Don’t go there.
First, you’re not up to date with your race science. Normals, Celts, Franks don’t exist anymore as ethnicities. Racial science has been developed to great detail in Europe before the Nazis came along. For example, many Austrians belong to the Noric subrace of the Dinaric race. This body of “science” has been thoroughly discredited, but anything you come up with for describing race more accurately will just end up a poor imitation of something the Nazis did better. And that no one else does anymore.
Now, if you go by national identities, sucha s French, German, Austrian, the bad news for white Americans is that we Europeans probably won’t include them in our definitions.
Someone asked on Quora, “Why are people from Europe, or other countries, offended by Americans talking about having ancestors and cultural roots from those regions?” because there is the frequent situation where an American proudly tells a European “I’m German” (referring to their great-grandmothers birthplace) and the European is tempted to respond with “No, you aren’t”.
For reference, Arnold Schwarzenegger was born a few kilometers outside the town where I live; we’d sometimes refer to him as “Austrian”, but no one in Austria would ever consider his kids to be Austrian.
I find myself pretty much in agreement with what @LapsedPacifist says on this topic; in particular the “toxic American import” does resonate with me.
But the way I am understanding it, we’re talking about completely different timescales here. I’m thinking much more short-term. My timescale on this basically starts with the Nazis.
Here in Austria our greatest racists of all time where more about Aryans vs. Jews, and about Germans vs. everyone else, and not that much about “whiteness”. Sure, they didn’t have a high opinion of black people, but black people just were not the “other” that they used to define themselves. My grandmother grew up in the 30s and was still able to identify Jewish people by sight, and if someone was Jewish, that was one of the first facts she mentioned about them. But I have never heard her to refer to anyone as “white”. And she would definitely have never dreamed of referring to Jews as “non-white”.
I guess part of what made antisemitism particularly insidious was that the Jewish population of Austria and Germany was not visibly different from the rest. A “they are hiding among us” narrative.
So, when someone in modern-day Austria uses “white” as a relevant category, I assume that the very idea of using that category has been imported from America. No matter where it came from before that.
It is also an “import” in a different way; I’d say that until the internet, the color-blind theory of antiracism (is there an official term for that?) reigned unchallenged in Austria. My generation was basically taught that “categorizing people by race was something the Nazis did, and thankfully we mostly don’t do that anymore, and if you ever find yourself doing it, stop immediately”.
Thus, when, during a visit to the US as a teenager, I first saw that in America there were actually fields on official forms where people could specify their “race”, I was shocked. This was something that only Nazis did, and it just didn’t compute.
Now, I’ve heard arguments that “color-blindness” is not a good thing, and that its just a way for the privileged group to ignore the problem. Which might be true for American society, where you actually have large minority groups that are disadvantaged because of their race.
The Austrian situation is different, as we do not have large minority groups that are disadvantaged because of their race. Sad truth number one is of course that we murdered ad chased away most of the last such group that we had. Sad truth number two is that we do have minority groups that are disadvantaged, but hey are not disadvantaged because of their race. They are recent immigrants, and they have a bad economic and educational starting position, have to struggle learning the language, and they are being discriminated against on the basis of cultural identity. The good news is that the descendants of immigrants become part of the culture and are no longer perceived as foreign. As long as society is color-blind. The concept of “race”, even in the form perpetuated by American progressives, is toxic in this context, because it perpetuates group distinctions where otherwise there would be none.
How so? By their mode of dress or some mythical racial characteristic of “Jew”? While German Jews were fully assimilated, the Nazis still looked to physical characteristics to find them, exclude them, then murder them enmass. None of this is news to you, I know. My point is that it still haunts European politics and is part of the same regime of racialization and categorization that is part of American politics.
Just because there wasn’t an explicit whiteness category, doesn’t mean that Europeans aren’t in some ways looking at the world through a racialized lens, I’d argue. There are still people who are considered outside of category of “European” because of their ethnic heritage - Romani people, North Africans, Turks, Arabs, sometimes Slavic peoples. I agree that it’s not the same as the American preoccupation with racial categories, but that doesn’t mean that Europeans are somehow free of the same kind of intellectual organizing of people
Entirely true. We had a movement here to end racial hatred here. Like us, you guys in European are still dealing with the racial structures built in the 19th and 20th century.
