Re: BELL CURVE CRITIC EXPOSED?
Ron Whittle (jerrybro@uclink2.berkeley.edu)
4 Feb 1995 03:13:36 GMT
dexter@aries.scs.uiuc.edu (Frosch) wrote:
> 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.
The book under discussion is about American society. For this
reason, I kept my remarks within that context.
"black" does not mean that, it means a
> range of things in different social contexts, one of which is
> u.s. society.
I know that, but I don't know exactly what it means, so I'm not
going to go around saying "it means all Africans" or any such
nonsense.
[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 I recall, I said "maybe they do". I admitted not knowing.
And, not knowing, I was not ready to say "black refers also
to Australian aborigines." Then I went on to admit not knowing
what Dutch and French settlers called their African neighbors.
By the way, I don't see why I have to include everything you
write into my post, and then to reply to it. You made a point
and I deferred to your better knowledge. I'm doing so now
explicitly, just to make you happy, though given the form of
your latest post you hardly deserve it IMO:
> to be brief: bullshit. and bullshit for which you needed to
^^^^^^^^
> delete your original paragraph (and my transliteration) to make
> the reconstruction halfway plausible.
This is what I mean. I don't even know what you're talking
about any more. My original point was that "black" is not
purely a question of how a person looks, and I thought of
my Hindu roommate at M.I.T. as someone who might be mistaken
for "black" because of the way he looked, but who in my
opinion should not be called "black".
I'm not sure why you're going out of your way to interpret
my posts in as unfriendly a way as as possible. Even supposing
I had thought "Hindu" referred to a race and not to a religion,
how would that bit of ignorance have affected my point? Not
at all, I should think. The only reason for bringing it up
that I can see was to discredit me by showing what an ignorant
fool I was.
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