Well, since they don't speak Latin in Italy, either, I think you need to rethink that one a bit.
As I understand it, "Latin America" means those parts of the Americas where the dominant colonists spoke the Romance Languages. And Romance Languages means those languages most directly derived from Latin. And that means Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and French; but since the Italians weren't colonial powers, that leaves Spanish, Portuguese, and French.
The term "Latin American" thus serves as a contrast to what might be called "Anglo-Saxon America" or maybe "Germanic America": those parts colonized primarily by speakers of Germanic languages (generally English and Dutch). But I never hear that term used.]
Do you consider race a political or a biological construct? I vote for the former.
Exhibit A: affirmative action
Exhibit B: There are a variety of light and dark skinned races in India and Pakistan. But when come to America, they are all considered to be of the "Asian" race in spite of their skin color. In reality, Asia is a continent, not a race.
Exhibit C: The EEOC and the Census Bureau have different political definitions of race. The later may even argue with you as to what race you are.
So if race is a political construct, it seems to me that the term African-American acknowledges that. It is a race unique to America.
If anyone's got a right to claim to speak modern Latin it would be the Italians, but I don't think they want it.
Still, if we were to be correct on this, it would be fair I think for many Canadians and Cajuns to call themselves Latin Americans, hailing as they do from areas that were once French colonial territories. Yes?
In reality, Africa is a continent and has people with several distinctly different skin colors inhabiting the continent including the European whites who settled there.
"the term African-American acknowledges that. It is a race unique to America"
Why is it necessary to use a term to give uniqueness only to Americans of African ancestry? The rest of us are unique as well - whites/European, yellow/Asian.
Africa includes white people who've been living there for thousands of years, actually, not just European colonial descendants. Egypt has been a true "multi-cultural" society since the pharoahs....
That's right, Dean. All continents are a mixture of populations with a rainbow of skin colors, nose shapes, eye shapes and lip shapes and some of those variances exist in one skin color as well. three classifications are not nearly enough.
jane m, I'm not saying it's necessary to use the term African-American, but it does at least show a person of that description becomes a different race as soon as she leaves the country (or continent, as America is also a continent, or rather, a pair of continents)
In the U.S., I'm white. In India, my race would be "angrezi" (English) I think.
That's right, Dean. All continents are a mixture of populations with a rainbow of skin colors, nose shapes, eye shapes and lip shapes and some of those variances exist in one skin color as well. three classifications are not nearly enough.
We all seem to be in agreement. If you assigned a race for each population, that would pretty much demonstrate that the 3-6 races don't really exist as broad partitions of humanity. That is the subtext of what I was I saying. The labels don't really matter that much.
When I worked for the Census Bureau awhilw back, I got in trouble for referring to people from Mexico as Mexicans. My Denver-based boss said I should use the term, "Chicanos" even though nobody here uses the term as she felt to call anyone a Mexican was an insult. Go figure.
The terms we actually use here are Mexican and Hispanic, either of which make more sense to me.
Pro-Abortion is fine, Pro-Drug is fine, Pro-Prostitution is fine....how about for an all-encompassing Anti-Morality Police?
Rose, move to Texas. Do NOT move to DFWA or Houston. Move to TEXAS. We don't buy in for that shit and don't take kindly to carpet baggers that try to force it on us.
If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck and swims like a duck...guess what it's a FR*KIN DUCK! To call it a 'water fowl' so as to not offend it's terribly fragile little ego is stupid and wastes my time.
Society's 'job' is not to make the whigniest, most annoying members happy. It is to further the goals of society (normally continuation and spread of said society). The world is not all about 'me' or anyone else for that matter. Grow up and deal with it!
FWIW, Rosemary, I agreed that part of your argument for the term "anti-abortion" appeared contrary to what you were supposedly trying to say. On the other hand, I agree with you on your main point there: most of these activists are not "pro-choice." They are "pro-abortion." That is, for most of the extremists it appears to be a defeat when a young woman makes the choice to place her child in a loving, stable family as part of an adoption plan. Crazy.
