With regard to the math context, I feel blessed that my math teachers were not wannabe history teachers. It was never important to me where it came from. The steady white supremacy drone is something else.
I recently read a Medium article that talked about white supremacy in Thailand that caught my eye. My wife watches Thai television ov…
With regard to the math context, I feel blessed that my math teachers were not wannabe history teachers. It was never important to me where it came from. The steady white supremacy drone is something else.
I recently read a Medium article that talked about white supremacy in Thailand that caught my eye. My wife watches Thai television over the internet and has mentioned that the "stars" are fair skinned and have Western (white) facial features. Surgery or biracial, probably a bit of both. My brown skinned wife notices. While the changes in facial features are new, the light vs. dark skin thing is old news. Fifty plus years ago she spoke matter-of-factly without disparagement of how the women in Chang Mai were light skinned.
Light and dark unmistakably Asian people have always been a thing and perhaps it's just that I failed to notice it making a difference to them. The vanishing wide pug nose does seem to be an embrace of white beauty standards. She calls it the old Thai face vs. the new Thai face. Could that have something to do with white supremacy? I'm not the right person to answer that. Their history is quite different from ours. The beginning of the abolition of slavery in Thailand began in 1874. Slavery there, as in most of world history had no connection to Trans-Saharan or Trans-Atlantic slavery. They don't have that issue.
When I think of white supremacy, I think of the Ku Klux Klan, and I have no doubt that the use of that label is intended to bring that association. Does the Asian embrace of white beauty standards have anything to do with that? For that matter, does the current trend in black women adopting the long straight hair of their Asian and south of the border sisters have something to do with White supremacism? I didn't try to discuss it with the author of the article because he proceeded to outright racism and I just didn't have the energy for a discussion with someone who labels me a racist because of the color of my skin. An exercise in futility.
I will ask here. Where is the line between actual white supremacy and everything white is white supremacy? Why is that so hard?
"Where is the line between actual white supremacy and everything white is white supremacy? Why is that so hard?"
As I understand it, white supremacy differs from good old-fashioned racism in that it isn't just hatred, it presupposes that white people are superior to other "races" and works to ensure that white people hold the ascendancy in society through legal and other means.
There's a strong argument to be made that America in particular was built on that premise. The superiority of white, land-owning men was literally built into the constitution.
The conversation we're having today is, have the various efforts to correct that gone far enough? And if not, what else needs to be done? I've yet to hear a coherent policy plan from anybody talking about white supremacy today. It's all, "mathematics is built on white supremacy," or "capitalism is white supremacy."
The question of whether too much emphasis is still placed on the contributions of white people in history is fair enough. Just as the question of whether too much emphasis is placed on the contributions of men. The point J raises about his son drawing blond-haired, blue-eyed "self-portraits" is really meaningful. But describing this as white supremacy, and acting as if all white people today are responsible for the various factors that affect his son's self-image, is a recipe for not fixing the problem.
The multi-racial have self-image issues beyond those served to them by the zeitgeist. I didn't give enough thought to that for my daughters as they grew up. Now one of them has grown very interested in ancestry. Perhaps on behalf of her children who will have to deal with it.
You probably know who Rhiannon Giddens is, but if you don't, here. She has a levelheaded approach. I think that many white people resist the issue because it is perceived as being served in a goblet of venom. There's an old expression about it not always being about what you say, but how you say it. Some truth in that but not that simple.
“The multi-racial have self-image issues beyond those served to them by the zeitgeist.”
Absolutely. So do some black people. So do some women. So do some gay people. So do some white people. I don’t think identity issues are unique to multi-racial people. Especially today. Society seems to have become pathologically focused on which group of people in history we should align ourselves with.
I think the belief that our skin or even our genes define us is inevitably toxic, because it tempts us to take credit for things we didn’t do, and to compete with others over things they didn’t do.
I’m much more focused on what I personally achieve than what a black person 100 or 1000 years ago did. I’m much more interested in wisdom in general than the skin colour of the person who expressed it. I object to that skin colour being *lied* about, of course, but mainly because lying about it is simply a different way of focusing on it.
Agreed. Just as the mother in the story paid too much of the wrong kind of thought/action to the issue, I probably paid too little.
As an indication of how much, or little, ancestry/ethnicity can mean to people and how quickly it can change recently happened under my roof. One of my wife's dearest friends (the whole family actually) for over 20 years is Vietnamese. One day my wife mentioned that that friend was Chinese. When I said, she's Vietnamese, my wife said, "That's what country she's from but she's Chinese. Chinese people are all over the place you know." I'm not sure what inspired that, they are still best of friends. No foul. The people of Southeast Asia are more inclined to see themselves as cousins than siblings in ancestral/genetic closeness than outsider can see.
Thanks to my daughter's interest in such things, she did the 23&me DNA thing and asked us to. My wife thinks of herself as Thai with a Laotian paternal grandmother. The DNA said that she is also about a quarter Vietnamese/Chinese Dai. The Dai are from the south of China and are widely scattered throughout Southeast Asea but mostly in Vietnam (the chinese people all over the place). That piece of information changed nothing about my wife's thoughts on who she is. She's never been to Vietnam and has no cultural history there. Her poker face indicated that her Vietnamese friend's history and cultural influence is in Vietnam, she's never been to China, was dissonant with, "She's Chinese." I didn't rub her nose in that, it occurred to her.
