Explains Philip Bump, in "The useful political lesson from Zohran Mamdani’s college application/America’s understanding of race and ethnicity is still woefully simplistic" (WaPo).
ADDED: By the way, I loathe the increasingly common use of the word "bucket" to mean "category." I'm one of those people — perhaps you are too — who see the concrete image in a metaphor. But maybe Bump wants to evoke disgust at the idea of human beings in buckets. His use of "jump" and "dropped" suggests that he does want us to visualize people disrespected and abused.
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100 comments:
Bump is a hump.
How can someone who was born in the United States and has never lived even a single minute anywhere in the African continent be identified as African-American?
Sure. What America needs now is a simple chart to sort out all the coloreds. That will fix everything.
DEIsm. #HateLovesAbortion
Lets all excuse the openly proud Communist - his lies and support for Intifada against Jews.
the Democratic Media are here to help him.
African by heritage?
I am Pangaean by heritage.
Non-Hispanic Black.
Is there any way to read that article without understanding the racism inherent throughout the discussion? That the WaPo is putting people in racist buckets while trying to disconnect itself from "much of American history", while still insisting "there are still two buckets" or any buckets at all?
The lesson from Mamdani's application is that he will take any benefit he can, which is a reasonable action for someone to take. What is unreasonable is his belief that Marxist economic policy would work in a society when people will take whatever they can and then not provide as much as they are capable, because it wouldn't benefit them to do otherwise.
"the end of immigration restrictions in the 1960s"
Teddy Kennedy's Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 did NOT "end" immigration restrictions.. it Just CHANGED them.
".. for the first time, immigration from the Western Hemisphere was limited, while the Eastern Hemisphere saw an increase in the number of visas granted."
We are all human by race.
I'll believe in a post-racial society when the people who keep advocating for a post-racial society actually live it themselves.
We are all members of the human race. Defining race by skin color serves only to facilitate discrimination.
here's a Fun Thought experiment..
imagine, that a New Law;
allowed immigrants in.. But ONLY After sterilization.
would democrats still be in favor of mass immigration ?
if NOT.. WHY not?
It's NOT kindness that brings in immigrants
It's NOT "to pick our crops"..
It to fill up the population for blue states
Three buckets. Don't forget about the ever popular NY Times race called "white Hispanic." Of which there is only one member - George Zimmerman.
Ha, Ha. A leftist gets caught up in the race industrial complex bullshit and now, "it's complicated".
What happened to the melting pot?
I go by obvious average IQ. Hence blacks, whites, Asian and Jewish. Blacks and Jewish in addition have belief in their oppression by the rest, which preserves their tribal alienation.
This, of course, is gaslighting and BS. “African-American” has a meaning. The American-hating democrat running for mayor does not meet the meaning. He is a liar.
What is a Polish-American? Is it anyone with a Polish surname? Obviously not. By the same token, adopting a name doesn't change one's nationality or genetic heritage. Take for example, Maulana Ndabezitha Karenga, formerly Ronald McKinley Everett of Parsonsburg, MD, from nowhere in Africa, pretending to be African-American. Perhaps his genetic heritage connects him to Africa through distant ancestors, but using the hyphenated form muddles the objective facts with pretense and imposture.
The only arguably meaningful "races" in America are, for historical reasons, White and Black (and maybe in some parts of the country Native American still matters). Other so-called "races" are no more different than comparing an Irish-American to a WASP or such-like antiquated ethnic comparisons.
Hispanics are whites who listen to merengue. Jews are whites who get extra holidays. Arabs are whites with a strange religion. Asians are whites who are good at school.
I agree, we should stop asking people these questions.
Obvious IQ comes not from the common man but the abundance or scarcity of evidence working at the highest levels, which is much more sensitive to average IQ. E.g. no blacks and lots of Jews and Asians.
I was told the new reference was a salad with the Constitution being the dressing. The melting pot seems more like what the Borg would have.
