Letters to the Editor
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(he is black; I'm white). I'm barely aware my sweetheart and I are different races until I see us in photographs
Aww! Well, I guarantee you HE'S aware of it.
I think you have a lot to learn. That you would consider comparing an old guy dating a teenager to your situation PROVES you have a lot to learn.
"Color blindness" sounds so lovely, but it is just another form of white privilege.
Sorry to get off-topic.
-Someone in the same kind of interracial relationship
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""Color blindness" sounds so lovely, but it is just another form of white privilege."
Gosh, you're making it sound bad.
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just don't buy the idea that neural connections aren't completed until age 25
Visit any medical research site and do a little searching. The latest MRI research of brain strucure and synapses (the nerve connections) reveals that the final connections and ultimate function don't mature til the early 20 to mid 20s. And the last part of the brain to develop is the critical decision making section. I didn't base this on what I think or feel or observed among friends, but research at medical and physiological web sites.
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Thanks...
Thanks to the Age Difference Police for getting on this case so quickly.
But has no one noticed that men of 40 are not middle-aged any more. When I was a young person, men of 40 wore coats and ties and one pair of shoes lasted a lifetime. Now they have been juvenilized and you only have to look at William Bradley "Brad" Pitt to see an example of a man well into his 40's who looks, acts, and dresses like a college boy as his newest inamorata leads him around by the nose.
And the women. She is 23. Like a large proportion of American women, she has had a child before the age of 21. Once you have a child, all ages are equalized, because being responsible for another person is the same whatever age you are.
But I digress. This young woman will not come back. "Needing space" is a well-known euphemism for wanting out of a relationship. It has nothing to do with space, physical or metaphysical, as commonly known. Nor is she planning to become an astronaut.
What he needs is... der, der... A NEW PUPPY, or in this case a new girlfriend. If the news has got out that he is newly single, and that there is a spare kid's bedroom in his house, he will soon be besieged with lonely women who are willing to take over the empty space in his nest.
So introduce him to more people, advertise his singlehood from the rooftops, then stand back and applaud his choice of a new partner.
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I love to learn
--I think you have a lot to learn. That you would consider comparing an old guy dating a teenager to your situation PROVES you have a lot to learn.
"Color blindness" sounds so lovely, but it is just another form of white privilege.--
Your 'color blindness' line sounds like something you'd see in The Onion. I can tell you're trying to say something serious, but I can't figure out what it is. What lesson do I need to learn? And how old are you anyway, Anonymous....? I have a feeling you're a lot younger than I am (47), but I'm open to learning lessons from someone of any age. I'm listening.
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colourblindness, i get your point anonymous
I remember reading something Patricia Hill Collins wrote about colourblindness and controlling images of black women. She was describing how a black women felt insulted when her friend said :" i don't even think of you as black" because implicit in such a comment is the fact that " i think of you as white, or i dont think of your race at all" and historically black women have had to be more white to be accepted (straight hair, lighter skin....etc).
Accepting colour in a interracial relationship is better than not thinking about it or limiting it to photographs, as there is a *great* difference between an equality based relationship and an *equity* based relationship.
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You asked for it
"I just don't buy the idea that neural connections aren't completed until age 25. Is that true with every individual?"
http://www.nimh.nih.gov/publicat/teenbrain.cfm
http://www.usaweekend.com/03_issues/030518/030518teenbrain.html
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1101040510-631970,00.html
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14738243
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/5327550.stm
As for colorblindness, this was written by Ian Haney Lopez, a professor at Boalt Hall, Berkeley's law school.
http://chronicle.com/weekly/v53/i11/11b00601.htm
Colorblindness badly errs when it excuses racially correlated inequality in our society as unproblematic so long as no one uses a racial epithet. It also egregiously fails when it tars every explicit reference to race. To break the interlocking patterns of racial hierarchy, there is no other way but to focus on, talk about, and put into effect constructive policies explicitly engaged with race. To be sure, inequality in wealth is a major and increasing challenge for our society, but class is not a substitute for a racial analysis — though, likewise, racial oppression cannot be lessened without sustained attention to poverty. It's no accident that the poorest schools in the country warehouse minorities, while the richest serve whites; the national education crisis reflects deeply intertwined racial and class politics. One does not deny the imbrication of race and class by insisting on the importance of race-conscious remedies: The best strategies for social repair will give explicit attention to race as well as to other sources of inequality, and to their complex interrelationship.
The claim that race and racism exist only when specifically mentioned allows colorblindness to protect a new racial politics from criticism. The mobilization of public fears along racial lines has continued over the past several decades under the guise of interlinked panics about criminals, welfare cheats, terrorists, and — most immediately in this political season — illegal immigrants. Attacks ostensibly targeting "culture" or "behavior" rather than "race" now define the diatribes of today's racial reactionaries. Samuel P. Huntington's jeremiad against Latino immigration in his book Who Are We?: The Challenges to America's National Identity rejects older forms of white supremacy, but it promotes the idea of a superior Anglo-Protestant culture. Patrick J. Buchanan defends his latest screed attacking "illegal immigrants," State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America, against the charge of racism by insisting that he's indifferent to race but outraged by those with different cultures who violate our laws. My point is not simply that culture and behavior provide coded language for old prejudices, but that colorblindness excuses and insulates this recrudescence of xenophobia by insisting that only the explicit use of racial nomenclature counts as racism.
Contemporary colorblindness loudly proclaims its antiracist pretensions. To actually move toward a racially egalitarian society, however, requires that we forthrightly respond to racial inequality today. The alternative is the continuation of colorblind white dominance. As Justice Harry Blackmun enjoined in defending affirmative action in Bakke: "In order to get beyond racism, we must first take account of race. There is no other way."