Its apparent very early on that it is about the US, and everything in the US is all about race.
Race is far more important in the US: it seems to be fundamental to people's identity and how they are regarded in a way that is difficult to grasp from outside. It is strange to me that people who accept self-identity of gender regard race as an immutable inherited characteristic.
The nearest parallel is caste in India. It is inherited, immutable and hierarchical.
The problem is that until 1971, which is within the lifetime of many people currently alive, especially in government (remember, the only US President born after 1946 is Barak Obama), race was a legal category in the US that seriously restricted lives.
Desegregation has been slow, and you can't really desegregate inherited wealth.
Race is in the mix, but is oddly mutable. Back when I was a kid being of Polish ancestry was a kind of joke. Some of my Irish friends have memories of being excluded from social events. At some point we both became "white" and previous divisions faded. There is no comparable we used to be Dalit and then people stopped caring about that experience in India.
The US is not homogeneous and the people within the US most likely to regard race as an all important immutable inherited characteristic are also largely those least likely to accept self-identity of gender.
That at least is my coarse observation as an outsider and I stressed qualifiers as there are no absolutes here, just fuzzy clouds of human attributes with some overlaps and no hard borders.
The types of US media that routinely dog whistles race issues and stereotype low IQ gun happy criminal types are pretty much the same media streams that mock trans identity, wokeness, and alphabet classification.
> The US is not homogeneous and the people within the US most likely to regard race as an all important immutable inherited characteristic are also largely those least likely to accept self-identity of gender.
Personally I've seen two correlations in different directions.
Race is important to the swastika-tattoo crowd on the far right, no doubt.
Meanwhile on the left, a lot of people acknowledge a widening gap between rich and poor, and the loss of well-paid manufacturing jobs that can support a family without a degree. That even though the median family's situation has been improving for decades, a lot of people haven't shared in the benefits. To me this is obviously a matter of class.
But I look at American analysis and discussion, and 95% of the time they ignore class, and instead analyse it through a racial lens - reinterpreting the widening gap between rich and poor as a widening gap between white and black. The along comes Trump, and he gains a load of support from the white working class simply by acknowledging that yes, they are struggling.
So I can certainly see what graemep is getting at.
Blame the likes of Murdoch and his predecessors, they've mastered the art of using rags and tabloids to eliminate nuance in the US public sphere.
Significant US analysis, that with any meat, looks to race, class , and income to quintile the US demographic and examine the prospects of each rank and the mobility across groups.
Recent years have seen books such as Paul Fussell, CLASS: A Guide Through the American Status System (1983), Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (2020), and a host between.
The difficulty for the US has been the dumbing down of public discourse, that was the condition that permitted a Trump to sweep through on a popularists platform.
I love Isabel Wilkerson's book. It was that (through the comparison with caste) that gave me a clearer idea of the difference between what race is in American culture.
> the people within the US most likely to regard race as an all important immutable inherited characteristic are also largely those least likely to accept self-identity of gender.
I'm pretty surprised to hear that. Nearly every program I've seen in my adult life that explicitly uses race as an important factor in who gets hired or promoted or funded has come from the left. The left is also the group that is in favor of gender self-identification. Maybe these aren't always the exact same people, but the overlap politically is strong.
That's not to say that conservatives don't hold or express racist or bigoted beliefs, but I'm not sure I've ever seen an overt effort to only hire white people or exclude brown people.
> the people within the US most likely to regard race as an all important immutable inherited characteristic are also largely those least likely to accept self-identity of gender.
I am not convinced. Even Americans who accept gender self-identity AND claim to be anti-racist usually have a problem with regarding race as a superficial characteristic, and rarely seem to accept people self-identifying as a different race to their "real" one.
> The types of US media that routinely dog whistles race issues and stereotype low IQ gun happy criminal types are pretty much the same media streams that mock trans identity, wokeness, and alphabet classification.
My point is that BOTH sides in the US regard race as an immutable fundamental characteristic.
Race is far more important in the US: it seems to be fundamental to people's identity and how they are regarded in a way that is difficult to grasp from outside. It is strange to me that people who accept self-identity of gender regard race as an immutable inherited characteristic.
The nearest parallel is caste in India. It is inherited, immutable and hierarchical.