Progressive poppycock
I'm a Pangaean too. My distant ancestors were protoplasmic bacteria. You racists.
Gender in the world is often presented in two buckets: Male and Female. The left has updated the buckets.
Buckets everywhere, too many to count.
Race in America is often presented in two honey buckets: The New York Times and the Washington Post.
Not only do the left get to create the buckets of victimology - they get to jump in and out of them at will.
..""Race in America is often presented in two buckets: White and non-White...."
The only reason for this rhetorical concept is to provide a useful target and hone in on it. Whether it's white or black, it's inevitably a Progressive tactic. Most Americans object to the principle of using race as a guiding valence for confining any discussion to a framework of racial issues, usually grievances. Normal people are capable of having conversations across racial lines without ever once addressing race, or even thinking much about it.
Everyone is trending orange, it's an emergency!
Well said, Steven.
I prefer citizen
"“African-American” has a meaning."
Yes, and for the left a word's meaning (or lack of, see: woman) is whatever they choose it to be at any particular point in time, not necessarily related to anything they might have claimed in the past. Typically, that meaning is based on whatever happens to be convenient for them right now.
Thomas Sowell turned 95 the other day. He must wonder if this leftie crap will ever find an acceptable endpoint.
- Krumhorn
Bob Boyd said, "What happened to the melting pot?"
It required huge cohorts of the citizenry to turn in their race cards, so they stopped talking about it.
Ha, Ha. A leftist gets caught up in the race industrial complex bullshit and now, "it's complicated".
It's reminiscent of how sex in the workplace-- a matter of such moralistic clarity during the Clarence Thomas confirmation-- suddenly sprouted nuances all over the place once Bill Clinton got caught.
So basically: Stupid Americans can't even do racism right?
So is Bump saying it doesn't matter if Mamdani put Black on his application because it doesn't matter anymore if you're Black or brown, it's all the same? As long as you're not white, that's all that matters?
So does that mean being a descendent of slaves isn't a big deal anymore?
We'd be better off being as least conscious of race as possible.
Sounds like there's a white bucket and a non-white melting pot.
Diversity (e.g. racism) Industrial Complex (DIC)
Also Democratic Industrial Complex (DIC)
if this leftie crap will ever find an acceptable endpoint.
It's a progressive (i.e. monotonic) process (PP). Probably not.
Semantic seance. That said, Baby Lives Matter (BLM).
File this under story Philip Bump would not be writing if Vivek Ramaswamy checked 'Black' on his college application.
Think of it in terms of "oppressor" and "oppressed", and the objective gets a lot clearer.
I have read one of Mr Bump's books, and several articles including the one Ms Althouse excerpts.
Without racism, Mr Bump would have to find an entirely different problem to write about, or possibly find another, more honest, line of work.
Like Al Sharpton, he relies on the persistence of racism to earn a living.
That is why we will never be free of racism.
The least important feature of Zohran Mamdani is the 'race' box he checked on an application.
The most important feature of Zohran Mamdani is that he's a communist. Don't forget it.
Aside from that, Mr. Bump's exercise is like grits to me. Bland, tasteless, boring, and not for everyone. I mean...who in this audience pays for a subscription to WaPo these days? Raise your hands.
Howard said...
“I was told the new reference was a salad…”
I’ve heard that too. Lefties say a lot of nonsense, and repeat it over and over and over to try to get it to stick.
“…with the Constitution being the dressing. ”
That’s a new one. Baby steps, I guess.
“The melting pot seems more like what the Borg would have.”
No. The Borg are space zombies. The new Soviet Man. They are the dead shell of the individual members of different species they used to be. A Borg drone is a Borg drone, regardless of whose corpse it was created from. Picard and 7 of 9 showed it was possible to resurrect the person from a Borg Drone, but not easy or common.
A better analogy for the Melting Pot is an alloy. But this is far from perfect.
