`but by law in the US she is considered white -- and she looks white as well` -- as a non-American I have a hard time understanding why the law in the US should distinguish your race?
Maybe I am missing something?
Maybe I am missing something?
>White – A person having origins in any of the original peoples of Europe, the Middle East, or North Africa.
You're missing the fact that the US was founded on the principle of racial hierarchy which led to centuries of oppression and stratification of class along racial lines. Numerous laws were passed in the US which explicitly granted or denied rights by race, the most obvious being slavery, through which people of African descent were legally classified as property in slaveholding states, and "separate but equal" laws post Reconstruction.
As a result of this history of racial discrimination, American culture and law are inextricably linked to racial segregation and classification, as must be any attempts to correct the injustices of the past.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judicial_aspects_of_race_in_th...
[1]https://www.census.gov/acs/www/about/why-we-ask-each-questio...
[2]https://www.brookings.edu/opinions/why-census-is-right-to-as...
> That belief is partly why many Irish, Italian and Polish immigrants who came to America in the early 20th century whitened their children's names to avoid persecution and increase their chances of social mobility.
> Tim Machuga is a software engineer who also knows what it's like to be black for a minute. He is a white man with an African name.
A typical Eastern European last name to me.
I wonder what does my first name (Oleksii) sound like to folks in the US?
That's a big reason why there are so many similar spelled surnames. They'd write it down 'wrong' at Ellis Island, and that's what you were stuck with. Oleksii, Oleksy, etc.
I agree with you that Machuga doesn't sound black at all. Maybe Hispanic if you're pronouncing it 'Mah-choo-gah'
Interesting that this submission got flagged. I wonder why?
I feel like the reporter asked around the office for people who'd had these experiences, and Tim mentioned his, so he put him in the article.
Also, the first name bias is quite real. I dated a lady for most of my late teens - mid 20's named Ticia (pronounced Teecha, rather than Tisha). She's Ojibwe Chippewa, but this was rural TN and SC, so race is treated as a very binary black/white checkbox, and she falls into the "white" category. However, Ticia is a "black" name, for the most part. I lost count of the number of times I saw blatantly rude reactions when she introduced herself.
How about european immigrants that just arrived in the US within the last decade,should native minorities have better opportunities than them?
And what exactly is race? Ancestry? National origin? Consider this list: north african arab,turk,spanish, white skinned mexican,brown skinned egyptian,light skinned indian,albanian and south african with european ancestry. Lets say these people and their families immigrated to the US in the late 80's and had children immediately,their children will be treated very differently from each other. Which race are they? The south african is white but the mexican is not so white?
The law has no business defining race or using this social construct for systemic inequalities. This breeds so much strife,resentment and division and is not sustainable.
When you benefit one group, if you in the process benefit and harm other groups unfairly you're only shuffling around inequality. I believe the end result is even more unfairness and injustice to even more groups of people.
It’s incoherent at times (that was the most egregious example) and seems to reflect the author’s bizarre misconceptions about the world (e.g. claiming “Jace” is a non traditional name).
Nobody wants to make a call and change anything that is wrong...let alone questions of what happens to progress reports of someone was X and now Y....