Inspired by something that happened at work to a friend of mine.
She is from Namibia, very light skinned however. A guy in her orginisation was arranging a BME focus group to encourage more from the community to join their industry.
Anyway, my friend was told she couldn't attend as "wasnt really black", this was from the guy in charge of the group who's family would have originated in the Caribbean.
Now this got me thinking. Are all these race and gender politic issues the result of constantly thinking about the issue?
If job applications asked everybody for their height, and various groups were set up to encourage more shorter people to apply for certain positions, wouldn't that just lead to height becoming an issue in a similar way to say ethnicity?
Its like a headline the other day about how over 50% of people in young offender institutions are black". Surely thats just focusing on a non issue, presumably those people ended up there because they committed a crime. To me, the headline should have been "why are so many young people committing crime?". I just think the racial element was unnecessarily provocative and and irrelevant. The paper was just trying to spin the story in a certain way.
And if we keep talking about gender, doesnt that make it always an issue? When will we ever stop talking about these issues? It just all gets a bit much at times for me. I just think sometimes, talking about what's considered "offensive" , just gives idiots the inspiration to use those words against others, not because the dickhead understands the words, but just because they know the words/terms are considered offensive by others.
If, for example, nobody ever mentioned that say a black person was black/gay/fat/white/hetro/trans or any of the hundreds of other characteristics , would there ever have been any discrimination?
Maybe I just need another coffee, it is very early.