Three takeaways from that. We often hold contrary notions so far in the background that it is without cognitive dissonance until a light is shined on it. What is important or unimportant at one moment can change quite suddenly. Your own personal experience and cultural influence is more important than that of your ancestors (your thought above). A very good reason for the conversations you inspire here. Thinking about that mass of contradictions in our heads.
In Vietnam the white-skinned woman thing is horrifying. One sees a lot of lesions forming on the upper cheeks, and some older women only had the fronts of their faces bleached; from the side they are as dark as ever, Plastic nose bridges are commonplace. Even tiny convenience stores selling little more than vegetables and instant noodles have a rack of skin bleaching packets.
I read about one guy who was talking online with a Vietnamese girl; after many months he decided to come out and meet her and prepare to marry. Her parents got all excited and got her surgeries, nose bridge, bleaching. When the guy arrived at the airport and she came running to the gate to meet her paramour he didn't recognize her, and when she explained he went back to the ticket counter and got the first return flight he could get.
I was so surprised by this the first time I went to Asia. I'd never heard of face whitening before I went to Japan. I've never seen plastic nose bridges though! What are they for?
Wow! I'm not aware of skin bleaching in Thailand though years ago I knew a woman who powdered her face to excess.
Given Vietnam's history, French colonialism and American military involvement it is hard for me to imagine a political fetish for white Western beauty standards. From what I have read, the left behind children fathered by Americans were not treated well. That would of course have been political.
There does seem to be a worldwide preference among many for "lighter." I still wonder about white supremacy claims pertaining to that. Am I just blind to it as a white man, even though I am probably atypical on my side about race?
Hopefully I haven't gone on a tangent from Steve's topic but I do think the broadend scope of white supremacism beyond the aftermath of trans-Atlantic slavery may have some truth that I may be missing. I can't just automatically dismiss it, even though I see it often as hyperbole.
"There does seem to be a worldwide preference among many for "lighter." I still wonder about white supremacy claims pertaining to that. Am I just blind to it as a white man, even though I am probably atypical on my side about race?"
I wouldn't call it white supremacy- colorism has a long history in East Asia. My parents, and other elders I've asked have generally attributed it to classism: darker skin = poor people working outside, lighter skin = rich people inside protected from the sun. I think Asian cultures' long history of favoring hierarchical organizational structures probably exacerbates the classism in some way as well, but that's personal speculation.
I've been trying to recall some good sources of reading about the topic, but frustratingly enough the majority of English-language sources or documentation that Google is serving me is stuff that was only written in the last five-to-ten years and either focused on Asian-Americans or trying to blame it all on western colonialism (or both). This is frustrating so I'm going to look deeper when I've got more free time.
The shallowness and superficiality in the middle and upper classes is hard to imagine here.
The traditional Vietnamese music is being driven out by pop, truly terrible pop; the western stuff is crap nobody over 14 in the USA would listen to, but it's still better than the Vietnamese pop, where all melodies are arpeggios and all tonality is tonic-dominant.
Dark skin is so deprecated that it eliminates any employment above labor.
"Dark skin is so deprecated that it eliminates any employment above labor."
Do you think this is something mostly seen between Vietnamese people? When I visited Vietnam, I was really struck by how curious people were about the colour of my skin. But it was wholly positive. They were fascinated by it, they kept telling me how beautiful it was, lots of people wanted photos with me or just to chat (though that might have been about speaking English).
There seems to be a marked divide when it comes to racism in parts of Asia, where older people are more likely to be very openly racist, but below 40 or so, people are unusually celebratory of differences.
Oh man, that's sad. I sometimes listened to Vietnamese radio in the 60s. Beautiful music. The vocals were melodic though I never learned any Vietnamese words that had no military purpose i enjoyed it. I don't need to say what some of the Americans had to say about that ;0(
I like some of the traditional music because it's tonally foreign and very modal. Some modes have a single quarter tone. But it doesn't reach m as it does them.
But the traditional music is only rural now and even here there is a lot of dreary techno. In western-influenced pop they like extremely simple tonality; half the songs sound like The Godfather theme, Aeolian mode (A to a on the white keys)
There were six different traditional modes, three are now extinct. I have a sepia photo of blind musicians who went from village to village performing ... it's dated 1906.
If you were hearing ejoyable singers they were probably Filipino. as are most live performers. Almost all Vietnamese are completely tone deaf.
I do like modal music. As a banjo player I like music classified as Americana which is a blend of origins (Afro Caribbean and European), like America. The blues pentatonic is formed by dropping the semitones from Phrygian so it kinda sorta survives. Dorian is a more popular minor scale than Aeolian and Mixolydian is popular in music I like. I do have an attachment to a tonic home base and never got into atonal music though I'm fine with key changes to the dominant fifth. Music is the most wonderful thing in the world and it is sad what is happening to it.