Sort of. Through a lens of prejudice, sure. You can call it ‘racialized’ if you like, but it needn’t have anything to do with any remotely sensible racial category. It can be ethnicity. It can be a very peculiar mix of social class and culture markers. It can all sorts of things and it maps so poorly on the American system of race that naming it ‘racialized’ confuses more than it illuminates. I’m completely with @zathras (and his brother, Zathras) on this.
I’ll give you an example: down my way there’s quite a bit of prejudice about the Roma people. Firstly, it’s not racism by American lights because the Roma are the same race as nearly everyone else here. It isn’t even colorism, because there’s Roma that are indistinguishable from the local population which ich, further, mixed with them anyway: e.g. my family did, though distantly.
It’d be ethnic prejudice (which, incidentally, is the European poison-of-choice, by and large which is I think what @zathras and I are getting at) except, no, it isn’t quite that. See, there’s a semi-large section of the population who are assimilated and/or mixed Roma. They speak the language, celebrate the relevant holidays, have the traditions and the semi-religious traits and all that, but to most people (including the horrifyingly chauvinist ones) ‘Roma’[1] refers to people of Roma descent who also live a semi-nomadic lifestyle that some still maintain. The people holding down job as lawyers, like my neighbors, say, simply don’t count.
[1] Okay ‘Gypsies,’ because appallingly chauvinist people don’t call 'em ‘Roma’
Is prejudice against those Roma okay? Hell no. But it isn’t racism. It’s something that doesn’t really even have a name. But it not having a name doesn’t make it not evil or not worth fighting.
In some countries, largely former colonial powers, the division by race is the big one—I’d suggest in America most of all, because it used ganging up on the nonwhite as an integration factor for its multi-ethnic population—but that’s not in any way universal. It’s a historical peculiarity that is merely a skin over very old evil that is universal.
Apparently so. Mind you, she wasn’t even close to accurate, but she had a significantly above-random success rate when identifying, e.g. American actors on TV that she didn’t know, as Jewish. It was a bit creepy, because I didn’t spot a difference, and I wouldn’t have cared about it enough to remark upon it if I had. After all, I wouldn’t consider it worth mentioning when a particular actor looks French, either.
What @LapsedPacifist said. A lens of categorization and prejudice, and relatively rarely a lens of race.
North Africans, Turks, Arabs: Turks and Arabs are very different from each other racially, but they get discriminated against as “muslim immigrants”. Islamophobia is not racism, because Islam is not a race, nor is it productive to view religion as something linked to genetics.
- I’m not sure what the proper general term is for *isms that categorize people and then discriminate against “others” or against minorities
- “racism” is not it, that is just one example of it
- the popular ways of discriminating in modern Europe are not based on race
- but several of them are based on things that correlate with race to a certain degree.
- emphasizing race as a category when it is the elephant in the room is important
- emphasizing race as a category when discrimination works along different lines is toxic, because it adds additional excuses for discrimination and in the worst case replaces a “variable” category with a fixed category.
By variable I mean something that the individual has influence over, whereas race is a “fixed” category that you cannot escape when it is assigned from the outside, and, worse yet, it is passed on from generation to generation. Especially as Americans, even the ones who are passionately fighting againast racism, still play along with the crazy idea that a child of a white and a black person is “non-white”.
I’ve been going a bit heavy with the Akala links in this thread already, but this one is particularly relevant to discussions of US vs UK racism:
The Irish Slave Myth is not neccisarily connected to the view that various European ethnic groups (Italians, Pols, Slavs, Basque, Irish) were excluded from the racial in group. And the roots of that exclusion aren’t neccisarily unique to America or directly tied to the 18 and 19th century immigration wave here. Its relatively easy to find records and writing from the UK where the Irish are discussed as other, non-white, improperly white, and very much the same way other non European groups dating back pretty god damned far. Its also trivially easy to look at something in US history. Like say the Second Clan, which was heavily anti-immigrant, and especially anti-Irish, in addition to being anti-black and anti-semetic. And see the those immigrant groups, and specific white ethnic groups listed in the same class, and discussed using the same language as Blacks, Jews and Asians. Or specifically identified as not white.
So there’s definitely something there. I think part of the problem is how we describe the racial in group as “white”. Because you’ve got multiple meanings there. We use it to mean white of skin, descended mostly from Europeans. But we also use it to refer to the racial in group more generally. And more specifically to those assimilated whites who lack a more specific ethnic identity.
