Depends on how you define white… which is a social category, not a fact of nature.
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Fair enough, but I’m going off of how people self-identified on their census forms. Is there a better way to do it?
I have no idea how the census form is written in the UK/Scotland, but if it’s like ours, it’s probably just a set of choices with a box to tick next to it with racial categories…
Do away with racial categories? Or let people fill it in with how they identify, without the pre-existing categories? 
Burn it all down and start again? 
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I just checked their form, and Scotland does have combinations, “other” and “write-in” categories as options. So the 96% of Scots that self-identified as white did so as a choice. My point was simply that if Scots themselves consider Scotland to be a very white country it’s understandable that Americans would also share that perception. Not really trying to make any other larger social commentary here.
Edit to add: on further thought, if someone wants to respond to the statement “Scotland is comparatively a very white country” with “no it isn’t because there’s no such thing. Race doesn’t exist in any definable way and/or can’t be measured,” then I’d say that’s basically the argument that some people also use when pushing back against diversity initiatives and I don’t find it very compelling in that context.
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Look, yes, you are all absolutely correct, and I was thinking of Bruce Fummey when I wrote “lily-white”. (Not that anyone could possibly know that.)
I was explicitly describing the perception of Scotland from outside Scotland.
I thought that was clear enough, but obviously I was wrong. That’s on me.
Edit it instead to read “Why Scotland? Because most non-Scots don’t know shit about Scotland, but they think they do. For most people, it’s because …”
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Yes, that.
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Well aware of how prickly many land owners are about hunters crossing their property, Cape located an area of “checkerboard” control. That is, the land is divided into one mile-by-one mile sections, half of which are public property, half of which are privately owned, like the black and white squares on a checkboard.
At one place on this checkboard map, Eshelman controlled two squares that met at a corner. The other two squares were public property. Using OnX, Cape mapped out the exact location and led three friends in stepping across the corner from one public square to the other. They not only didn’t step on Eshelman’s land, the area of his property they crossed was infinitely small. Not one state has laws against this “corner crossing,” which is common in areas where grants of public land were once given to railroad companies in an effort to “open up” the West.
Legally, Eshelman can’t run a fence across that corner. So instead he installed “no trespassing” signs at the corners of each of his squares, leaving only a few inches in between (a photograph of the signs is in the Times article). But in a return visit the hunters, aware of the signs after scouting the location, brought with them a specially constructed short ladder, allowing them to hop over the space between the signs.
As WyoFile reports, Eshelman’s ranch manager spotted Cape’s group on the public property. After ranch workers harassed the hunters, including chasing them with pickup trucks which Eshelman’s men drove across the public land, the manager called the local sheriff along with Wyoming Fish and Game in an effort to charge the hunters with criminal trespass. Originally, officers from both agencies informed that manager that they didn’t issue trespassing charges for corner crossing. But days later, after the manager pressured local officials by reminding them of Eshelman’s importance in the county, another fish and game deputy issued the charge.
This is insane!!! Good on the hunters for being so legally savvy not to fall into his traps.
Meanwhile, around here the authorities are currently suing a landowner because he put up ‘no trespassing’ signs on a path that runs across his land past his house. It’s against everyman’s right.
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We should probably not just shrug our shoulders at this, because it directly shapes how little white people care about white supremacy. We’re gonna keep having problems with racism as long as that’s our primary mindset. And I really don’t think that writing it off as social commentary rather than a serious problem that keeps leading to major rounds of violence, deaths, and even acts of genocide is particularly helpful.
And yes, it may be a “choice” but what are the larger aspects that have people put that as their choice in the first place.
This shit matters man.
Do you think that’s what I’m doing? Did I say that it’s “fake” versus being a “social category”? You know very well that’s not what I meant, so I’d appreciate it if you’d not lump me into the “ignorant asshole” category, thanks. You know that it’s not the same thing, and it’s a bit disingenuous to insinuate that’s my meaning, when you’ve read enough of my comments here to know that’s not the case.
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When I asked if there was a better way to ask the question on the census you replied
Which I took to mean that you don’t think it should be something that’s asked on the census. And I personally think that for a variety of reasons related to our history and in order to support attempts to improve equity we do still need to collect that data.
In an ideal world, yeah, we would not need them. And yes, they (at least here) are used in the distribution of goods and services, but then again, there is almost always an undercount of Black and Brown communities. Do you believe that’s just a coincidence? I’d argue it’s built into the very framework of the modern implementation of a census in the first place. At what point do we give up tools that were created for oppressive purposes?
The census is not value-neutral, though, and never has been. It’s goal is to draw a line around who belongs and who doesn’t, and that’s often along racial lines. Just because there have been attempts to use that as a means of improving equity, doesn’t mean that history just evaporates and doesn’t matter. It absolutely does matter, and we can’t just ignore how such categories have been used to ensure white supremacy.
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Well if there’s one thing I’m sure that you and I agree on it’s that we don’t live in an ideal world.
My position is not that the data can’t be used for bad purposes, but that given our very imperfect history having the data available to work with is a net benefit. It’s very difficult to fix any problem (inequality, in this case) if you can’t even measure it. For one example of the opposite approach just look to France, which is officially colorblind and doesn’t collect this data. Nobody who has spent much time there would claim that black folks don’t have it worse than white folks but advocates for equality have a tough time enacting any policies to improve the situation because officially the problem doesn’t exist.
Anyhow, I think we both made our points. (unless you think we should split off this topic?)
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There might be a connection in the novels of Walter Scott.
see
https://www.southerncultures.org/article/the-great-granddaddy-of-white-nationalism/
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Indeed. I think it’s in the agree to disagree phase, as I think that we need to look at the deeper history of why we got in the mindset of data-driven problem-solving in the first place when it comes to things like race and national identity… That does matter…
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