Your dad using your race to guilt you was wrong.

Eh... I don't know what to say to this besides what I am sure I have a said a billion times before somewhere, but whatever. It's kind of hard to really talk about this type of thing sometime, because analyzing can often reduce it to overly simplified and maybe even insulting generalizations. Hard emotionally raw issues can just often produce friction between people just through what seems like the smallest thing, and when someone is hurt they tend to be extreme in their reaction and act on their feelings regardless of context.

Honestly, if you want my opinion, my feelings on race are sort of the same as my feelings on gender and if you take this blog post I did on feminism and mentally replaced 'feminism'  with 'the black power movement', 'gender' with 'race', 'male and female' with 'white and black', and so on, you might have a good idea about how I feel about the issue. But there are some caveats. Again, there is that emotional rawness, that feeling of being bullied and kicked around (even if it is misplaced), and even perhaps the catharsis of bulling someone back.

And I think it leads to vicious cycles similar to what I said in this blog post about racial profiling. Only this time, the situation seems reversed. Unless I am missing information, it sounds like a white person, and then a whole collage, was profiled based a perceived cultural bias. One that sadly has some real history behind it and, true or not, is a reasonable thing to expect in some places. Because, sadly, profiling is a useful tool in a lot of cases. Perhaps not to the extent people seem to use it, and certainly not without follow up investigations and examinations, but still useful.

What it all comes down to is that it's easy to justify a lot to yourself by saying you are raising up to fight a perceived injustice, it's easy for two different people to look at the same event and see either a justified action in service to what they think is a greater cause, or a bunch of out of control people taking an excuse to break the rules and do awful things. And it's hard to know which sometimes. That's the problem with 'justice', it's always about punishment and retribution. Always a back and forth battle for some illusory 'cause'. Always 'with us or against us'.

But in the end, it's still blind isn't it? We can't say who's 'right' or 'wrong', only what we believe and what we do about it. And our feelings are a big part of that, acting as the formation to our own biases and the biases of others in reaction, most of which people are not going to want to give up or change. So yeah, bitter feelings cycle around, hurting everyone on all sides, widening the gaps between them, making them retreat to the sides they are comfortable with and resisting any chance to meet anywhere in the middle. Thus is the human condition right now. I think it can change for the better, but it's gonna be a long painful road yet.

Ayy, like always when talking about philosophical or political things. Killo goes on a rant. xD

I don't get it. Why categorize people, let every interaction with another be nothing but an intersection in spacetime. The effect it has on you will warrant a response, lets call it 'causality', and thus we can conclude that the future is 'predetermined'. Harboring resentment towards actors playing out their role in the universe is a very wasteful way of spending the proverbial 'blink of an eye' that is your lifetime.

Lets all pretend that every other human is your self in another body lets call it 'empathy'.

And here we have the wisdom of life.

• Causality - Actions have consequences.
   
• Predetermined - You can't change the past and only hope for a good future. Vengeance is meaningless.
   
• Blink of an eye - On the cosmic scale, your life time is arbitrarily short. Don't waste it with negative thoughts.
   
• Empathy - Lets not ruin it for others.

As you can see, there is no race, religion or etc, etc... that matters. Identity is a human idea, each of us is a drop in the vast ocean. Insignificant and indistinguishable, you might have a slightly different chemical composition but with time you will dilute and disappear.

Eh, I don't really agree with your wisdom there in the general sense. On the one hand you are basically saying that whatever happens will happen without you being able to do anything about it, and on the other implying that people have choices and we should avoid particular wasteful actions/emotions. On the one hand you imply that people are just 'actors playing a role', and on the other denying that that role (identity) has any meaning. Not that both options can't be true I suppose, but it seems overly simplistic and reductionist to me.

I think it's a mistake to try and find wisdom for life in the cosmic and remote. I think wisdom should instead look inward. I think most people should ask themselves at least 5 basic questions. Who are you? What do you want? Why are you here? Where are you going? How are you going to get there? Tricky questions with even more tricky answers. Ones that society attempts to answer for you. Ones that maybe are impossible to answer at all. Race, gender, and religion, perhaps even science, offer some quick answers but maybe not the right answers. These questions may include cosmic forces or may be more personal, and maybe there isn't a real difference between them.

Point is, you need to answer the questions for you, not anyone else and certainly not the universe as a whole, but that's just what I think.