Its probably better to refer to these European groups as “less than white”, “the wrong kind of white” or in the racial out group or something like that than trying to describe them as “non-white”.
The Irish Slave myth doesn’t have roots in these ideas. Or the works cited in your own link on the subject (if you haven’t I’d suggest reading them they’re pretty interesting. And often predicated on examining how a given groups got an invitation to the white people party while others didn’t. And a big part of the answer to that is by piling on against blacks with your main line whites). From what I can tell there’s some basis in Irish Nationalism. And it certainly follows on from the old fashioned misery Olympics (no we’re more oppressed). And it remixes some of the same real history to form the basis for its fake history. But from what I can tell it largely rose up, rather recently, through the same right wing and white nationalist venues as much of the alt right horse shit we deal with regularly. (rather than the often left wing racial/identity politics driving the other discussion). It takes real features of Irish history and extracts them into wild false hoods. And boils down to two arguments. “It happened to the Irish too! So its OK!”. And “well look what happened to the Irish, and you don’t see them complaining”.
The first runs afoul of the Two wrongs don’t make a right rule. And the second misses the point that Irish people (especially Irish Americans) complain about this all the time. The Irish even threw a god damned revolution over it.
But more importantly what you have is fundamentally a slate of wild falsehoods. Propagated and created by open white supremacists. That are intended to excuse or justify race based injustices. Slavery. And dismiss the complaints of African Americans. It doesn’t follow directly from a concept that is very much about acknowledging and unpacking those same things. And trying to figure out how they’re connected to, and drawn from the same sources as other oppression.
And personally. As an Irish American person it straight pisses me off. It dismisses and misrepresents some rather important things about Irish history. In effect arguing all that oppression was OK and there are totally no lingering risks or problems from it. As an excuse to claim the same thing in regards to Blacks.
I will also point out that in addition to this, using ‘racism’ when it doesn’t quite apply allows the not-quite-racists-but-equally-terrible people to deflect the charge with a simple “no I’m not racist, $GROUP is not a race or, I’ve no problem whatsoever with $GROUP2 which is the same race as $GROUP.”
Which of course illustrates the problem of this variety of categorization. It’s based on an assumption of what Jewish people look like. It’s not the black-white racial categories we associate with the US, but it is based on some imagined fixed category that correlates to race as a social construct.
Agreed. I’m saying that Islam is being racialized by some in Europe.
Aren’t the children and grandchildren of Turkish guest workers in Germany facing discrimination despite the fact that they are fully integrated into German society? It’s true that there is a general category of “Muslims” that is scare tactic, but I’d suggest that the same sorts of essentialisms that drove the Jewish question, drive the Muslim one. You’re right that it’s not racial, but it correlates to the idea of race or ethnicity being an essential quality of a person and in this case it’s seen as being incompatible with being European. The race question got mapped to culture.
That’s entirely true. It allows people to discriminate and still look down their noses at American racists, despite doing similar things to other people.
Yeah, like this guy.
Saying “someone looks Jewish” is like saying “someone looks gay” and it’s based on stereotypes, not actual science.
Yep, there’s an archaic compliment: ‘he’s a white man’ meaning good bloke, that’s Anglo, or at least Aussie.
[quote=“zathras, post:64, topic:109293”]
in America there were actually fields on official forms where people could specify their “race”, I was shocked. This was something that only Nazis did, and it just didn’t compute.[/quote]
On government forms here in Oz, they only ask if you identify as Aboriginal or Torres Straight Islander (to qualify you for various measures of affirmative action), and it’s optional.
When I applied for a social security card, there was a space for race, but the applicant was given the option to not select anything. I handed over the form, the woman behind the counter just looked me over and selected for me.
I’d call that culturalism. And not being a cultural relativist, I’d say there’s good culturalism and bad culturalism, but that’s a murky subject that depends on your ideology.
Did you think I meant otherwise? That was my entire point, that some people think they can tell someone is something, just by looking at them…
Also, I see your (Canadian) Drake and raise you a Sammy Davis Jr:
Culture has became the new stand in for race.
I’m not sure that it’s new; it may be more that the cultural bigotry that has been with humanity forever has at some times and in some places been racialised.
Whatever the sequence, I’m gonna maintain that some culturalism makes perfect sense, unlike any racism.
FGM, anyone?
…But yeah, slippery slope.