Years ago, I worked with a guy who composed electronic atonal music. I had no way to judge if it was good or bad. He was a percussionist away from electronic music.
When I mentioned Phrygian it was with reference to its basis for pentatonic mode 1. I really only hear it from Middle Eastern sounding music as a complete modal scale.
My proudest: The Forces, Dawn of Comprehension. Forces starting at 2:44 I am very proud of. Strands has some of that hybrid modal stuff.
My goal: Brooding. Very well-liked.
Greatness of Rome is about the Trionfi, the returning triumphal armies.
Gone came out of a dream.
Some silly techno just for practice (Pinhasoid came out quite good), some covers (George Harrison, Bartók, Eno); the Bartók is quintal chords, I saw it live in 1973 and it changed my life. Second Piano Concerto, Adagio,
I am redoing Forces with some development. As you can hear, I need work on production and mastering.
Stuff to do today and haven't listened to all of it but I like what you've done on what I've listened to. I need to listen again and in what did he do here mode rather than just enjoy the music mode.
I'll politely disagree. Other than a black key scale having no semitones (critical to the concept of anhemitonic (nonhemitonic, no half steps) pentatonics it's way of looking at its usefulness ends there. The five pentatonic modes are positively modal.
The second semitone following a note (7th) in Lydian and Ionian is the tonic so there is no associated pentatonic mode.
Pentatonic Mode 1 is formed by dropping the semitones from Phrygian. Often thought of as blues minor.
Pentatonic Mode 2 is formed by dropping the semitones from Mixolydian. A major sounding scale. Popular in country and pop.
Pentatonic Mode 3 is formed by dropping the semitones from Aeolian.
Pentatonic Mode 4 is formed by dropping the semitones from Locrian. Not a popular pentatonic mode because of its tri-tone sans dominant 5th.
Pentatonic Mode 5 is formed by dropping the semitones from Dorian. It yields a scale that is neither Major or minor and is often used in music thought of as modal in old-time music.
Modes 1, 2 & 5 are the most popular of the pentatonic modes, at least in the US.
And yeah, the Locrian tri-tone (the devil's interval) was a no-no back then.
I just noodled around with that Super Locrian. Adding the Major 3rd makes the absence of the dominant 5th less jarring and a somewhat exotic sounding scale. Kind of cool. Thanks for mentioning it.
"She calls it the old Thai face vs. the new Thai face. Could that have something to do with white supremacy?" No, unless Richard Spencer and Steve Bannon are over in Thailand telling people that the 'old Thai face' is uglier than the new one. This, and Steve's debater complaining her son drew a self-portrait with blond hair and blue eyes, is a result of American/European cultural exportation. We create content about white people featuring white people, others see it and are influenced by it. Several years ago I Googled "why are Indian men so aggressive/into white women" out of frustration of having been romantically targeted for years in Canada by brown dudes (Middle Easterners too, but Indians are just relentless) and I discovered that they got socialized to respond to white beauty because of pornography, which is produced of course mostly by Europeans and North Americans.
There's a whiteness problem here for sure but calling it 'white supremacy' is inaccurate, since WS is first and foremost about a *conscious commitment to the notion that white skin connotes greater value and that all others are inferior* (Corollary: The same goes for the non-penised). I don't believe Americans or others exported primarily white content to other countries for some sinister white supremacy cause. They made shit about themselves, having not been pushed until recently to diversify, and because it was popular here they exported it elsewhere where it was also popular, esp if it spoke to human values and experiences we all share. The indoctrination to desire white beauty is, AFAIC, a side effect rather than a sinister agenda.
We need a better description for this specific problem than 'white supremacy'. White enculturation? Or better yet, something less racial since it's really not about exporting white values, but, well, simply making money.
Indian men in the west must have it rough. I've never met anyone, straight woman or gay man, who was attracted to them. They have a reputation for being incredibly obnoxious though I've known many who were gracious.
Get the candor of someone with power to hire and ask about Indians.
India's a highly diverse country, racially, ethnically and linguistically. They have some of the hottest guys...when I first moved here an Indian friend and I went to see a movie starring the Indian actor John Abraham and I just fell in love with him. Abraham was, at the time (17 years ago) drop dead gorgeous with huge brown eyes...I'm a sucker for big brown eyes. I'm not averse to Indian men (or Middle Eastern ones, they can be pretty hot too) but I'm always on my guard because those are famously misogynist parts of the world. Too often they come to the West without the social skills to handle friendships or relationships with women and they likely run afoul of feminists and egalitarianism.
What do you know about hiring Indians? I used to work for an Indian-owned small company, it was a pretty good multiple-stretches-of-employment except for one phase when my boss sexually harassed me, but I attribute it more to middle-aged dumbass male stupidity than his being Indian, because it happened well into our professional relationship, not at the beginning (when I was several years younger and arguably hotter).
I have to be careful in responding because an honest reporting of my experiences will have some people screaming "racism!" at me. I'll just restrict it to three observations, all of which I swear to be true.
1) the two best managers I have ever had in over thirty years of software work were both Indian.
