[graemep]

My understanding of racism in the US is that it is more like caste in India than like class in Britain, for example.

The big difference is that you are defined by your ancestry so there is little to no mobility.

This seems to be confirmed by the way Americans seem to regard someone's race as a fundamental and immutable characteristic, even while intellectually accepting race is just defined by social convention.

[timschmidt]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Class:_A_Guide_Through_the_Ame... is an excellent reference.

[willy_k]

Well yeah, thats kind of what race is. It’s something you’re born with, and it’s not fuzzy. It can be nuanced, thats different. How it’s regarded is a separate issue, and that has generally improved over time.

Edit: I might be conflating race with ethnicity.

[graemep]

Depends what you mean by fuzzy. it is culturally defined and people in different cultures use different definitions. Americans have whole categories not used in, for example, the UK (a very similar culture otherwise) such as "hispanic" which seems to include people I would call "white"? The same with people who are classified as "black" who look white. Americans now seem to use "caucasian" as a synonym for "white" which contradicts definitions used historically.

British people use definitions that are different from those of South Asians, and westerners in general are entirely unaware of caste which is a whole racial hierarchy that affects a lot of the world. Sri Lankans define race as whatever your father was, but Jewishness is inherited from your mother.

It might not be fuzzy within a particular culture at a particular point is time, but it is not consistent between cultures or over time.

Edit: initially omitted because I keep sharing it and might look spammy, but decided to add a link to my blog post on the topic: https://pietersz.co.uk/2023/08/racism-culture-different

[willy_k]

When I wrote that I had in mind the idea of “mixed race” people. In the US it is very common for someone to identify as half black and half white, or one quarter Irish and three quarters Mexican, and so on. So, nuanced but not fuzzy, in that sense at least. But that is closer to ethnicity than race on second thought.

[graemep]

How do you define ethnicity and race? Apart from the ambiguous areas I do not think we all use the same definitions.

> In the US it is very common for someone to identify as half black and half white, or one quarter Irish and three quarters Mexican, and so on.

That is one of the things I find hardest to understand about American definitions. I would just think of someone like that as American (unless they are significantly culturally not American in some way). I just describe myself as mixed, or as from one of the two countries I am a citizen of (I have lived in both for significant chunks of my life and am influenced by both cultures but have little ancestry from either).