You seem to be saying that race shouldn't matter. But how can we discuss this paragraph (about a neighbourhood that is different where the only reason given for that is race) without exploring what race means in that context?
(personally, I don't agree in any context, race matters in pretty much every context in the world because discrimination based on race is present in every context, and to ignore it only allows that discrimination to continue)
stop misdirecting, you know damn well he implied that asians aren't really american.
race matters, but not for nationality. nationality means the country that you are a citizen of
you can't run these stupid verbal tricks on HN and expect to get away with them.
for example, i know white people of south african nationality who would take great offense if you considered them to be american, or european in any context other than a simple mistake.
No, I didn't know anything of the sort. I only noticed "Asian-Americans" and "Americans" in the same sentence once you pointed it out. I understand the offense that this could cause but to be honest I'd find it odd if he was using "less snobbish" as a negative term. If anything I thought he was being negative towards the "Americans".
Also I sense we both believe that discrimination is wrong, you've taken this fairly strongly. But we approach this matter differently.
Your point about how I would react being described as anything other than South African is dead on. But the truth is that apartheid and colonialism has meant that not all South Africans were born with the same opportunities. So nationality may exist in some abstract sense apart form race but it is not a great equaliser. A whole lot of what I know about the US leads me to believe that this is something our countries have in common.
This is not a verbal trick: I firmly believe that the only way to deal with discrimination is to recognise it even where nobody is using the words. If anything the "trick" is pretending that a stamp on a form wipes out the tremendous advantages or disadvantages of skin colour.
Just want to respond to this because it is a pet peeve of mine. There's a cultural habit of using Asian along with our other labels (black, latino or hispanic, white, native, desi), but Asian is a word not like the others, as it refers to a continent and makes you think maybe the person or their parents is really from that continent. I wish we had another word or another set of words, as there are plenty of folks in California whose Asian-American families have been in the area for a century and a half. Oh well.
it isn't good to say in polite company, but sometimes it slips out because it's kind of hard to disguise an entire racial worldview (i.e., only white people are real americans)
i'm an american and my race is asian, i hear little subtle things like this all the time, everywhere. it's gone down in the past 10 years but it's still there.