The Crabs in a bucket metaphor works perfectly here regardless of which bucket you fall into. In decades past, it only applied to certain crabs in certain buckets, but now it's all of them.
DEIsm (e.g. class bigotry) is the umbrella incorporation of class-disordered ideologies (e.g. racism).
Ann Althouse said…
“I'm one of those people — perhaps you are too — who see the concrete image in a metaphor. But maybe Bump wants to evoke disgust at the idea of human beings in buckets. His use of "jump" and "dropped" suggests that he does want us to visualize people disrespected and abused.”
This is the first thing I visualize when you say “People in a bucket”: https://thinksafetyalways.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/bucket-truck-platform.jpg
Then this: https://media.cnn.com/api/v1/images/stellar/prod/120329091059-garbage-pail-kids-adam-bomb.jpg?q=w_1248,h_1735,x_0,y_0,c_fill/w_1280
Race is what Mandani and the Dems want to talk about. They really don’t want to talk about policy, performance or results.
It's still amazing how quickly the media will rush to humiliate themselves in defense of a preferred politician. Everyone in Mamdani's high school knew what Black and African-American meant. Everyone in America knows. There was reportedly an "Other" option for those of mixed race or otherwise not listed. Mamdani lied, because everyone knew that being Black was an advantage for getting into college. Bump just looks ridiculous.
I read a comment here on Althouse that nailed this. The commenter, and I'm sorry I can't remember who said it, said that the real racial divide in America is not white and everyone else (and I am not going to capitalize "white.") The real color divide is black and everyone else.
People of color don't exist, by which I mean that you can't make more black people. There are certainly a lot of people in this country from all over the world, but they are not American black people, who are unique. The USA is culturally different for having them, and they are the biggest reason the USA dominates the world pop culture.
Everyone else is the white people of the future. My ancestry is Irish and Peruvian, both of whom assimilated. My mother is dark skinned, as is my son. So what? It's all nonsense. We're culturally American. I'm always amused that I'm technically a member of some oppressed group when I'm very obviously not oppressed, nor was my mother when she immigrated in 1958. Nor is my son, for that matter.
Quit trying to make more black people, who cannot be duplicated or replaced, by shifting words around. My mother was discriminated against for her race maybe twice in her long life, but had to put up with sexual harassment for being a woman all the time. Race just isn't that important for anyone but black people, in their case completely legitimately. For everyone else it's pretty minor.
@Steve Austin Showed Up For Work, your comment made me remember and then paraphrase a quote from J.E.B. Stuart regarding the USA's original, original sin:
"We will regret slavery but once, and that will be continuously."
We will never be allowed to not regret it, no matter how much time intervenes apparently.
As for Zohran Mandani, if the voters of NYC want to make a mistake, they should be allowed to do so. I think we all can agree that the manic attempts to keep Trump off the ballot backfired.
I get what Zohran did by checking the race box. I checked the "Hispanic" box when I applied to college. My father, my departed "white" parent, told me that either I used the label or it would be used against me. My mother is from Peru, so it's legit, even though I don't speak Spanish and look pretty darn pale. So, good for the Zohran. Play to win.
I might be going to hell in a bucket baby, but at least I'm enjoying the rude.
Jerry Garcia
"Black" is facing extinction due to mixed parentage. 100% Black is mostly limited to Africans with zero admixture. In the USA, this is increasingly rare. This is why POC will continue to gain prominence as the preferred victimized category.
It is instructive to read U.S. v Bhagat Singh Thind to get the century-ago perspective. There are two races, those that will intermarry with the descendants of the original European settlers and blacks and we don't need a third. Very forward looking in an interesting way. Thind, a sikh immigrant and WWI vet was denied naturalization because, while arguably white, he wasn't in the marriage pool.
Don't follow the red herring. He didn't call himself "African-American"; he called himself "Black." He's a weasel and a liar, which makes the Communism make perfect sense, as it is the true religion of liars.
I remember the Hank Williams song "My Race Bucket's Got a Hole in It."
