• JackGreenEarth@lemm.ee
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    3 months ago

    We need a term to distinguish people with different skin tones as they are treated differently. You can call it race or skin color, it doesn’t really matter, it’s just a semantic argument.

    • werefreeatlast@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      Like he was probably skin tone 25. We can divide brown into the standard 8-bit 256 shades and just use that. Or RGB? Look, the point is that Asians are not all from Asia which is a continent, and certainly they are not yellow. The Simpsons are yellow. Mexicans, Hispanic, etc are not brown people from Mexico. We’re trying to assign a location of birth to be a life long declaration of allegiance or a skin color that is not actual or precise. I’m first gen American, my kids are American but my wife and I were born on opposite sides of the planet. The indigenous Americans themselves came from elsewhere as written in their prehispanic history. The Spanish are not white colors either and so the mixed people who came later are not actually from America either, and neither the Anglosaxons AKA whites, AKA blonde etc. You can’t use those ways to describe people because it’s not biological. I personally know all sorts of mixed migrants and natural born US citizens and there’s no way one could use these terms to describe people in a way that people want to be described as or even in a way that is remotely accurate. And ofcourse is there’s only 5 different types of people, then there’s no American melting pot. Ofcourse my views here are from the point of view of a migrant so I know perfectly well that American is unique. If you ever travel anywhere else, you’ll immediately notice that everyone there has similar features and skin tones with very little variation. So either they are way behind us, or they melt variation so quick that we never see it. But my money is on the US being the most advanced melting pot. That’s pretty clear in Mexico, Korea, Netherlands, Philippines, Japan, China, and several other places I’ve visited. Mexico and Philippines for example are great examples of almost complete melting into mixed people from different places. Not that it’s a good thing there, indigenous people almost disappeared due to war and disease.

      It’s complicated.