Why are we so seemingly obsessed with assigning thing into ethnic/race groups?
this post was submitted on 03 Nov 2025
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Mm, yes, no one else in the history of the world has ever been racist.
I get that, I've just found Americans online like to inject race into everything regardless of where they are on the political spectrum
Do they have little flags attached to their names, like that one 4chan board? Maybe just the loud obnoxiously Americans do that, or you associate anyone loud and obnoxious with being American.
Either way, race has been a huge issue since before America even existed (they mostly imported their racism from Europe). I won't deny that quite a few loud groups use race as wedge issue these days, though, no matter their political spectrum.
No, I'd say race is primarily US-American concept.
Language/nationality are in Europe the most relevant factors. Racism simply due to skin color does happen too but it occurs less often than other forms of discrimination (because there are simply significantly fewer people of a different "race". The US-American view would just see white people discriminating against white people.)
I mean, a Black and a White US-American are culturally far more similar than an English and a Polish guy but in looks far more different. So US-Americans discriminate primarily by looks (racism) while the English discriminate primarily by culture (xenophobia). That's why British Indians (considered to belong to a Brown race in the US) can be the leaders of the Tories with barely any outcry while in the US Obama caused Republicans to collapse into a hatred singularity called "Trump".
You realize that times have existed before now, right? The entire concept of racism in America comes from the European idea of "Noble Savages". Not to mention the slave trade was a Dutch concept that was imported to the US for a huge profit.
The idea that somehow everyone else's hands are clean but apparently everyone in the US is somehow tainted is a ridiculous passing of the blame so you don't have to consider the actual cause, rather than a nationalist one.
Granted, you are talking about how European ideas are xenophobic, so displaying your own is a point in your favor.
Times before are somewhat irrelevant when speaking about today. Not because today is supposed to be independent of the past, mind you, but rather because there have been strongly varying rates of progress across different countries. You cannot extrapolate two countries are the same today because they were the same in the past. Cultures diverge.
And nowhere did I claim everyone in the US was tainted while elsewhere everything is perfectly fine? Did you even read my comment? There's good reason I used the term "primarily" several times. This is a serious topic and so I thought about my precise wording.
Ukrainian refugees in Europe are treated better than Subsaharan African refugees. Both experience xenophobia, the latter further experiences racism. Neither group is treated remotely well.
If we want to get really specific, racism is just one specific type of xenophobia where looks alone determine membership in the in-group or various out-groups. But to claim all xenophobia is racism is misleading at best and outright wrong at worst.
Simple US-American models about racism that are broadly accurate there just cannot be applied elsewhere without adaption. Not doing that is very much "progressive" US defaultism.
*gestures broadly at the continent of Asia*
It's almost like race is a foundational conversation to the USA, a colonial nation.
I'm Canadian so same here but we don't try to label things "white thing" or "POC thing" because that's weird
No, we just white wash our racist and homophobic history. Please learn about our history, it's VERY racist.
I know and I guess that's my point. Mêmes like this basically just continue a weird modern "progressive" segregation when you're all just Americans.
Edit: to expand on that, what I mean is that is this meme trying to say white skin is more the deciding factor on how someone acts vs the environment they grew up in?
And so do the Americans and every other colonial nation.
Or you have no sense of humor, you are supposed to celebrate differences. Not mash them down and hide them like a shameful secret
The humour is based on saying that how someone acts is derived from the colour of their skin
edit: is it not?
edit 2: obviously Canada has a huge racism problem too, especially in regards to indigenous peoples but generally progressive people don't make jokes like this because it's honestly sort of racist
Eventually they'll move on and realize that xenophobia is the cool new thing to inject into everything constantly.
Pattern recognition is one of humanity's most important survival traits even though it has a ton of false positives. We just really like putting things into categories.
One could almost argue that it's... very mammalian.
Human nature. We're hardwired to form tribal groups around perceived similarities, which necessarily entails excluding people who are different. Overcoming the negative results of this biological wiring is an eternal challenge for us.
Edit: downvoting me doesn't make the truth go away. This is established science. Humans will form groups compulsively, over literally anything.
https://youarenotsosmart.com/transcripts/transcript-tribal-psychology/
https://www.simplypsychology.org/social-identity-theory.html
From a european perspective this seems weird and racist
From an American perspective, this is weird and racist.
Thought you were about to summon something in the beninging.
Lmao I’m in a huge battle with my autocorrect right now. The dumbest one is that I typed “à la mode” literally one time this morning and now every single time I use the word “à” it’s adding a fucking reverse accent. I have never written à full French sentence in my life. What the fuck Apple?
From an American perspective, this is on point. Especially in suburbia
It's almost like we have our own culture separated from our Old World cousins. That punchline was pure nostalgia
that's because it is.
but we laugh about it because being white isn't a protected status.
Is there a term for when something seems patently racist but also you know first-hand it's objectively true, so you find yourself looking up racism in the dictionary to see if it counts?
Black people redo high fives when the honkies aren't watching
You're cancelled
It's called "racist". That is what it is called. Racist.
Not really. If the meme had said that white people were genetically inferior because we redo high fives, then it would be racist.
“Being concerned about stereotypes”?
(Even though this one seems pretty harmless)
Yeah boi I do this. Need it to be crisp. Appropriate high five for appropriate occasion. Same with handshakes, I ain't gonna let my boys be greeted with a fumbled shake. Naw they deserve PERFECTION
One friend and I have a thing going where we try to do a random awkward "handshake". It has to be improvised and must be different to the ones we have done previously. It's really funny, especially when it comes naturally and other people are watching.
E.g. Both start, innocently enough, by going for what looks like a classic normal one. But then I target just his little finger while he might go for an inverted (thumb downward) handshake.
I like this. This is mine now. Thank.