First off, I hope this examination is welcome; I've come to greatly appreciate most of what you say and I don't want this particular small issue to cause you to think of me as an enemy. If it's alienating you, I'm glad to drop it.
That said, I can answer better if you could explain how you parse the whole sentence, including the words "and caste divisions". Please briefly paraphrase the meaning(s) you take from the whole sentence.
I ask because I cannot see a sensible way to parse the whole sentence which binds "unfortunate" to "skin" rather than to "divisions". Parelleling "skin" and "caste" as types of unfortunate divisions is extremely logical, while parelleling "unfortunate skin" and "caste divisions' doesn't make sense to me, semantically or syntactically.
However, if we stopped reading after the word "skin" I would agree with you.
So maybe I don't understand correctly how you interpret the (whole) sentence, and that needs to be cleared up before I build any argument upon a false understanding.
"First off, I hope this examination is welcome; I've come to greatly appreciate most of what you say and I don't want this particular small issue to cause you to think of me as an enemy"
No, no worries there. I rely on you guys to keep me honest. If I thought of everybody who occasionally disagreed with me as an enemy I'd have very few friends😁
I'm simply reading "the fact of our unfortunate skin" and "caste divisions" separately. Caste divisions aren't even a meaningful way to describe divisions in the west.
But the issue here is that you're working off less information than I am. It's as if you had a conversation with a friend of yours, you recounted it to me, and then I wanted to debate what they meant by a particular phrase. It's not that I don't see that there's more than one way to interpret the sentence, it's about context.
First off, I hope this examination is welcome; I've come to greatly appreciate most of what you say and I don't want this particular small issue to cause you to think of me as an enemy. If it's alienating you, I'm glad to drop it.
That said, I can answer better if you could explain how you parse the whole sentence, including the words "and caste divisions". Please briefly paraphrase the meaning(s) you take from the whole sentence.
I ask because I cannot see a sensible way to parse the whole sentence which binds "unfortunate" to "skin" rather than to "divisions". Parelleling "skin" and "caste" as types of unfortunate divisions is extremely logical, while parelleling "unfortunate skin" and "caste divisions' doesn't make sense to me, semantically or syntactically.
However, if we stopped reading after the word "skin" I would agree with you.
So maybe I don't understand correctly how you interpret the (whole) sentence, and that needs to be cleared up before I build any argument upon a false understanding.
"First off, I hope this examination is welcome; I've come to greatly appreciate most of what you say and I don't want this particular small issue to cause you to think of me as an enemy"
No, no worries there. I rely on you guys to keep me honest. If I thought of everybody who occasionally disagreed with me as an enemy I'd have very few friends😁
I'm simply reading "the fact of our unfortunate skin" and "caste divisions" separately. Caste divisions aren't even a meaningful way to describe divisions in the west.
But the issue here is that you're working off less information than I am. It's as if you had a conversation with a friend of yours, you recounted it to me, and then I wanted to debate what they meant by a particular phrase. It's not that I don't see that there's more than one way to interpret the sentence, it's about context.