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[gerg]

You are correct. I shouldn't have used invariably there. However, you seem to be attacking a straw man. Your argument is that the meaning of an image depends on the cultural knowledge of the viewer. My argument is that the viewer only needs to have seen a horse before in order to derive the meaning of the horse drawing from its form. If you think "having seen a horse before" is somehow equivalent to "cultural knowledge," then the term cultural is so watered down it doesn't mean anything.

I do not mean to reduced culture to empirical experience. (But only because culture is not a natural science in the same way that empirical experience is.) However, neither am I attacking a straw man. (Or, at least, I don't think I am.) All I am attacking is the idea that the imagery purported by a stereotype has inherent meaning as a stereotype.

The image possesses properties that the average person of X nature also exhibits and, on top of that, exaggerates them. The scientist who sees the image will connect the dots, scan her memory to find what mental image most closely approximates what she sees, and she will deduce that due to the image's proximity to her mental image of the average person of X nature, that the image's meaning is "average person of X nature." She will not see that image and infer that the meaning of the image is "very special and unique person of X nature."

Why? Surely she would only do so if her culture encouraged her to do so?

Imagine that there were only skinny people in the world. If that scientist saw a picture of a fat man, would she think it a stereotype of all men? I find the conclusion that she would entirely absurd.

All I want to know is how the image's meaning "average person of X nature" is found anywhere within the image itself, and if so, how. Why is this meaning found in the image and not the meaning "a distinct person of X nature"?

I'm not saying that the image's form is the same as the image's meaning. I'm saying they are closely related.

The point being, however, is that their relationship is highlight contingent.

 

[Particle Physicist]

You may have an American mindset.

uh.. no. not really. i have a realistic mindset.

by the way. my Brazilian friends completely contradict you on pretty much everything you have been saying.

 

[Fio]

Sorry for the bump but I had a very busy week at college, so I could respond just today.

The caste system relies on a "one drop rule" like mentality, it requires their to be some form of a hierarchy, in this case, it was racially constructed. In Brazil, this hierarchy was based entirely on ethnicity, White (Portuguese) on top, mixed individuals in the middle, followed by Indigenous Brazilians and African slaves at the bottom.

Sorry, but I don't know where you got this information, because it's not true.

As I said, the fact that in the first years of the Brazilian Republic the majority of the elite was Portuguese has nothing to do with racism, but with opportunism. Or do you think that if they were black they would give the public services to people of other kind different of their own?

About this differentiation between the "middle" and the "bottom", I don't know what's your point. It'd be surprising if people enslaved, black or not, were at any other place in a society than at its bottom.

And there is a reason why they remained there for so long, their culture, notions of community, blood ties, pretty much everything was destroyed because of their conditions of slaves. Europeans immigrants faced the same hardships that black people faced after the abolishment of slavery, but the Europeans knew about the importance of schooling, they created communities to help each other, etc. All these factors gave them a head start in the race to leave the bottom of the society. Mind you that I'm not saying that black people weren't able to do that, I'm just saying that they didn't because of their conditions of ex-slaves.

And just because there's no form of institutionalized racism doesn't mean that it doesn't exist within the country. For example, the Black experience within the United States before the Black Codes/Jim Crow laws was pretty much the same as after they were passed, the only difference being that White Americans weren't "legally" in the right to segregate and treat Blacks like shit. Societal Racism can and does exist outside Government institutionalized Racism.

So how do you explain the willingness of the Portuguese people who already lived here to mix with people of other ethnicities? That's pretty well documented. It's very different of The USA, when people barely mixed among themselves.

Also, the affirmative action is for Handicapped, Indigenous Brazilians, and Blacks. It's usage isn't just because of the socioeconomic gap between White Brazilians and the rest of the country but to help perpetuate the accepting of these demography of student, which up till now, the college board has failed to do on its own.

Since handicapped people are a tiny minority, Indigenous Brazilians are pretty much non-existent except in the North of the country, you can figure out why I say 50% for black people. These racial quotas, when applied in a country like Brazil, are so stupid that in the beginning of the process they created a very bizarre phenomenon: It became easier to a white person to be accepted by pubic universities. In many regions of Brazil there are much more mixed/black people than white people, so this situation created a scenario where there were much more mixed/black competing for the quotas to be a public university student than white people. Now, many universities have added more criteria to fix this this.

I'm not quite sure what to think of this statement, on one hand you deny the factor of racism for the socioeconomic gap and on the other hand, 90% of your post says that the country's post colonial situation was the result of White Brazilians economically excluding Blacks when independence was achieved.

You are confused because you are assuming that I'm saying that there has never been racism in Brazil, which I never did. Which I emphatically refuse is the notion that the current Brazilian society is racist, the notion that today, the reason why there still are more black people poor than living in good conditions is due to a deep engrained racism in Brazilian society. Statements like that are the ones that I don't support. Because they can't be proved, except by anecdotal evidence.

And? Alexander Lucius Twilight, a Black man in the United States, was elected as a Vermont legislature in 1836. P.B.S. Pinchback, a Biracial man within the United States, served as Governor of Louisiana for a short time in 1872. Joseph Rainey, a Black Woman within the United States, was elected congresswoman of South Carolina in 1870 for four terms. And this was during 19th Century :lol Exceptions to a rule doesn't change a rule in cases like this.

So? These cases don't change anything because we know for a fact that the American Society had (and still have at some extent) a deep engrained racism against black people. The racial segregation showed that. But my point is valid because of two reasons: being a Supreme Court member is exponentially more important than a congressman or a temporary governor, second, after him many other black/mixed people were Supreme Court members, and there has never been institutional racism in Brazil. Also, Brazil was one of the first countries - if not the first - to openly boycott South Africa. This happened after some black Brazilian soccer players who went to South Africa to play some exhibition games were told that they couldn't play alongside white south African people. This sparked a huge outrage among the Brazilian population that even the current military junta, known for not giving a shit about the people had to take a drastic action against SA.

by the way. my Brazilian friends completely contradict you on pretty much everything you have been saying.

Are you sure they know what they're talking about? What about their educational background? Because I've been debating for some months now these issues with some quite hardcore apologizers that the Brazilian society is racist and even them don't dispute "pretty much everything" I say.