2) a few of the best programmers I have ever worked with were Indian (none of these worked from India)
3) every single one of the worst programmers I have ever worked with, both in terms of being programmers and in being coworkers, were Indian. Every single one. If you knew anything about the work I could tell you stories that would have your jaw on the floor,
I had a manager who led the way to hiring in/from India. My field was not exactly "programming" although I wrote tons of it. It was test engineering where I developed hardware interfaces and wrote software for automatic test of avionics hardware. Early on she brought in programmers who didn't understand the electronics that they were writing software to test. It did not go well. By the time I retired they were taking over much, if not most of the software work I did, except in areas of ITAR and dual use restricted technology. I was still doing the hardware stuff and was the technical lead on projects they were involved in.
I will say that the ones I worked with in the end were competent, hardworking and pleasant to work with. Like Americans and the ones that I worked with from other countries, some were very good and some not so much. But this thread of conversation is about them as people. They were people. In the end, race and culture made little to no difference in my experience with working with them.
With the exceptions I noted my experience has been starkly different.
I don't want to talk about race. It's a huge country with many distinct ethnicities and languages. What I will mention, at risk of being called names, is work ethic. The coworkers I mentioned who did solid work had been in the USA for some time and picked up the (long dead) culture of excellence in software. Most never did.
Far more common, universal among recent arrivals, was an adamant and aggressive mediocrity, doing the absolute least they could get away with doing, triumphally announcing every (badly) cleared task in email (when nobody else did) but otherwise completely uncommunicative.
In 2020 I was on a distributed team on a project that ultimately died as I knew it would because the guy doing the back end, named Lijo. was completely incompetent and wouldn't listen to anyone. On the daily zoom call (ugh) his voice was three times louder than anyone else's and he insisted on doing a screen share when he had nothing to demonstrate, hijacking our machines so we could watch him wiggle his mouse. I needed analgesics after every call. There were three other Indians on this team and they were soft-spoken and did good work.
Once I wrote a new back end entrypoint in a language called Django I didn't know very well; I asked him to review it and touch up the syntax. He completely rewrote it, very badly, changing the HTTP status codes so the code calling it wouldn't work anymore, reformatted it to his own preferred illegible slop (reformatting others' code is a serious provocation). It was terrible work. I tried three times to talk to him about it, maybe he had his reasons (wrong. A server exception is 500, not 400, and that's not a matter of style) and he never answered. I finally went to management, something I abhor doing, and all they heard was "conflict in the team." Since the company didn't do much testing they didn't know that his back end was going to fall flat on its face as soon as they prepared for release. I knew it because I usually do back end work. They never released, all that work wasted.
I mentioned hiring. OK, back in the days of the HIV epidemic I went to give blood and they wouldn't take mine because I'm gay and even though most gay men didn't have HIV, we were nevertheless more likely to. Well, such was the case in software hiring; sure there are a lot of good Indian developers but most companies tossed any Patel resume in the trash because the probability of getting a Lijo was just too high. OTOH when the hiring manager was Indian, nobody but other Indians was ever hired. Outsourcing to Indian companies risks having them go silent just before the project is done and then having them steal it and market it themselves.
I wrote about my Lijo experience on Medium, omitting his nationality and his name. I made $2500 from that one article. Apparently it resonated for a lot of people. I bought a Moog with the money.
OK, filter my remark with the following. At first, they were not so good and there were some do as little as possibles in the crowd. Over time a culling process improved them but as you wrote, their best work was when they came to the US which decreased the savings in replacing Americans with them. I moved to a joint venture project with the Chinese and people from India moved off my radar for years. Before I retired, we lost an engineer who was doing a lot of work with people from India, and I was assigned some of it. The ones I had visibility to were doing alright but there was demand for validation at every step.
I think that one difference in our experience may be in your statement. "Since the company didn't do much testing they didn't know that his back end was going to fall flat on its face as soon as they prepared for release." Since my work was about safety of flight and air worthiness for commercial aircraft, rigor was extreme. A great deal of time spent on documentation and review. We were less likely to have ugly surprises although there were ugly revelations during the course of programs that led to terminations and rework, but not whole projects tossed into a dumpster.
I'm a programmer (well, retired now), and I'd be interested. In the stories about bad colleagues, that is; I'm not interested in elaboration about their ethnicities unless especially relevant.
I think one of the many harms that this new, dumbed-down version of "white supremacy" encourages is the erasure of colorism and other associated forms of prejudicial thinking about physical attributes (shapes of noses, kinkiness of hair, etc). Colorism and its like exists across so many cultures. Perhaps it can all be traced back to white supremacy. But colorism comes to play in white cultures and in black, let alone Asian and Latin cultures. It may be connected to white supremacy, but it is a different thing.
With regard to the math context, I feel blessed that my math teachers were not wannabe history teachers. It was never important to me where it came from. The steady white supremacy drone is something else.
I recently read a Medium article that talked about white supremacy in Thailand that caught my eye. My wife watches Thai television over the internet and has mentioned that the "stars" are fair skinned and have Western (white) facial features. Surgery or biracial, probably a bit of both. My brown skinned wife notices. While the changes in facial features are new, the light vs. dark skin thing is old news. Fifty plus years ago she spoke matter-of-factly without disparagement of how the women in Chang Mai were light skinned.
