Well, maybe the hedgehog art is a little over the edge ;). Just kidding, I like it.
Obsessively seeking justification for taking offense is something normal sane well-adjusted humans may do when irritated. It’s not a natural progression that always inevitably occurs; people may just as easily throw their hands in the air and walk off, or ostentatiously change the subject, or practice breathing, or whatever.
But it does happen… in my opinion, and in that of some psychologists, as previously noted.
I am also Jewish and same issue - beyond the great grandparents, NADA. But then I got involved with Judaism and this issue of not being able to trace our ancestry came up, and another lady said, “Well, I don’t really know any Jewish people who are into geneaology.” Meaning that pretty much all of us are in the same boat. It’s so sad.
I just learned that my great-grandma had a brother we never knew anything about until a cousin started tracing some ancestry. He died in one of the concentration camps. My mother lived with my great-grandma during her senior year of high school so it’s so sad she did not even KNOW that this brother existed, much less had been in the camps. We also have that on the other side, great-grandpa wouldn’t tell anyone the real family name so we don’t even know what to look for.
Yes, my family has been chasing a (what now appears to be) spurious claim that we have ties to Native tribes in Missouri. We love the romanticism of the idea of some Native American blood. This whole idea traces back to a letter stating one of my great-great uncles was a “blood blood” relative of a documented official tribe member. He wanted to be able to trade with them, or get some kind of land grant that was going around at the time.
Yeah, we still love the idea and haven’t totally given up on it, but most research points to the document we have being part of one of my great-great-uncles many con jobs.
The issue is that one “ethnicity” is not immune to passively using or rebroadcasting the stereotypes of another.
It is not so actively foisted but patterns are picked up through interaction with those that perpetuate the stereotypes (like there being a special class of black person who is “well-spoken” and thus a “model” minority to use as an example to others.)
I understand full well the original context of the words before racism structured the dogwhistle, but why not just accept that the other context exists and there are many ways to better phrase and avoid the context?
Language is such a beautiful, fluid creature that one is not in any way hindered by another choice of phrasing.
I remember reading a great book “Going Native, or Going Naive: White Shananism and the Neo-Noble Savage” on the subject of white appropriation of Native identity, both the “sincere” hippies/white neoshamans and the con artists both (and the different ways that tribes interacted with the “true Indian name” seekers, which was pretty interesting) It was written in 2003 but I think it’d hold up pretty well in today’s political climate.
That the author is an Austrian sociologist probably helps. I do read that there’s a fascination with the American Indians in the region, and the American West in general.
Even so-called “whiteness” is itself often an appropriation. How much of the culture of the UK, Germany, Norway, etc is one really entitled to if one has never even been on the same continent? Or tracing back through generations worth of sketchy records? The entire concept of appropriation hinges upon the assumption that most people naturally have a single, unambiguous ethnic identity in the first place. Even defining one’s own actual ethnicity can be a challenge, and I think that’s true of people of any skin tone.
I think that referring to people of European lineage as “European Americans” rather than “white” might improve matters. Not unlike how people speak of African Americans or Asian Americans. It reduces some of the fixation upon color while localizing “whiteness” instead of treating as a default expectation.
Oh I know a few people who have gotten into that Shamanism thing and I always feel like they are being totally conned. It’s so hard to know what to do with cultural appropriation stuff. I’m a yoga teacher and there are a bunch of articles about yoga appropriating Indian culture, Hindu culture. And yep it totally is. I kind of get around it because my teachers studied with teachers in India or from India, so I feel like they got approved to study, but for sure it’s a bunch of white ladies dressing up with their Ganesh shirts a lot of the time.
I can’t remember the name of the book, but I will try to find it. I saw the author speak. She is a Jewish woman who grew up in South Africa. Her family was in Europe as WWII approached and South Africa was recruiting anyone who was white to help beef up the white numbers. So in Europe her family was a persecuted minority; but, in South Africa, they were part of the privileged white people under Apartheid. She had a really fascinating take on issues of race and identity. She ended up moving to the U.S.
Perhaps not. By appropriation I mean it as in “assuming some cultural link because one fancies such a link, with no deeper cultural knowledge behind it it, and exploiting it within a different culture.” I think that assuming any homogeneous white identity is quite suspect.
