Re: BELL CURVE CRITIC EXPOSED?
Frosch (dexter@aries.scs.uiuc.edu)
4 Feb 95 01:33:19 GMT
>dexter@aries.scs.uiuc.edu (Frosch) wrote:
>> actually, the confusion of definitions is worse than i had
>> picked up in passing. the use of 'african-AMERICAN' to mean
>> any person of african descent, i could _just_ manage to forgive
>I was talking about Americans.
maybe _you_ think that is what you were doing, but as i note
from a different post, you are not even taking into account that
the newsgroups to which this is being posted (any of the above)
are INTERNATIONAL. to say "black means african-american", with
not even a nominal pointer to social context, is a gross failure
acknowledge that reality. "black" does not mean that, it means a
range of things in different social contexts, one of which is
u.s. society. [and you deleted without comment my pointer to the
use of "black" in australia, although this directly contradicted
claims you made in another post.]
>> as an americocentric slip of the tongue. but using "hindu" as
>> a designator of "race"??
>I wasn't using "hindu" as a designator of "race". I was using
>the statistical fact that not a lot of Africans are Hindu.
>Hinduism is not as far as I know a proselytizing religion. It
>is much like Judaism in this respect. In particular, at least
>prior to the arrival of the British in India Hinduism involved
>strictly controlled *hereditary* castes. Brahmins, for example,
>were born Brahmins. Hardly an example of the proposition you
>seem to be trying to prove, namely:
>Hinduism is a religion.
>Religion has nothing to do with heredity.
>Therefore Hinduism has nothing to do with heredity.
>(The middle term is of course the error.)
to be brief: bullshit. and bullshit for which you needed to
delete your original paragraph (and my transliteration) to make
the reconstruction halfway plausible.
>In article <3gp0bt$qnp@agate.berkeley.edu>,
> <jerrybro@uclink2.berkeley.edu> wrote:
>>[...] If, for example, someone were to identify me as black,
>>and then discovered that I was in fact a dark-pigmented Hindu,
>>I'd expect him to admit his error. "Black" means "African-
>>American".
annette
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