Weird, I am pretty sure that if I showed random people on the street some pictures and asked them what race the people in the photos were, they would readily answer. They wouldn't go: "Sorry, I have to check their family tree." or "I would have to ask them what they identify as."
I've addressed this throughout the thread. People associate specific looks with specific social groupings. This does not mean black people look a certain way, it means people are more likely to put people that look a certain way in the group black. You're not understanding what's actually going on with race. Being black doesn't make anyone look like anything phenotypically. Just like being lower gentry in 18th century England didn't make anyone look like anything phenotypically.
If I ask you to picture, say, a white, a black, and an asian person, does your mind go blank?
No, because we have specific associations with those words, it's not that white people platonically look a certain way. Of course this runs into some internal errors almost immediately. If we take a facial aggregate of the people that identify as Irish, and one of the people that identify as Iranian they will not look the same, yet both are placed in the white category. Clearly something else is going on here.
Does your brain get overloaded when you try to picture the endless possibilities? Or do you simply imagine a prototypical person of X race? Because that's the race in the "I (don't) find people of X race attractive."
Yes, people essentiallize traits to a label and then distribute the trait to everything that has that label. This doesn't work well in analyzing things, it's a shortcut that works for quick generalization, not for deep understanding. It's also racist when the labels in question are racial labels.
If you can categorize people as the same race based on appearance then they must have a common physical characteristic that people can find more or less attractive.
That's both not logical true, you're assuming there's only one understanding of the category, and missing the fact that identifying people as specific racial groups is a more complex process than sticking their features into the race giving equation and finding their race. What do you think passing is?
Dismissing without seeing the photo = racist.
Dismissing after seeing the photo = just as shallow as any other number of physical preferences.
You've collapsed a lot of things into the bolded. The former is clearly worse than the latter, but your missing quite a bit here that makes the latter a poor level of analysis. Of course in practice this is impossible to actually do directly, but there are ways to approximate what goes on when people make decisions like this.
If they are rejecting based on appearance 51% of black women and 50% of white women, there's probably a slight problem. If they are rejecting 99.5% of black women and 50% of white women then there's clearly a pretty significant problem. And since we live in a society that has a history we can pretty easily point to what could be the origin of that problem.
You can do this qualitatively too. Most obviously, if people just outright dislike dark skin tones you don't have to dig very far to figure out what's behind that.
They are all factors you can't control (without going into extremes). And different races have different average heights, so by having a preference you are discriminating against a race.
Fine, if this is literally the only thing going on, i.e. controlling for high ones racial preference is the exact same, and in that situation alone, I'm willing to admit problematic cultural understandings of gender are in play here instead of problematic cultural understandings of race.
Let me rephrase the question then.
What is "black culture", in respects to this thread about blanket judgements of people?
The OP used the word in a shitty way, sure. I've never said otherwise. Had I known that I probably wouldn't have called out people bemoaning the word more generally. Though in that case it'd be not because it's bad to do so, but because people would jump to that being a point in support of the OP. It turns out we don't have discussions in isolation. So when I see people completely dismiss black culture as a meaningful phrase that's going to raise my eyebrows.
So the way it came up in this thread was bad, people retorted in ways that suggest that the word is always bad. I saw the latter and responded to it. Much like you saw my most recent post and decided I was saying something I wasn't.
Let me point this another way, what the OP did or didn't do doesn't have anything to do with the truth value of my claim. He's wrong. It's stupid to even consider for a second that hating what one thinks of as black culture could be anything other than racist.
That doesn't say anything at all about the phrase in the abstract.