People never talk about the real reason races such an issue is because tribalism is so deeply ingrained in our DNA. People forget that we were hunter-gatherers for 90% of our time on Earth. For The barbarians of the North we were in that tribal stage for 99.5% of our evolutionary window.
We are still in the transition phase of getting used to stranger danger. I have relatively low expectations for us so therefore I am not angry nor disappointed I think we're doing just fine, LOL.
Oh, so we're back to "its complicated". I don't like the phrase "Bucket list". But i do like the descriptor "Bucket seats". So, now you know where I can stand on buckets.
"Play to win."
I thought the point of all of this affirmative action racial shit was to help make up for past injustices, not an attempt to beat out others to win a prize.
Silly me.
Conservatives had their chance to get rid of affirmative action and all this racial classification that discriminates against white people. But they refused to do it in the 70s and 80s. 60 years after the civil rights movement, there's no reason for it.
OTOH, there is a rationale for having government workforces and universities "Look like America". That's why colleges should have at least 60 percent their freshman class made up of white Chrstians.
Wilbur said...
I remember the Hank Williams song "My Race Bucket's Got a Hole in It."
i aint got no queer?
Our entire health system is now run by a heroin addict who got into Harvard by writing his name on the top of his college application and yet it's vital that we go over Mamdani's college application with a fine-tooth comb..
Trump calls Jews "shylocks" and had a close advisor who gives Hitler salutes, but the real antisemitism problem is a mayoral candidate who has worked on campaigns for Jewish candidates, and has been endorsed by many high-ranking Jewish elected officials.
My only disagreement is that saying there’s a double standard implies that there’s *any* standard applied to this administration.
I didn't quite understand the article. Maybe if I read it a few more times. My gist is that the writer believes that being white is some kind of privilege, and that white people should be more humble and not complain about things.....Mamdani doesn't belong to a minority. He belong to an elite. His mother is worth millions and his father is an Ivy League professor. He never once in his life entertained the notion of enlisting in the military or going to a community college. I got the sense that the writer feels that someone like Mamdani is less privileged than someone like Vance. That's just not true, and I'm more entitled to my various grievances than Mamdani who seems to have had an easy ride thus far.
We could use proper terms like continuous and non-continuous.
Racial categories hav fluid meanings and uses depending on political advantage.
The left:
1. Universalists deny that race exists "it's just skin color" by emphasizing our 99%+ genetic overlap and the genetic blurring/mating that occurs on the edges between all local groups. Then they ignore science and the massive stair-steps of genetic gaps versus chimps and every other mammal don't exist. They want it both ways.
2. They conduct university research on the breeding of modern humans with every ancient fertile ape nearby (i.e., Europe -> Neanderthals; Asians -> Denisovians; West Africans -> a very old "ghost" species not that long ago). They are updating the eugenics of 100 years ago with extremely detailed and specific data.
3. They demand and demand that ordinary popular racial categories be part of laws and equity preference formulas. This continues "one drop of black blood makes you black" thinking -- see everything coming out of Justice KB Jackson's subculture. See the Biden administration's 2024 rewrite of the government's official racial categories here:
https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2024/03/29/2024-06469/revisions-to-ombs-statistical-policy-directive-no-15-standards-for-maintaining-collecting-and
The political right:
1. Knows outsiders when they see 'em. They look different, speak different, and act different. They ain't kin.
2. Generally accepts friendly non-competing outsiders after a while, but doesn't tolerate the destruction of an internal culture. They are as open to interracial marriages as the nominal left, hence cultural blurring at the border. This is universal, and there many pro-segregation socially conservative BLACKS too.
3. They don't think too hard. It's just the way it is and it'll never change.
Two-eyed Jack said...
“It is instructive to read U.S. v Bhagat Singh Thind to get the century-ago perspective. There are two races, those that will intermarry with the descendants of the original European settlers and blacks. [A]nd we don't need a third.”