Terms that bug me:
African-American--it's ambiguous. And it's anti-assimilation. As a matter of fact, it pick out the descendents of people from ONE continent for lack-of-assimilation. PLUS: it's seven syllables long, when the previous terms to describe the very same people were 1-2 syllables long. Unforgiveable. Also, it appears to be part of a game plan to make the English language "dance!" by shooting at its feet every 30 years.
Hispanic--WTF does that mean?
non-White--unless applied to Asians or Blacks. This habit of talking as if Arabs, Latinos, Native Americans/American Indians or even Jews aren't "white" is just silly. I'm strictly a 1962 edition of the Encyclopedia Brittanica girl, and if we're going to recognize races, I'll grant three and three only.
Things that bug me less:
Asian--this should bother me enormously, but somehow it doesn't. It's just the current term to describe that thing that happens with people's eyes when they are Japanese/Chinese/Korean/etc. We probably need something more precise for that particular "look," on those occasions that we find we need one. (Usually it's young urban men talking about what they find hot in women, of course.)
I understand that my sensibilities are 100% inconsistent and irrational, of course.
That is, for most of the extremists it appears to be a defeat when a young woman makes the choice to place her child in a loving, stable family as part of an adoption plan
Show me ONE case of that. That's bullshit and you know it.
I don't know that I've ever seen a case of someone directly stating that they think adoptioni as a "defeat" but I have certainly seen efforts to fight placing adoption literature in abortion clinics and efforts to stop various groups from airing commercials talking about adoption by saying such sentiments are offensive. I don't have explicit references but I can find them if you want. Joy, having once been a radical feminist herself, I suspect may have more direct experience though.
I'm all over the African/Asian/American thing. I mean I wish people would drop it and just use the colors. The irony I see is most "African American" families have been in this country for generations longer than my family has. When my family got here we fell in the "white" category, not the "European American" category. This was fine with me.
Whenever I get into this discussion, I bring up a famous golfer who is a dual citizen in America and his home country. His name is Ernie Els. He is a "white" guy, but he was born and raised in South Africa. So by our crazy PC standards, is he white guy or an African American?
I'd want to see the specific proposed pro-adoption literature and pro-adoption commercials before I granted that the people in question were truly against adoption, personally.
I disagree. Language is about communication and in my opinion, getting someone to listen to a point of view other than their own is made more difficult by immediately antagonizing them with a label they don't agree with or refusing to use a label they use themselves.
Personally, I consider myself mostly pro-choice, mostly anti affirmative action and pretty much completely anti discrimination.
I'm very pro-directness.
Now for the lame niggling.
Hmmm, I'm pretty sure they used to and they still use it at the Vatican, smart guy... They never spoke Latin in Italy, they spoke Latin in the Roman Empire. Which included at least parts of Italy, France, Germany, Egypt, Libya, Israel, Syria, Lebanon, Greece, Turkey and elsewhere. Italy and the Roman Empire are not the same thing. The area that was the ancient city of Rome is mostly not in Italy. It's in the Vatican.
I don't know if they speak it in the Vatican, but that ain't Italy.
They did speak Latin in Mass in almost every country in the world so either almost every country is 'latin' or none or one, the Vatican.
I don't know if Spanish is the deciding factor as I'm pretty sure Brazil is included in Latin America and they don't speak Spanish.
I would sooner expect rationality from (political comment deleted) as from the English language.
There, now that I've been a niggling jerk, I'll stop.
Yeahm that African-American thing bugs the hell out of me insofar as it's used to describe anyone "black", whether they can claim any distant African heritage or not.
It reminds me very much of how, in the days of Jim Crow, Creoles were classified as "black" simply because of their skin color. Never mind that their heritage led back to Europe and the Caribbean instead of Africa. Today's simplistic skin-tone Balkanization of America is just as bad in a lot of ways as old Jim Crow and is based on something just as silly.
