Date: Mon, 17 Dec 2001 01:46:01 -0800 (PST) From: "f.johan.beisser" <jan@caustic.org> To: Greg Lehey <grog@FreeBSD.ORG> Cc: David Greenman <dg@root.com>, "Jason C. Wells" <jcwells@highperformance.net>, FreeBSD Chat <chat@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Re: Political Correctness on -chat (was: Why no Indians and Arabs?) Message-ID: <20011217010244.I16958-100000@localhost> In-Reply-To: <20011217192503.P14500@monorchid.lemis.com>
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On Mon, 17 Dec 2001, Greg Lehey wrote: > It seems that I have completely misunderstood at least the US members > of the FreeBSD project. FreeBSD represents a new social phenomenon, > and we've already discussed the demography in terms of male/female > (im)balance and age distribution. An obvious other one is cultural > distribution. agreed. > It seems that people in the USA have a hangup about this; sorry, guys, > I didn't want to offend anybody. I don't think there's anything wrong > in the question, though. As somebody else pointed out, there are > times when you want to recognize people by their appearance or > ethnic/cultural background. I don't agree with his criteria, but it's > an obvious thing to do. I grew up with a large number of both Arabic > and Indian friends (to the point where, at the age of 12, I spoke > English with a Tamil accent), so you can hardly claim I was > discriminating against them. I'm sure that most of my friends of this > time would be as surprised about the reactions to my message as I am. i've found it's mostly motivated by people feeling guilty and offended for noticing someones ethnic background. there is a certain amount of paranoia about race here in the US; after all, it's only relatively recently that the "Separate but equal" laws have been repealed or made unconsitutional. i have to admit, this thread did catch me off guard, not so much because of the reactions to it, rather the fact that this came up at all. while i don't doubt your intentions with this (how could i? this would be interesting data), i can see how some people would take this badly. > Why should that mean there's nothing to talk about? I now know of one > representative each of the groups I'm talking about. Why so few? right now, it may be a bad time to ask this kind of a question, being a mere 3 months since septemer 11th (i wish there were a better set of words for this, since naming something after a date is just odd). there is still quite a bit of racist reactions going on around here, and honestly, i can't blame anyone for not telling about their background or ethnicity. -------/ f. johan beisser /--------------------------------------+ http://caustic.org/~jan jan@caustic.org "John Ashcroft is really just the reanimated corpse of J. Edgar Hoover." -- Tim Triche To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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