Light and dark unmistakably Asian people have always been a thing and perhaps it's just that I failed to notice it making a difference to them. The vanishing wide pug nose does seem to be an embrace of white beauty standards. She calls it the old Thai face vs. the new Thai face. Could that have something to do with white supremacy? I'm not the right person to answer that. Their history is quite different from ours. The beginning of the abolition of slavery in Thailand began in 1874. Slavery there, as in most of world history had no connection to Trans-Saharan or Trans-Atlantic slavery. They don't have that issue.
When I think of white supremacy, I think of the Ku Klux Klan, and I have no doubt that the use of that label is intended to bring that association. Does the Asian embrace of white beauty standards have anything to do with that? For that matter, does the current trend in black women adopting the long straight hair of their Asian and south of the border sisters have something to do with White supremacism? I didn't try to discuss it with the author of the article because he proceeded to outright racism and I just didn't have the energy for a discussion with someone who labels me a racist because of the color of my skin. An exercise in futility.
I will ask here. Where is the line between actual white supremacy and everything white is white supremacy? Why is that so hard?
"Where is the line between actual white supremacy and everything white is white supremacy? Why is that so hard?"
As I understand it, white supremacy differs from good old-fashioned racism in that it isn't just hatred, it presupposes that white people are superior to other "races" and works to ensure that white people hold the ascendancy in society through legal and other means.
There's a strong argument to be made that America in particular was built on that premise. The superiority of white, land-owning men was literally built into the constitution.
The conversation we're having today is, have the various efforts to correct that gone far enough? And if not, what else needs to be done? I've yet to hear a coherent policy plan from anybody talking about white supremacy today. It's all, "mathematics is built on white supremacy," or "capitalism is white supremacy."
The question of whether too much emphasis is still placed on the contributions of white people in history is fair enough. Just as the question of whether too much emphasis is placed on the contributions of men. The point J raises about his son drawing blond-haired, blue-eyed "self-portraits" is really meaningful. But describing this as white supremacy, and acting as if all white people today are responsible for the various factors that affect his son's self-image, is a recipe for not fixing the problem.
The multi-racial have self-image issues beyond those served to them by the zeitgeist. I didn't give enough thought to that for my daughters as they grew up. Now one of them has grown very interested in ancestry. Perhaps on behalf of her children who will have to deal with it.
You probably know who Rhiannon Giddens is, but if you don't, here. She has a levelheaded approach. I think that many white people resist the issue because it is perceived as being served in a goblet of venom. There's an old expression about it not always being about what you say, but how you say it. Some truth in that but not that simple.
https://www.pbs.org/wnet/firing-line/video/rhiannon-giddens-kkiuzf/
“The multi-racial have self-image issues beyond those served to them by the zeitgeist.”
Absolutely. So do some black people. So do some women. So do some gay people. So do some white people. I don’t think identity issues are unique to multi-racial people. Especially today. Society seems to have become pathologically focused on which group of people in history we should align ourselves with.
I think the belief that our skin or even our genes define us is inevitably toxic, because it tempts us to take credit for things we didn’t do, and to compete with others over things they didn’t do.
I’m much more focused on what I personally achieve than what a black person 100 or 1000 years ago did. I’m much more interested in wisdom in general than the skin colour of the person who expressed it. I object to that skin colour being *lied* about, of course, but mainly because lying about it is simply a different way of focusing on it.
Thanks for the video, I’ll check it out.
Agreed. Just as the mother in the story paid too much of the wrong kind of thought/action to the issue, I probably paid too little.
As an indication of how much, or little, ancestry/ethnicity can mean to people and how quickly it can change recently happened under my roof. One of my wife's dearest friends (the whole family actually) for over 20 years is Vietnamese. One day my wife mentioned that that friend was Chinese. When I said, she's Vietnamese, my wife said, "That's what country she's from but she's Chinese. Chinese people are all over the place you know." I'm not sure what inspired that, they are still best of friends. No foul. The people of Southeast Asia are more inclined to see themselves as cousins than siblings in ancestral/genetic closeness than outsider can see.
Thanks to my daughter's interest in such things, she did the 23&me DNA thing and asked us to. My wife thinks of herself as Thai with a Laotian paternal grandmother. The DNA said that she is also about a quarter Vietnamese/Chinese Dai. The Dai are from the south of China and are widely scattered throughout Southeast Asea but mostly in Vietnam (the chinese people all over the place). That piece of information changed nothing about my wife's thoughts on who she is. She's never been to Vietnam and has no cultural history there. Her poker face indicated that her Vietnamese friend's history and cultural influence is in Vietnam, she's never been to China, was dissonant with, "She's Chinese." I didn't rub her nose in that, it occurred to her.
Three takeaways from that. We often hold contrary notions so far in the background that it is without cognitive dissonance until a light is shined on it. What is important or unimportant at one moment can change quite suddenly. Your own personal experience and cultural influence is more important than that of your ancestors (your thought above). A very good reason for the conversations you inspire here. Thinking about that mass of contradictions in our heads.
