Comment on Do you also feel cringe about people making such a big deal about ethnicity?
tatterdemalion@programming.dev 1 week agoI just want to say that ethnicity is not necessarily related to genetics in any way, it’s about your heritage and upbringing. A person can be born and raised in Japan without having indigenous parents. In this way, they are ethnically Japanese if they choose to identify with the culture they were raised in.
So it’s not suddenly racist to appreciate someone’s ethnicity. It’s racist to assume someone’s ethnicity based on how they look.
And what you say about ethnicity being irrelevant to the government is quite controversial. For example, there are various treaties in effect between colonizers and indigenous peoples. Do you think such treaties are not valuable because they are based on ethnicity?
Solumbran@lemmy.world 1 week ago
I think that being a colonizer is not something a government should be. So yes, definitely, such a treaty is bad.
A government should be treating people as equally as possible. Ethnicity only brings unnecessary division.
tatterdemalion@programming.dev 1 week ago
Well yea, ideally colonization would not have happened, but it did. Would you rather the indigenous people had received no consolation at all?
Solumbran@lemmy.world 1 week ago
This does not require ethnicity at all.
If someone is discriminated because of an ethnicity they don’t actually have (let’s say a Mexican being targeted as an “arab”) should they not get compensation ?
According to your logic, you need ethnicity to give compensation which means that you require victims to have a specific ethnicity to be recognised, but it is absurd. What makes victims victims is what they went through, not the reason they suffered abuse.
And this doesn’t even apply to colonization as in this case most of the times the former colony is now a country, and as such you can give compensation to the country and its citizens, no ethnicity required.
Either way, ethnicity is not needed.