I might be too keen on forcing distinct treatment of categories of race, color, ethnicity, and regionality. I know that people popularly muddle them all together and say that “it is unavoidably confusing”, but it seems like a bad idea. It is often used to stack demographics, such as “how many people here are white versus Puerto Rican” as opposed to “how many Celts, Normans, Norse, Basque… etc”
I may have taken my approach to attachment to an Emotional Support Animal in a peculiar direction. It’s fun (and comforting), but certainly way, way into the weirdo zone.
I think we have a different model here. My general model is that a normal sane well-adjusted human wouldn’t actively seek things to be offended about, and if they’re offended they wouldn’t be obsessive in responding. Offense is a kind of (often justified) irritation/anger at a social boundary being transgressed. Even if the prior state of mind is calm, once someone refers to an “articulate black person” (etc.) that’s going to be a bit of sand in the gears that’s going to irritate people who are sensitive to that social boundary. Sometimes the transgressions pile on, each adding more frustration and irritation. Responding well to those transgressions is hard. It’s a social skill you have to develop to be able offer effective social guidance to people violating boundaries when the natural emotional response is being annoyed which isn’t likely to result in constructive dialog.
But the pattern I tend to see is this. A person stomps over a group boundary. Someone or a few members of the group respond and point out the boundary in various ways. This should be enough for the person who stomped over the boundary to note it, acknowledge they made an error (often minor), and move on, which sometimes happens. At other times the transgressor sees the response, doesn’t want to admit they made any mistake in stomping over the boundary (gotta protect that ego) and a cycle of rationalizations/excuses/self-justification and responses to those rationalizations/excuses/self-justifications ensues and maybe escalates. So I don’t think it’s normal to obsessively justify taking offense, so much as it’s common for people to sometimes refuse to respect boundaries and drag things into a mess.
Normal people are naturally sensitive to where those boundaries are. I’m not normal, so I have to make models, and analyze, and build mental lists of rules, and parse things I say to do what I can to not go stomping over other people/group’s boundaries. My model of a normal sane well-adjusted human is someone who respects other people’s boundaries (unless there’s a matter of serious moral principle at stake).
Kind of dragging the original topic in a little, the anti-PC movement is predicated on the idea that nobody should respect other people’s boundaries, that people responding naturally to their boundaries being transgressed are the real bad guys, while disrespectful aggressors are real victims.
Let's not talk about Haidt. I might inadvertently veer into a rant. Haidt is for me a problem, not a solution, and I've already written far too much here.
The issue is that generally in discussion of race theory, specific definitions are used to denote specific concepts, and if you don’t believe in the very concept of “whiteness” (Euro or otherwise) with any nuance that’s a discussion beyond the scope of this thread and there are resources surely for you to self-educate beyond our paygrade.
As someone who is white but Jewish, I am aware of how mostly I get treated with privilege. I don’t get judged by my looks because I don’t look Jewish. But then there are these tone deaf things where people who are Christian just don’t get the whole idea of why religious majorities don’t get to shove their religion down your throat. Sometimes people are really NICE about it, but they just don’t get that, you know, abortion isn’t considered a sin in MY religion and it’s not their job to shove their perception of things from their whole Southern Baptist point of view onto me with laws.
To be fair, I think there is more consensus that some people have light skin, rather than what a cohesive white identity might be. I think of it as a tempting stereotype, not unlike how notions of “blackness” gets people to think of the African continent as a cultural and ethnic homogeneity. Some people speak of Africa and Asia as if they were each an indistinct country rather than diverse places in themselves.
My perhaps minority opinion is that race is a smokescreen based upon a false identity which prevents discussion of ethnicity - where the interesting similarities and differences are, and real culture is. But it is not my intention to argue this perspective.
The homogeneity is based on perception of a vague “whiteness” that generally trails skin depth but also practices and behavior, not an eradication of culture and individualism. It is heirarchical and values-laden and societally applied.
One can not opt out.
Again, I did not create this concept and there are those much better at breaking these concepts down than myself, but I do not believe you are interested in that research. If I am incorrect, I can surely lead you to someone more experienced in race theory in order for you to understand the concepts used here and elsewhere.
“White” is very much a constructed identity that isn’t tied to a particular heritage. Who is “white” has shifted over time. You don’t have to go back all that far to a time when people from Italy or even Ireland weren’t “white”. Something that baffled me during the election was people kept referring to Sanders as an “old white dude.” He’s a Jew born during the second world war. People may call him “white” now, but I don’t think he was “white” when he was a kid (and Trump’s chief strategist still doesn’t think he’s “white” - if he even thinks he’s a human).