In Vietnam the white-skinned woman thing is horrifying. One sees a lot of lesions forming on the upper cheeks, and some older women only had the fronts of their faces bleached; from the side they are as dark as ever, Plastic nose bridges are commonplace. Even tiny convenience stores selling little more than vegetables and instant noodles have a rack of skin bleaching packets.
I read about one guy who was talking online with a Vietnamese girl; after many months he decided to come out and meet her and prepare to marry. Her parents got all excited and got her surgeries, nose bridge, bleaching. When the guy arrived at the airport and she came running to the gate to meet her paramour he didn't recognize her, and when she explained he went back to the ticket counter and got the first return flight he could get.
I was so surprised by this the first time I went to Asia. I'd never heard of face whitening before I went to Japan. I've never seen plastic nose bridges though! What are they for?
Wow! I'm not aware of skin bleaching in Thailand though years ago I knew a woman who powdered her face to excess.
Given Vietnam's history, French colonialism and American military involvement it is hard for me to imagine a political fetish for white Western beauty standards. From what I have read, the left behind children fathered by Americans were not treated well. That would of course have been political.
There does seem to be a worldwide preference among many for "lighter." I still wonder about white supremacy claims pertaining to that. Am I just blind to it as a white man, even though I am probably atypical on my side about race?
Hopefully I haven't gone on a tangent from Steve's topic but I do think the broadend scope of white supremacism beyond the aftermath of trans-Atlantic slavery may have some truth that I may be missing. I can't just automatically dismiss it, even though I see it often as hyperbole.
"There does seem to be a worldwide preference among many for "lighter." I still wonder about white supremacy claims pertaining to that. Am I just blind to it as a white man, even though I am probably atypical on my side about race?"
I wouldn't call it white supremacy- colorism has a long history in East Asia. My parents, and other elders I've asked have generally attributed it to classism: darker skin = poor people working outside, lighter skin = rich people inside protected from the sun. I think Asian cultures' long history of favoring hierarchical organizational structures probably exacerbates the classism in some way as well, but that's personal speculation.
I've been trying to recall some good sources of reading about the topic, but frustratingly enough the majority of English-language sources or documentation that Google is serving me is stuff that was only written in the last five-to-ten years and either focused on Asian-Americans or trying to blame it all on western colonialism (or both). This is frustrating so I'm going to look deeper when I've got more free time.
The shallowness and superficiality in the middle and upper classes is hard to imagine here.
The traditional Vietnamese music is being driven out by pop, truly terrible pop; the western stuff is crap nobody over 14 in the USA would listen to, but it's still better than the Vietnamese pop, where all melodies are arpeggios and all tonality is tonic-dominant.
Dark skin is so deprecated that it eliminates any employment above labor.
"Dark skin is so deprecated that it eliminates any employment above labor."
Do you think this is something mostly seen between Vietnamese people? When I visited Vietnam, I was really struck by how curious people were about the colour of my skin. But it was wholly positive. They were fascinated by it, they kept telling me how beautiful it was, lots of people wanted photos with me or just to chat (though that might have been about speaking English).
There seems to be a marked divide when it comes to racism in parts of Asia, where older people are more likely to be very openly racist, but below 40 or so, people are unusually celebratory of differences.
I just mentioned skin bleaching to my wife with reference to Thailand and she said, "Yeah, they do that. They want to be white." Sad.
Oh man, that's sad. I sometimes listened to Vietnamese radio in the 60s. Beautiful music. The vocals were melodic though I never learned any Vietnamese words that had no military purpose i enjoyed it. I don't need to say what some of the Americans had to say about that ;0(
I like some of the traditional music because it's tonally foreign and very modal. Some modes have a single quarter tone. But it doesn't reach m as it does them.
But the traditional music is only rural now and even here there is a lot of dreary techno. In western-influenced pop they like extremely simple tonality; half the songs sound like The Godfather theme, Aeolian mode (A to a on the white keys)
There were six different traditional modes, three are now extinct. I have a sepia photo of blind musicians who went from village to village performing ... it's dated 1906.
If you were hearing ejoyable singers they were probably Filipino. as are most live performers. Almost all Vietnamese are completely tone deaf.
I do like modal music. As a banjo player I like music classified as Americana which is a blend of origins (Afro Caribbean and European), like America. The blues pentatonic is formed by dropping the semitones from Phrygian so it kinda sorta survives. Dorian is a more popular minor scale than Aeolian and Mixolydian is popular in music I like. I do have an attachment to a tonic home base and never got into atonal music though I'm fine with key changes to the dominant fifth. Music is the most wonderful thing in the world and it is sad what is happening to it.
Kids growing up now have no incentive to want to take part in music though electronic composition is really hot.
It makes me wonder, daily, who is going to play the contrabassoon in the orchestra in 25 years?
I compose a lot in a hybrid Lydian/Mixolydian:
C D E F♯ G A B♭ C
Dorian is really popular in blues but I'm not sure I've ever heard much Phrygian, except from the blimp in Bladerunner.
Years ago, I worked with a guy who composed electronic atonal music. I had no way to judge if it was good or bad. He was a percussionist away from electronic music.
