From: tse@loonybin.apple.com (Gary Tse)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.asian.american
Subject: Re: Racial preferences in choosing your mate (was Re: Asian-American/African-American Relationships)
Date: 22 Jul 92 07:44:50 GMT
Distribution: na
Organization: Raoul Duke School of Pharmacology and Journalism

In article <1992Jul21.235801.14425@oakhill.sps.mot.com> jpak@manute.sps.mot.com writes:
|In article <1992Jul21.184118.951@mumbo.apple.com> tse@loonybin.apple.com (Gary Tse) writes:
|>Either.  It's hypocritical to preach (and hopefully practice) racial
|>equality in one place and racial discrimination in another.  Oh, or
|>am I using the word "hypocritical" incorrectly?  How about "highly
|>contradictory"?  Or "stinks of situational ethics"?
|
|A simple "double-standards" here will do for me.  

I think "double-standard" would be a more apt description than any other
I have offered.  Jame, thank you for that suggestion.

|If I can inject this point into your debate with Roger, perhaps the defining
|line for making racial "preference" (or discrimination, depending on how you
|look at it) acceptable or not acceptable is not the concept of "head vs heart"
|or "rationality vs gut-level preferences," but rather how it may affect
|bringing others into your family.  

Again, thank you.  I brought the concept of "head vs. heart" into my 
original post inadvertently.  I wanted to focus on difference in attitude
between matters of trivial and great *personal* significance.  I think
this standard of personal significance is a more general form of the 
"bringing others into the family" meter James suggested, so I will use 
that in this post.

Most decisions a person makes professionally and socially are of small
personal significance.  Decisions a person makes regarding, for example,
changes in his family would be of much greater personal significance.

In my original post, it seemed perverse to me that society would so frown
on discrimination in matters of the most trivial personal significance
and yet be largely silent over discrimination in matters of the greatest
personal significance.

I have since changed my view on this.  I realized it is easiest to not 
be racist over things that are really of trivial personal importance and
most difficult to not be racially discriminatory over matters that
are of the greatest personal significance.  Therefore, what I perceived
to be perversity is probably just society's acknowledgement of still
an unconquered core of racism over our most private concerns.  There is
good sense in this, although I must say that I am very saddened. 

|>I posed this question in my last post.  I really am interested in 
|>an answer, from *anybody*.
|
|Hey, that's what I'm here for, Gary.  :-)  I won't duck this.

Well, James, I have never faulted you for lacking courage.

|>Would "X can't be my best friend, because
|>he's an <ethnic>" be a racist statement?"
|
|Sure sounds like it to me.  And yeah, if you then switch "best friend" to
|"spouse" or "SO," a lot of people don't want to feel that's racist.  But if
|you think about it, you can't get around the double-standard.  And it's not
|an issue of "gut-level vs rationality," because you'd then have to assume
|that people choose their friends on the basis of rationality while at the
|same time choosing their mate on the basis of "gut-level preferences."  In
|reality, I don't think it works that way.  Many, many people can be (and in
|fact *are*) VERY rational and practical in their choice of a mate.  Even
|moreso than in their choice of friends.

Thank you for your honesty.  This is exactly the answer I was hoping
to get.

-- 
Gary Tse, tse@Apple.COM			``Out of a misty dream
(408) 862-5452			Our path emerges for a while, then closes
						Within a dream.'' -- E. Dowson