Sorry, I reject "Pro-Abortion" as a description of my views. I think it should be legal to abort, but I think the cases in which it is ok to abort are very, very few. I want other people to be able to follow the dictates of their conscience, but that does not mean that I wouldn't try to talk any of my friends or family members who were considering it out of an abortion.
By analogy to the drug bit earlier in the comments, I am pro-abortion-legalization, *not* pro-abortion.
As for "Latin America" - given that Spanish and Portugese are every bit as much an outgrowth of Latin as Italian is, I think your view here is a stretch, at best.
Dean - much of the opposition to placing adoption literature in clinics is intended to prevent people from feeling *harassed* into adoption. Eg, if it's really their choice, then once they've consulted with the people they consider to be spiritual or temporal advisors, everyone else should just butt out.
"much of the opposition to placing adoption literature in clinics is intended to prevent people from feeling *harassed* into adoption."
Man, if having some pamphlets sitting in a rack in the lobby is considered "harassment", I've got a very good case against a whole lot of people in my dentist's office, my doctor's office, my chiropracter, the convenience store, etc. I'll be rich.
But I thought this thread was to bash people who are hypersensitive?
Dan - there's a difference between having pamphlets sitting in a rack in a lobby, and having everyone involved in the process be handing you the pamphlets and insisting that you take them, right?
Most people who are opposed to distributing pro-adoption literature in abortion clinics imagine the latter is what is happening, and that's what they're opposed to.
It's not clear to me if the problem is that they're misinformed (although, were such distribution to be *legally mandated*, it's more likely to be the latter than the former - the "[] law requires us to show you how adoption is better" pamphlet tacked on right behind the "federal law requires us to give you this information about our privacy policy" pamphlet). But that *is* what I've always assumed is meant by "placing adoption literature in clinics".
I wasn't clear about the Hispanic thing. People who live south of the U.S. border are overwhelmingly a mix of Native American and European. The more native American ancesters they have (vs. European ones), the more "hispanic" they look. In other words, their "Hispanicness" is directly proportional to how much NON-Spanish-speaking (vs. Spanish-speaking) ancestry they have.
* * *
Re: abortion. I'm actually pro-choice as a legal matter, but I'm very against the cultural zeitgeist that pressures girls and women into doing this.
And those on both sides of the abortion divide need to ask themselves this question: why doesn't either side trust the other to provide counseling? (Answer: because we suspect that they are going to push the other side's pet choice, and I want them to make the choice I want them to make.)
Michael, there's no way to "prove" something that's simply out in the ether and is never spoken of out loud (out loud, we get this "safe, legal, and rare" nonsense). But I'll give you my experiences:
1) When I was 14 I had a pregnancy scare due to a late period. At that time I was seeing a psychotherapist, and when we discussed the possibility that I was pregnant, I said I didn't know what I'd do. She raised her eyebrows and said, "get an abortion?" as if it were the obvious answer.
"I don't know whether I think that's moral," I answered. (I had mixed feelings about it, despite considering myself a radical feminist.)
"Now, why am I getting *angry*? she suddenly asked out loud. Why indeed? (Because my making the "wrong" choice would have gotten her mad. Because there is only one right choice.)
2) When I got pregnant at 19 my then-boyfriend pressured me into an abortion, when what I wanted was to have the baby and have it adopted. There's your "ONE case," Buddy--and I have to live with it for the rest of my life.
3) Whenever the benefits of abortion are discussed, the pro-abortion people always make the comparison between what it would be like for the child to "not ever exist" vs. being raised by a (usually) young) (usually) single mother. If they were really fighting fair, they'd be comparing abortion to adoption, but they don't want to discuss adoption, because it transforms most of their "hard cases" into cases that aren't nearly as hard.
Sex Worker = Rent-a-C***
Pro-drug legalization. Nope, not misleading.
As I understand it, "Latin America" means those parts of the Americas where the dominant colonists spoke the Romance Languages. And Romance Languages means those languages most directly derived from Latin. And that means Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and French; but since the Italians weren't colonial powers, that leaves Spanish, Portuguese, and French.