When I mentioned Phrygian it was with reference to its basis for pentatonic mode 1. I really only hear it from Middle Eastern sounding music as a complete modal scale.
Is any of your music in the internet?
Sorry Steve, music detour.
"Sorry Steve, music detour."
😁 Detour away, I'm a musician myself.
Yeah. https://soundcloud.com/cheopys
My proudest: The Forces, Dawn of Comprehension. Forces starting at 2:44 I am very proud of. Strands has some of that hybrid modal stuff.
My goal: Brooding. Very well-liked.
Greatness of Rome is about the Trionfi, the returning triumphal armies.
Gone came out of a dream.
Some silly techno just for practice (Pinhasoid came out quite good), some covers (George Harrison, Bartók, Eno); the Bartók is quintal chords, I saw it live in 1973 and it changed my life. Second Piano Concerto, Adagio,
I am redoing Forces with some development. As you can hear, I need work on production and mastering.
Stuff to do today and haven't listened to all of it but I like what you've done on what I've listened to. I need to listen again and in what did he do here mode rather than just enjoy the music mode.
Actually pentatonic is completely distinct from modes. The black keys are a pentatonic scale and orthogonal to the modes.
In the Middle Ages you could be executed for playing in Locrian, B to b on the white keys.
Robert Fripp showed me Super Locrian, B C D E♭ F G A B
I'll politely disagree. Other than a black key scale having no semitones (critical to the concept of anhemitonic (nonhemitonic, no half steps) pentatonics it's way of looking at its usefulness ends there. The five pentatonic modes are positively modal.
The second semitone following a note (7th) in Lydian and Ionian is the tonic so there is no associated pentatonic mode.
Pentatonic Mode 1 is formed by dropping the semitones from Phrygian. Often thought of as blues minor.
Pentatonic Mode 2 is formed by dropping the semitones from Mixolydian. A major sounding scale. Popular in country and pop.
Pentatonic Mode 3 is formed by dropping the semitones from Aeolian.
Pentatonic Mode 4 is formed by dropping the semitones from Locrian. Not a popular pentatonic mode because of its tri-tone sans dominant 5th.
Pentatonic Mode 5 is formed by dropping the semitones from Dorian. It yields a scale that is neither Major or minor and is often used in music thought of as modal in old-time music.
Modes 1, 2 & 5 are the most popular of the pentatonic modes, at least in the US.
And yeah, the Locrian tri-tone (the devil's interval) was a no-no back then.
I just noodled around with that Super Locrian. Adding the Major 3rd makes the absence of the dominant 5th less jarring and a somewhat exotic sounding scale. Kind of cool. Thanks for mentioning it.
"She calls it the old Thai face vs. the new Thai face. Could that have something to do with white supremacy?" No, unless Richard Spencer and Steve Bannon are over in Thailand telling people that the 'old Thai face' is uglier than the new one. This, and Steve's debater complaining her son drew a self-portrait with blond hair and blue eyes, is a result of American/European cultural exportation. We create content about white people featuring white people, others see it and are influenced by it. Several years ago I Googled "why are Indian men so aggressive/into white women" out of frustration of having been romantically targeted for years in Canada by brown dudes (Middle Easterners too, but Indians are just relentless) and I discovered that they got socialized to respond to white beauty because of pornography, which is produced of course mostly by Europeans and North Americans.
There's a whiteness problem here for sure but calling it 'white supremacy' is inaccurate, since WS is first and foremost about a *conscious commitment to the notion that white skin connotes greater value and that all others are inferior* (Corollary: The same goes for the non-penised). I don't believe Americans or others exported primarily white content to other countries for some sinister white supremacy cause. They made shit about themselves, having not been pushed until recently to diversify, and because it was popular here they exported it elsewhere where it was also popular, esp if it spoke to human values and experiences we all share. The indoctrination to desire white beauty is, AFAIC, a side effect rather than a sinister agenda.
We need a better description for this specific problem than 'white supremacy'. White enculturation? Or better yet, something less racial since it's really not about exporting white values, but, well, simply making money.
Indian men in the west must have it rough. I've never met anyone, straight woman or gay man, who was attracted to them. They have a reputation for being incredibly obnoxious though I've known many who were gracious.
Get the candor of someone with power to hire and ask about Indians.
India's a highly diverse country, racially, ethnically and linguistically. They have some of the hottest guys...when I first moved here an Indian friend and I went to see a movie starring the Indian actor John Abraham and I just fell in love with him. Abraham was, at the time (17 years ago) drop dead gorgeous with huge brown eyes...I'm a sucker for big brown eyes. I'm not averse to Indian men (or Middle Eastern ones, they can be pretty hot too) but I'm always on my guard because those are famously misogynist parts of the world. Too often they come to the West without the social skills to handle friendships or relationships with women and they likely run afoul of feminists and egalitarianism.
What do you know about hiring Indians? I used to work for an Indian-owned small company, it was a pretty good multiple-stretches-of-employment except for one phase when my boss sexually harassed me, but I attribute it more to middle-aged dumbass male stupidity than his being Indian, because it happened well into our professional relationship, not at the beginning (when I was several years younger and arguably hotter).
