtle by American standards. After all, the most important outgroups often consist of people very much like you who happen to live across the border.

In many Asian and European countries, discrimination is primarily based on whether people perceive you as a foreigner or a local, and on how favorably people view that particular group of foreigners. That correlates with what Americans would call "race", but there are important differences. America in contrast focuses much more on "race". You can often fit in better as a white foreigner than a black American, which is weird by European standards. All those differences that separate us Europeans from each other suddenly vanish, and you can easily fit in the ingroup, at least if you don't make too much noise about your foreignness.