In WWII, African-Americans served in Black units, and Japanese-Americans served in segregated units, mainly the 442nd. Everybody else? White units(*).
(*) - The Navajo Code Talkers were not segregated units. Technically, anyone who was a fluent speaker of Navajo could be a candidate. But Navajo was chosen precisely because only the few Navajo, plus a few language professors could speak it.
And they weren’t just speaking Navajo; they were using a code that required speaking in Navajo using Navajo words. There was the case of a Navajo soldier who was captured by the Japanese in the fall of Corregidor (I think). The Japanese tortured him to try to get him to translate the intercepted messages. But while he could identify the Navajo words, he did not know the code, and the messages were gibberish to him.
Hillary was so much more respectable. She put us in a basket.
Actually the NYT newspaper protected the identity of a hacker that a NYT reporter called a Nazi while reporting something very important about Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for New York City mayor:
When he was 17 years old applying to college, he checked multiple boxes on a race question. He applied to Columbia and declared himself to be of Indian descent (Asian), but he was born in Uganda , and lived in South Africa before moving to NY (African American).
You cannot have it both ways, son. Dad was on the faculty at Columbia but the kid was not admitted because he checked two race boxes.
That's it. That's the story.
..""Race in America is often presented in two buckets: White and non-White...."
Misread as “Rice in America is often presented in two buckets: White and non-White...."
Makes more sense.
So how many residents of South Africa of Afrikaner (Dutch) ancestry checked "African American" on their applications? Technically, Elon Musk is an African-American.
RideSpaceMountain said...
@Steve Austin Showed Up For Work, your comment made me remember and then paraphrase a quote from J.E.B. Stuart regarding the USA's original, original sin:
"We will regret slavery but once, and that will be continuously."
We will never be allowed to not regret it, no matter how much time intervenes apparently.
Just watched a video about Apple and their integration with China and Foxconn.
Apparently “employees” at factories making Apple IPhones installed nets around the windows of the factory to keep people from being able to jump out the windows and kill themselves.
Slavery exists today in most of the world. There are more slaves today in the world than there were during the height of the trans Atlantic slave trade. The United States and Great Britain are the only countries that are actually fighting against it.
Democrats are currently rebelling against the country because they don’t want to give up their exploited foreign labor.
This issue needs to be addressed honestly. Apple and Nike and many multinational corporations are modern day slave traders.
Explains Philip Bump, in "The useful political lesson from Zohran Mamdani’s college application/America’s understanding of race and ethnicity is still woefully simplistic" (WaPo).
We always knew that racist affirmative action policies were never about helping black people. It is clear now that these policies hurt opportunities for black people. The numbers are unarguable and rich white women took all of the opportunities poor blacks were supposed to get.
It was always about rich upper class progressives getting advantages through bureaucracy.
Mamdani is just another rich progressive politician stealing from black people. This is what they do.
Cast down your bucket where you are. - Booker T.
If we followed his advice, we wouldn’t have all these other groups to sort thru.
RR
JSM
It is only "woefully simplistic" when covering the ass of, oh, I don't know, maybe a candidate for mayor of NY, NY.
Otherwise Mr. Bump will be happy to pin you down to a fair thee well.
"What America needs now is a simple chart to sort out all the coloreds."
Leftists could start with the latest version of the gender flag. By the time they get through the infighting the singularity will have eliminated the entire subject.
"We are all members of the human race. Defining race by skin color serves only to facilitate discrimination."
Nonsense. It's entirely possible to discriminate on the basis of skin color without dragging "race" into it.
'Bucket' is appropriate for a lot of categorizing - there's no depth of difference that requires action, so one bucket is very much like another, and no-one cares.
But there are still two buckets, buckets into which people with mixed racial backgrounds jump (or are dropped) depending on circumstance.