I have to be careful in responding because an honest reporting of my experiences will have some people screaming "racism!" at me. I'll just restrict it to three observations, all of which I swear to be true.
1) the two best managers I have ever had in over thirty years of software work were both Indian.
2) a few of the best programmers I have ever worked with were Indian (none of these worked from India)
3) every single one of the worst programmers I have ever worked with, both in terms of being programmers and in being coworkers, were Indian. Every single one. If you knew anything about the work I could tell you stories that would have your jaw on the floor,
I had a manager who led the way to hiring in/from India. My field was not exactly "programming" although I wrote tons of it. It was test engineering where I developed hardware interfaces and wrote software for automatic test of avionics hardware. Early on she brought in programmers who didn't understand the electronics that they were writing software to test. It did not go well. By the time I retired they were taking over much, if not most of the software work I did, except in areas of ITAR and dual use restricted technology. I was still doing the hardware stuff and was the technical lead on projects they were involved in.
I will say that the ones I worked with in the end were competent, hardworking and pleasant to work with. Like Americans and the ones that I worked with from other countries, some were very good and some not so much. But this thread of conversation is about them as people. They were people. In the end, race and culture made little to no difference in my experience with working with them.
With the exceptions I noted my experience has been starkly different.
I don't want to talk about race. It's a huge country with many distinct ethnicities and languages. What I will mention, at risk of being called names, is work ethic. The coworkers I mentioned who did solid work had been in the USA for some time and picked up the (long dead) culture of excellence in software. Most never did.
Far more common, universal among recent arrivals, was an adamant and aggressive mediocrity, doing the absolute least they could get away with doing, triumphally announcing every (badly) cleared task in email (when nobody else did) but otherwise completely uncommunicative.
In 2020 I was on a distributed team on a project that ultimately died as I knew it would because the guy doing the back end, named Lijo. was completely incompetent and wouldn't listen to anyone. On the daily zoom call (ugh) his voice was three times louder than anyone else's and he insisted on doing a screen share when he had nothing to demonstrate, hijacking our machines so we could watch him wiggle his mouse. I needed analgesics after every call. There were three other Indians on this team and they were soft-spoken and did good work.
Once I wrote a new back end entrypoint in a language called Django I didn't know very well; I asked him to review it and touch up the syntax. He completely rewrote it, very badly, changing the HTTP status codes so the code calling it wouldn't work anymore, reformatted it to his own preferred illegible slop (reformatting others' code is a serious provocation). It was terrible work. I tried three times to talk to him about it, maybe he had his reasons (wrong. A server exception is 500, not 400, and that's not a matter of style) and he never answered. I finally went to management, something I abhor doing, and all they heard was "conflict in the team." Since the company didn't do much testing they didn't know that his back end was going to fall flat on its face as soon as they prepared for release. I knew it because I usually do back end work. They never released, all that work wasted.
I mentioned hiring. OK, back in the days of the HIV epidemic I went to give blood and they wouldn't take mine because I'm gay and even though most gay men didn't have HIV, we were nevertheless more likely to. Well, such was the case in software hiring; sure there are a lot of good Indian developers but most companies tossed any Patel resume in the trash because the probability of getting a Lijo was just too high. OTOH when the hiring manager was Indian, nobody but other Indians was ever hired. Outsourcing to Indian companies risks having them go silent just before the project is done and then having them steal it and market it themselves.
I wrote about my Lijo experience on Medium, omitting his nationality and his name. I made $2500 from that one article. Apparently it resonated for a lot of people. I bought a Moog with the money.
OK, filter my remark with the following. At first, they were not so good and there were some do as little as possibles in the crowd. Over time a culling process improved them but as you wrote, their best work was when they came to the US which decreased the savings in replacing Americans with them. I moved to a joint venture project with the Chinese and people from India moved off my radar for years. Before I retired, we lost an engineer who was doing a lot of work with people from India, and I was assigned some of it. The ones I had visibility to were doing alright but there was demand for validation at every step.
I think that one difference in our experience may be in your statement. "Since the company didn't do much testing they didn't know that his back end was going to fall flat on its face as soon as they prepared for release." Since my work was about safety of flight and air worthiness for commercial aircraft, rigor was extreme. A great deal of time spent on documentation and review. We were less likely to have ugly surprises although there were ugly revelations during the course of programs that led to terminations and rework, but not whole projects tossed into a dumpster.
I'm a programmer (well, retired now), and I'd be interested. In the stories about bad colleagues, that is; I'm not interested in elaboration about their ethnicities unless especially relevant.
I'd be interested in hearing about them too. Race redacted!
Well thanks for sharing, however obliquely :) I understand why.
I think one of the many harms that this new, dumbed-down version of "white supremacy" encourages is the erasure of colorism and other associated forms of prejudicial thinking about physical attributes (shapes of noses, kinkiness of hair, etc). Colorism and its like exists across so many cultures. Perhaps it can all be traced back to white supremacy. But colorism comes to play in white cultures and in black, let alone Asian and Latin cultures. It may be connected to white supremacy, but it is a different thing.