The term "Latin American" thus serves as a contrast to what might be called "Anglo-Saxon America" or maybe "Germanic America": those parts colonized primarily by speakers of Germanic languages (generally English and Dutch). But I never hear that term used.]
Hmmm, I'm pretty sure they used to and they still use it at the Vatican, smart guy...
Exhibit A: affirmative action
Exhibit B: There are a variety of light and dark skinned races in India and Pakistan. But when come to America, they are all considered to be of the "Asian" race in spite of their skin color. In reality, Asia is a continent, not a race.
Exhibit C: The EEOC and the Census Bureau have different political definitions of race. The later may even argue with you as to what race you are.
So if race is a political construct, it seems to me that the term African-American acknowledges that. It is a race unique to America.
Still, if we were to be correct on this, it would be fair I think for many Canadians and Cajuns to call themselves Latin Americans, hailing as they do from areas that were once French colonial territories. Yes?
In reality, Africa is a continent and has people with several distinctly different skin colors inhabiting the continent including the European whites who settled there.
"the term African-American acknowledges that. It is a race unique to America"
Why is it necessary to use a term to give uniqueness only to Americans of African ancestry? The rest of us are unique as well - whites/European, yellow/Asian.
Africa includes white people who've been living there for thousands of years, actually, not just European colonial descendants. Egypt has been a true "multi-cultural" society since the pharoahs....
In the U.S., I'm white. In India, my race would be "angrezi" (English) I think.
We all seem to be in agreement. If you assigned a race for each population, that would pretty much demonstrate that the 3-6 races don't really exist as broad partitions of humanity. That is the subtext of what I was I saying. The labels don't really matter that much.
Actually, they do speak modern Latin in Italy, they just call it "Italian."
The terms we actually use here are Mexican and Hispanic, either of which make more sense to me.
Pro-Abortion is fine, Pro-Drug is fine, Pro-Prostitution is fine....how about for an all-encompassing Anti-Morality Police?
Rose, move to Texas. Do NOT move to DFWA or Houston. Move to TEXAS. We don't buy in for that shit and don't take kindly to carpet baggers that try to force it on us.
If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck and swims like a duck...guess what it's a FR*KIN DUCK! To call it a 'water fowl' so as to not offend it's terribly fragile little ego is stupid and wastes my time.
Society's 'job' is not to make the whigniest, most annoying members happy. It is to further the goals of society (normally continuation and spread of said society). The world is not all about 'me' or anyone else for that matter. Grow up and deal with it!
Terms that bug me:
African-American--it's ambiguous. And it's anti-assimilation. As a matter of fact, it pick out the descendents of people from ONE continent for lack-of-assimilation. PLUS: it's seven syllables long, when the previous terms to describe the very same people were 1-2 syllables long. Unforgiveable. Also, it appears to be part of a game plan to make the English language "dance!" by shooting at its feet every 30 years.
Hispanic--WTF does that mean?
non-White--unless applied to Asians or Blacks. This habit of talking as if Arabs, Latinos, Native Americans/American Indians or even Jews aren't "white" is just silly. I'm strictly a 1962 edition of the Encyclopedia Brittanica girl, and if we're going to recognize races, I'll grant three and three only.
Things that bug me less:
Asian--this should bother me enormously, but somehow it doesn't. It's just the current term to describe that thing that happens with people's eyes when they are Japanese/Chinese/Korean/etc. We probably need something more precise for that particular "look," on those occasions that we find we need one. (Usually it's young urban men talking about what they find hot in women, of course.)
I understand that my sensibilities are 100% inconsistent and irrational, of course.
Whenever I get into this discussion, I bring up a famous golfer who is a dual citizen in America and his home country. His name is Ernie Els. He is a "white" guy, but he was born and raised in South Africa. So by our crazy PC standards, is he white guy or an African American?
Personally, I consider myself mostly pro-choice, mostly anti affirmative action and pretty much completely anti discrimination.
dale
Now for the lame niggling.
