Suddenly racists think there’s something undignified about being white?
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It just seems unnatural to them, because for hundreds of years, race has never mattered before when voting. /s
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This is like all those dipshits proclaiming that having sex with a person of the opposite sex is now gay… 
Dipshits all around. Just throwing out as much hate as they possibly can.
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It is, though it’s been ages since I heard anyone say it.
I think it comes from an old inside joke about some Black folks ‘forgetting’ where they came from once they become rich & successful; ie, Michael Jackson, Tiger Woods, OJ Simpson, etc.
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Also…
I wish this show were still on… it was fucking brilliant.
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Also, White society ‘co-opting’ or appropriating Black culture, etc:
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Paradoxically enough, a common facet of U.S. white culture is a romanticized connection to some European place that actually has next to nothing to do with who and what they are as white US citizens.
So when this leader from The Irish Times popped-up in my social media feed this morning, I was surprised.
Surprised and disheartened, because I didn’t expect someone like Ms. Kingsolver to be repeating the same old “white essentialist” take on Southern Appalachian culture, i.e., “We are Scots-Irish”.
But this is how real history is erased - a thing is repeated like a mantra so often and for so long that it becomes “received wisdom”.
Some might well ask “What does it really matter if our ancestors were from this group or that group?”.
It matters because untruths and foundational myths are used by people all over the world, yesterday and today, to justify the pre-eminence of some groups, and to downplay (and even disappear) the stories of other groups.
Some of us do not want our stories to disappear.
Of sixteen second-great grandparents, Ms. Kingsolver has only one single ancestor who on balance might be said to descend from Ulster folk (highlighted in green in pedigree).
The rest of her ancestry consists of the descendants of people from the British Isles (including England, Scotland, and probably Wales), people from either Flanders or The Netherlands, and people from France and Germany.
At least half of her ancestral lines were slaveholding families, so where no explicit wills, land documents, or Bible entries provide documentary cross-referencing, we must entertain the possibility that some descendants may in fact be what I call “sparks” - the offspring of slaveholders and enslaved people.
Ms. Kingsolver’s very surname is an enigma. Appearing out of the blue in colonial South Carolina first as “Consolver”, many believe this surname might be a corruption of the Portuguese/Portuguese Jewish surname “Gonçalves”. Interestingly, her direct Kingsolver ancestry includes households which included free people of color.
It is all too easy, when we feel an affinity for a place, to imagine some sort of “genetic memory” connecting our feelings to something more tangible or historical.
More often than not, we are simply projecting our own romantic desires onto the world around us - our imagined history having no basis in reality.
Just think where this might lead when people less well-intentioned than Barbara Kingsolver start to “project”.
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Billionaire investor Ken Griffin calls on Harvard to embrace ‘Western values’
May 11 (Reuters) - Billionaire investor Kenneth Griffin called on his alma mater Harvard University on Saturday to embrace “Western values”, saying that the turmoil across college campuses was the product of a “cultural revolution” in U.S. education.
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So, another disgustingly rich idiot who doesn’t seem to realize that Harvard already does embrace Western values. Quite heartily.
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I think a big part of why we’re often so easily given to such fictions about our ancestries, is that we’re (as humans) moved by narratives that can help make sense of the world we find ourselves in and in that we have little control over. Of course, that’s not history, which is much more complicated and wonderful and awful than an easy narrative will allow for. The complicated nature of our actual family lines just aren’t nearly as persuasive as “my ancestors risked hardships and came over to give us a better life.” That can certainly be part of the story, but it’s not remotely the whole story. And our ancestors were just as complicated as any of us… But still… it’s nice to have a simplified story that doesn’t obligate us work on changing the present. And that’s why we do need real history in our classrooms, rather than the glorified state propaganda kids get far too often.
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Yeah, I can see that.
I also think ethnic nostalgia can happen because, for any white person who’s not an overt white supremacist, there’s a lot of guilt associated with being white. We normally want to be a part of some tribe or whatever, but whiteness seems too to awful embrace, so a lot of white folks reach back further for something less incriminating.
Another reason that happens, I think, is because there’s an emptiness to racial whiteness. After all, it was primarily defined not in terms of qualities its members have, but rather, the “fact” that its members (supposedly) don’t have this or that (supposedly inferior) quality. A resulting sense that there’s not much tangible to affirm positively about whiteness surely also causes some to reach for romanticized European roots instead.
Well, for a certain meaning of “nice,” I suppose (I think it’s actually awful). I wish more white people would think about themselves as white, and try to understand what that really means. And yes indeed, better education in history would certainly help with that!
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I certainly don’t mean “nice” in terms of “good”, but nice in terms of allowing people to feel like they’re off the hook.
Not only does embracing “white” hurt those not defined as white, it erases specific cultural traditions. It does so much damage to all of our basic humanity, that it should be understood and rejected due to the specific harm it does to everyone.
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“Harvard should put front and centre (that it) stands for meritocracy in America…,”
Unless opportunity is equalized, his “meritocracy” favors the scions of old rich white guys.
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… but surely Harvard agrees with him that inherited wealth is a form of “merit” 
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They sometimes hang out with the quackers.
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