Werd. That’s why I find that discussing these matters in terms of ethnicity and/or culture is vastly more meaningful. There is a lot more to it than color or race, especially since the context is typically immediate social issues rather than anthropology.
The whole business of using continents to describe people is less than ideal, but has some precedent. If some groups are uncontroversally called African-Americans or Asian-Americans, then referring to those of European descent as being European-Americans is a lot more consistent, and progressive since it denies them default status. But obviously this is still a terribly reductive approach, implying that continents are more ethnically homogenous than they actually are.
Hate to tell you this bro, but grandma’s maiden name is Mather and her family was from Boston. Good chance we’re related to this guy: Cotton Mather - Wikipedia I don’t know if he was in favor of enslaving people but he was definitely supportive of witch burning. (And smallpox inoculations, for whatever that’s worth)
Oh right, forgot about that branch.
Hey, according to her 23andMe genetic profile, there’s a little native american blood in there too. That branch goes back a ways.
Would it help if we added a qualifier to these discussions, perhaps “#NotAllWhitePeople”?
I can’t remember where I heard this argument originally; might have been James Baldwin, might have been Akala, might have been Kwame Ture, might have been Ta-Nehisi Coates, might have been someone else.
Anyway, it goes like this: Blackness was created by White Supremacy, and only exists in opposition to Whiteness.
African people did not originally identify as “Black”; they identified themselves as people affiliated with a wide assortment of ethnicities and cultures, same as everywhere else.
Blackness as a concept is a consequence of slavery and colonialism.
From the White perspective, Blackness was constructed as a means of permitting the dehumanisation required to maintain slavery. From the Black perspective, Blackness was a consequence of the cultural genocide that resulted from slavery.
Similarly, Whiteness as a concept is meaningless without Blackness. It was constructed in order to create the racial hierarchy.
Regardless of its origins, however, both Black and White are a reality in the modern world, and their effects cannot be managed without recognising that fact.
Or - how about ditching the useless descriptor “white” in favor of people’s actual ethnicity? Like Normans, Celts, Franks, etc? That has the benefit of breaking them up instead of lumping them into one otherwise unrelated demographic (which is like the census version of gerrymandering). As an easier illustration: Yoruba, Tamil, and Australian people have all have dark skin, but otherwise no more cultural or genetic similarities than any other arbitrary selection. So it respectful to discuss people in more culturally meaningful terms.
Of course it is. What is more dangerous than slavery and colonialism themselves is the oppressed internalizing these. They are a reality, but there is a fine line between saying uncritically that they are the reality. To fight it, we need to be willing to institute a better cultural narrative, to decolonize the Americas.
The source of that Baldwin quote:
None of us have real world, direct connections to those cultures. The Normans and Celts certainly have echoed through history, but just as that, a nationalist echo.
Like GermanFrenchEnglishIrishSwedeDanishNorwegian?
I am admittedly not well informed as to the actual ethnicities of Europe, so there are I am sure better examples. My point was that they have distinct cultures and traditions, and that these are more socially significant and interesting than amounts of melanin. And less easily rationalized as a basis of arbitrary oppression of others.
From Yesterday’s paper.
Talk about that (or ask questions about that) all you’d like. Buy books on it and enjoy… But that is not at all the same thing as whiteness. Yes, they are equated, but that’s because whiteness is a social construct, as is a nationality or ethnicity. But again, that doesn’t mean it’s not something that’s real, that has power in people’s lives.
Or maybe read something like this:
https://www.amazon.com/History-White-People-Irvin-Painter/dp/0393339742
Because that’s not how the cultural construct that is race (and thus racism) actually works. In practice, the odds of getting shot by a cop are elevated for black people whether their ancestors hailed from modern-day Botswana or Eritrea and lower for white people whether their ancestors were Celtic or Scandinavian.
i still need to read through and think through other people’s responses.
one thing i do like is that it makes the colonial immigrant status of american whites more obvious.
“asian-american”, “african-american”, “mexican-american”, “canadian-american” – they all designate some other space first… as if they had less claim to being american than “real” americans.
some if it is obviously silly as mexico and canada are already part of the “american continent”… which leads me to think – probably incorrectly – that the only reason we even have “hispanic” is because “south-american-american” is even more silly.
but, if we are going to misjudge origins based on skin color and eye shape – why not put light-skinned people into the same game.
Another bonus would be that by that definition an awful lot of people currently termed ‘hispanic’ or Mexican-American become simply European American just like the people looking down on them.
No. It’d help if you used qualifiers like ‘American.’ American whites. British whites. Colonialist whites. The term and all about it was invented as a bludgeon to hit Africans and Indians (the sort from India) and Native Americans and… with by people who made a habit of finding less technologically advanced civilizations and terrorizing them. That’s what it is for. It’s a poor description of human characteristics and I’d be all for retiring it alongside phlogiston and the luminiferous aether, but it still applies in places laboring under the terrible weight of the crimes of colonialism.
But that doesn’t mean you should export this tainted signifier to the rest of the planet. And, as @popobawa4u points out, the same problem applies to ‘black’ which applied to people outside of America is at best laughably imprecise, and at worse insulting.
tl;dr The former (and in many ways current) colonial powers are stuck with a racist, anti-human way of classifying people and can’t get rid of it without healing themselves. Don’t export this poisonous methodology where it neither fits nor belongs.