Hmmm, I'm pretty sure they used to and they still use it at the Vatican, smart guy...
They never spoke Latin in Italy, they spoke Latin in the Roman Empire. Which included at least parts of Italy, France, Germany, Egypt, Libya, Israel, Syria, Lebanon, Greece, Turkey and elsewhere. Italy and the Roman Empire are not the same thing. The area that was the ancient city of Rome is mostly not in Italy. It's in the Vatican.
I don't know if they speak it in the Vatican, but that ain't Italy.
They did speak Latin in Mass in almost every country in the world so either almost every country is 'latin' or none or one, the Vatican.
I don't know if Spanish is the deciding factor as I'm pretty sure Brazil is included in Latin America and they don't speak Spanish.
I would sooner expect rationality from (political comment deleted) as from the English language.
There, now that I've been a niggling jerk, I'll stop.
Hispanic derives from Hispani, Latin for Spanish. In that sense, Hispanic is probably the best descriptor.
Hank Barnes
It reminds me very much of how, in the days of Jim Crow, Creoles were classified as "black" simply because of their skin color. Never mind that their heritage led back to Europe and the Caribbean instead of Africa. Today's simplistic skin-tone Balkanization of America is just as bad in a lot of ways as old Jim Crow and is based on something just as silly.
By analogy to the drug bit earlier in the comments, I am pro-abortion-legalization, *not* pro-abortion.
As for "Latin America" - given that Spanish and Portugese are every bit as much an outgrowth of Latin as Italian is, I think your view here is a stretch, at best.
Dean - it would be unusual, but perfectly legitimate, for Acadians, Quebecois, and Cajuns to call themselves Latin Americans.
Man, if having some pamphlets sitting in a rack in the lobby is considered "harassment", I've got a very good case against a whole lot of people in my dentist's office, my doctor's office, my chiropracter, the convenience store, etc. I'll be rich.
But I thought this thread was to bash people who are hypersensitive?
Most people who are opposed to distributing pro-adoption literature in abortion clinics imagine the latter is what is happening, and that's what they're opposed to.
It's not clear to me if the problem is that they're misinformed (although, were such distribution to be *legally mandated*, it's more likely to be the latter than the former - the "[] law requires us to show you how adoption is better" pamphlet tacked on right behind the "federal law requires us to give you this information about our privacy policy" pamphlet). But that *is* what I've always assumed is meant by "placing adoption literature in clinics".
* * *
Re: abortion. I'm actually pro-choice as a legal matter, but I'm very against the cultural zeitgeist that pressures girls and women into doing this.
And those on both sides of the abortion divide need to ask themselves this question: why doesn't either side trust the other to provide counseling? (Answer: because we suspect that they are going to push the other side's pet choice, and I want them to make the choice I want them to make.)
Michael, there's no way to "prove" something that's simply out in the ether and is never spoken of out loud (out loud, we get this "safe, legal, and rare" nonsense). But I'll give you my experiences:
1) When I was 14 I had a pregnancy scare due to a late period. At that time I was seeing a psychotherapist, and when we discussed the possibility that I was pregnant, I said I didn't know what I'd do. She raised her eyebrows and said, "get an abortion?" as if it were the obvious answer.
"I don't know whether I think that's moral," I answered. (I had mixed feelings about it, despite considering myself a radical feminist.)
"Now, why am I getting *angry*? she suddenly asked out loud. Why indeed? (Because my making the "wrong" choice would have gotten her mad. Because there is only one right choice.)
2) When I got pregnant at 19 my then-boyfriend pressured me into an abortion, when what I wanted was to have the baby and have it adopted. There's your "ONE case," Buddy--and I have to live with it for the rest of my life.
3) Whenever the benefits of abortion are discussed, the pro-abortion people always make the comparison between what it would be like for the child to "not ever exist" vs. being raised by a (usually) young) (usually) single mother. If they were really fighting fair, they'd be comparing abortion to adoption, but they don't want to discuss adoption, because it transforms most of their "hard cases" into cases that aren't nearly as hard.