Manifestly, there are more than two buckets. Don't we have like five or six or more racial categories on forms? It sounds like Bump is saying that because Mamdani is non-white it doesn't matter what sort of non-white he is. If that's not what Bump is saying, then what is he saying? And is it really a burden to have a "mixed racial background" or is it something like an opportunity? If Mamdani really were part black or part African as well as part Asian, wouldn't that have been a plus for him?
*
Somebody -- I think it was Richard Brookhiser in his book on WASPs -- said that African-Americans, Native Americans, and WASPs were the mythic, ur-categories of Americans, and the rest of us - Irish, Italian, Jewish, Mexican, Chinese, Polish, Lebanese - didn't have the kind of resonance those primal categories had. He may have had a point.
African American is a fine name for Blacks. I want to ban the "W"-word from polite conversation. I identify as a Euro-American from many different tribes. Also, if you ask a Nigerian-American if they are African American, they'll tell you way!
No way, dammit.
Always proof 3X.
Those EFFing lefties can join the MSM in tossing each others’ salads.
I’m a Scandinavian-German-Scottish American. That doesn’t tell you anything about me.
My dad was in the army in the late 60’s and retired in 1980. That was what defined me, and any black guy with that same general background has more in common with me than anyone in the world. Same army schools, same army neighborhoods, same cultural influences (common to everyone of that age bracket).
'sound and fury signifying nothing told by an idiot' thats what bump is saying,
the other way to say it is Mamdani is ashamed of his Indian heritage,
He joined the army in 1961, so I shouldn’t say he was only in the army in the late 60’s. That was just when I knew him.
I could probably add that when my dad retired, we lived in a podunk town in the Pacific Northwest. I served on the Navy for one enlistment.
I tell these details to show what made me who I am today. Not my race. Same neighborhoods, same shitty schools as all my probably 40% of black classmates. I used to troll libs in the day by telling them that I was more black than Obama, culturally.
Either the first part of my comment glitched out, or I didn’t fully submit it somehow. I said:
I am Scandinavian-German-Scottish American. That doesn’t tell you anything about me. My dad was in the army in the 60’s until his retirement in 1980.
So a black guy with that background- same schools, same neighborhoods, same cultural points of reference- has more in common with me than anyone in the world.
Does anyone know what "race" is? I don't.
It seems like a lot of the people in the non-white bucket are trying awfully hard to relocate themselves to countries established by people in the white bucket.
ADDED: By the way, I loathe the increasingly common use of the word "bucket" to mean "category."
I’m with you, Althouse, but the advantage for Bump is that using “buckets” gets pretty absolute — you drop real objects into real buckets and the objects are in at most one bucket. Maybe the object falls into no bucket at all, but that’s probably okay.
By contrast we humans are totally comfortable with the idea that we — slippery weasels that we are — can be in multiple different categories at the same time. Tougher to divide people and set them at each others’ throats if there are folks in categories on both sides of the dividing line.
I am of scotch Irish German descent blonde now Grey hair blue eyes white as Casper.
On Bluesky I am a person of color. Because I am Puerto Rican. One lady thinks I look "swarthy"
John Henry
P
"It seems like a lot of the people in the non-white bucket are trying awfully hard to relocate themselves to countries established by people in the white bucket."
The United States of America: A country so racist, so evil, so corrupt, and so tyrannical that its greatest critics never want to leave.
Silos is more pretentious than buckets
I refuse to answer race questions. When asked why, I say it's because there is no ethnic breakdown of Caucasians. I'm primarily Scots-Irish. That doesn't rate very highly with the WASPs. The Jews, full Irish, the Italians, the Slavs and other white ethnicities have a different story than the understood WASP white privilege. We're all honorary white when it comes to deciding who to exclude from the best colleges, regardless of test scores.
I was clued to this by a wealthy Jewish girl I knew in college (70s). I told her about how crushed my mom had been to be denied a membership in the DAR, even though she had carefully researched all the needed information. After a brief discussion of our background she said "It's because y'all are Scots Irish, they don't think you to be any more white that we are."
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