Goodnight, Grasshopper.

Jun 04, 2009 22:33

So. David Carradine just died.

I've always had a very conflicted relationship with Carradine. When I was younger, we watched Kung Fu (reruns--I'm not that old) all the time. We used to quote it to each other, call each other Grasshopper. We also watched Quincy (because of Sam) and Star Trek (because we were dorks, but also because of Sulu), but ( Read more... )

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Re: psychoanalyzing you is so much fun :-) hannahchan June 5 2009, 18:45:51 UTC
Ha! You know, I totally didn't even see it till you pointed it out, but yeah, I kind of pulled a Carradine myself, didn't I? Except I didn't really have a choice: One day, I just woke up and my whole family was Chinese, and as a kid, you just roll with that kind of stuff when it happens.

Race is such a weird subject, intrinsically, isn't it? The other day, someone brought up a mental exercise they'd had to do in grad school, of deciding whether, if you had to change one thing about yourself, you'd choose being less smart, less educated, less attractive or a different race. "Oh my god, there was a point in my life when I would have killed to be Chinese!" I piped up, without thinking. "It would have made my life so much easier!"

It turns out that, in constructing the exercise, no one had considered that 1) someone might consider being non-white an advantage, and 2) someone might consider "non-white" to refer to anything other than African-American. We have a long way to go for our ideas and discussions about race to catch up with the realities on the ground, is I guess what I'm saying.

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Re: psychoanalyzing you is so much fun :-) wasabi_poptart June 5 2009, 18:53:48 UTC
What a strange question. The obvious answer is "less educated." Because you can always get more, if you really want it. And if you don't really want it, then it's not such a priority for you that it would really matter.

Education is over-rated. Being over-educated has made me a lot of fun at parties, but that's about it, really.

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Re: psychoanalyzing you is so much fun :-) hannahchan June 6 2009, 15:31:30 UTC
I think the question was supposed to be about which factor you thought would reduce your chances of getting a good job or something. But yeah, dumbass question to start out with--though I was getting it re-told to me at a party after a few beers, so I might not be doing it justice.

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