I agree with your stand on stereotyping(although I would say that stereotypes are often ill-conceived(not just unfounded) just as much as they’re ill-applied), though perhaps not 100%. Close enough to it, though.

There’s some other stuff, but I can’t really sort out all of my thoughts into a coherent viewpoint right now, since I just read it. Still, it was nice. Thanks for giving me something of a new perspective.

“I have just a few suggestions. Absent from your essay is the concept of power. This concept I argue would complicate your thesis in several ways, namely highlighting the ways in which power by Europeans, especially during Enlightenment, was exercised to deploy the social construct of race in oppressive, deleterious and deadly ways. The significance of this being that power imbalances continue to be exercised in ways that maintain and reproduce racist ways of understanding and deploying discourses of “race.”

“Power I think would also trouble your very first introductory argument about how to define a pure Chinese person. One of your criteria was citizenship. But here again, power would invite us to contemplate how power is and has been deployed to extend citizenship to some and not others, in unjust and discriminatory ways. This I think unsettles any attempt to define even the pure Chinese person.

“Some great scholars in this area are Paul Gilroy, Stuart Hall, David Theo Goldberg, Carl James, and George Dei.”

Obviously some very legitimate points. This is how I responded:

“I completely agree with what you’re saying about the affect of power on producing messed up ways of thinking about race.

“Also, I hope I haven’t given the impression I was going for a strict “definition” of race; I was trying to say that to find an unequivocally “Chinese” person, the fulfillment of those criteria would fit the bill, as far as we can give any label a meaningful air of reality. I think that it includes the consideration of power to the extent that the people in power do have some power to define the identity of everyone else, for good, or usually, ill. Self-identity is not whole-identity, and the way one is treated by both people in power and minorities has a very real effect.

“As for the citizenship example, I completely agree that power is deployed in discriminatory ways, again, it was not my goal to strictly define someone “pure” Chinese. I simply wanted to put forward an example of someone who no one could argue was Chinese. If the government were to take citizenship away from someone or refuse to grant it in an unjust and discriminatory way, that still has a real effect on that person: a powerful “Chinese” body has stated that one is not “Chinese” in nationality, which comprises part of the Chinese identity as the large Chinese body, and much of the population, views it.

“I will certainly look into the scholars you mention!”

And then I added a bit more, because my thoughts come sporadically:

“Oh and it occurs to me that one could say that my attempt to find someone no one could argue was Chinese vs. trying to define someone as “purely” Chinese is an arbitrary distinction without any real difference, but I think there is. I’m not saying you *must* fulfill these criteria to be Chinese, but I am saying that if you do, then it’s certain you’re Chinese. Now if one were to dismiss any label of “Chinese” as being largely a power-construct and meaningless in the first place, which I take it you might be doing, then I agree that that would destabilize this entire discussion from the beginning, but then I’m not sure what we’re left with, except for a bunch of words with amorphous meaning and no real reference point, which to me is far too subjective a place to be.”