Jews
Etc
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Both you and @Mindysan33 are correct, from my POV.
Especially in Germany, but also in many other places in Europe, open racism isn’t an option for most racists. Most of them would belive they are not racists, but. You know. It’s a cultural thing. It’s a religious thing. And of course, those people are just not like us. They don’t share our Leitkultur. They lived like this (whatever this is) for generations, so of course there’s also some hereditary element, but we are not racists. You know, those families of our people living on social benefits for generations, they are also a nuisance!
(FTR, you want to look up Thilo Sarrazin to get an impression how fucked up the discourse in Germany is. Especially in regard to third generation immigrants from Turkey, the veiled racism was so very clear, and the arsehole still got invited in primetime talk shows.)
Othering based on the tone of your skin and the colour of your hair is so easy. I wondered why people even discuss the question if “whiteness” is an appropriate term. The fucking racism doesn’t taste any better. But then, I can see the intellectual challenge - it keeps the mind off doing other stuff, and, granted, might even lead to a better understanding. The question from my POV would be: is it worth it, or is my understanding of racism developed enough to see through this shit?
And I acknowledge that I sometimes don’t see through all the shit.
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Can anyone fill me in on why I can never get any traction with popularising this term?
Is it because folks just don’t wanna deal with that can of worms? I think we might have to in order to make any headway on this mess.
Hey! I forgot about these guys.
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They aren’t supposed to. All of that sort of tracking is voluntary information for demographic study and things like the EEOC. It’s not neccisarily tied to whatever piece of paper your filling out or your identity.
The big place where this comes in is the census. By comparing census data for the populations of different ethnic blocks to, say EEOC info from job applications you can do things like track and identify discrimination.
Basically the US government isn’t categorizing or labeling people by race. Their tracking population dynamics based on self identified ethnic block. The self identification being a rather important component.
Issue being it’s all based on the census categories. Which arent granular enough and are still tied to old racial categories. Badly in need of updating.
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I realized that and was tempted to protest, but decided it wasn’t worth the bother.
Sure. She probably focused on some arbitrary subgroup of Jewish people. All I know is that when she looked at the TV screen and said something like, “why did they pick a Jewish actor to play a Nazi soldier?”, she was right 70 percent of the time.
My reaction was “how can you tell, and, and why should we care?”, and I went on to look up the actors in question on Wikipedia. On the English-language version, because there a persons “race” is usually mentioned within two sentences, unless it’s “white”.
She didn’t have a good answer on “why should we care”. Mind you, she grew up as a nazi, but by the time I had the privilege of knowing her, she was one of the more open-minded people I knew, and definitely the most open-minded in her age group. If her prejudices told her that somebody was “different”, that was only one more reason for her to get to know them.
And yet, some people get good use out of their gaydar.
It’s not the statistics that’s wrong, it’s applying it to the individual that’s wrong. So what if you can tell with 60% certainty that someone belongs to a particular group? You still don’t know, and why would you care in the first place?
My point was that in her youth, my grandmother was trained to care. And s a result, she was able to pick up subtle cues that I don’t notice at all, and that I don’t think would be particularly productive for me to pay attention to.
The local way of talking about it is that they are not fully integrated into German society. The group was big enough that they started perpetuating their identity as being Turkish, marrying inside the group, developing a markedly distinct dialect of the German language, etc.
In a way, classism got mixed in there - the Turkish-German way of speaking German is stereotyped as “street thug slang” and sometimes even imitated by other young people who are going for that image.
It’s not that the race question got mapped to culture. We’re dealing with a culture question here, which serves a similar function that “race” does in American discourse. If you start by assuming that it’s all about race and therefore all similar problems are “race” mapped to “X”, then you’re engaging in circular reasoning, I think.
I care about this distinction because I believe adding the concept of “race” to a cultural question makes it yet worse, because culture can be shared, modified and mixed much more freely.
A historical point: I believe with antisemitic persecution before 1800 or so, “religion” was the defining element, not “race”. Whenever the people of Vienna felt they had to blame the Jews for something, they gave them the choice of “be baptised, or be executed”; they did not, at that time, analyse ancestry and genetics like Hitler did.
And as always, there’s the fine line between helping those people to derail the argument by pointing out irrelevant fine points, and “immunizing” your argument by branding all disagreement with obvious logical flaws as “racism in disguise”.
And a cheap shot against Americans is, of course, always tempting, and it does go “up” the global power differential, so you’ll have to put up with it even though #NotAllAmericans 
. My problem is that in my estimation, some aspects of American anti-racism are so much based on a racialized view of the world that you guys are actually helping the racists in Europe when your words get transported over the Atlantic.
True.
Racism is (to my knowledge) always evil, but most of the bbs is very happy with engaging in extreme culturalism against Trump voters. There culture includes a definition of America as “White, Christian and patriotic”, and if we don’t accept that as a good thing, that’s probably a case of “good culturalism”.
And there are several aspects of several middle-eastern cultures that I won’t accept or respect in my own country, either.
Europe is currently debating its “immigration model”, but the majority version seems to be, “If you come here, you have to become one of us. It will take a generation. But you should mix with us. we don’t want you to found a separate ‘immigrant community’”.
A melting pot with a dominant culture, not a multicultural society. Integration means assimilation, and “parallel societies” are to be avoided/prevented.
And that deal only works if it’s about culture, not about race. In this model, the “culturalism” is explicit. But it’s not racist, it does offer a well-defined way in. The progressive American model, by contrast, seems to be “come here and stay who you are”. Which seems to mean that if you come from X to America, you will quickly become X-American, but your great-grandchildren will still carry that hyphen.
The concept of race is toxic to the cultural-assimilation-based model of immigration. Even a positive acknowledgement that implies that race matters breaks the contract and says “you will always be different” (or “I will always be different”). In fact, it requires training people to be color-blind.
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Just as a side point:
Oz is an immigrant nation, and the source of said immigrants has changed markedly over the years. English, Irish, Chinese, German, Serbian, Greek, Vietnamese, Afghan, etc.
We are certainly not an enlightened paradise when it comes to bigotry; a lot of the locals are xenophobic arseholes. But there does seem to be a repeated pattern with the integration of new immigrant communities.
The following is entirely made up of broad stereotypes, but I think there is some truth to it:
With each new group of immigrants, the first generation tend to cling to their culture and language a bit. They’re in a new and strange environment, and there is comfort in the familiar.
For entirely understandable reasons, they seek help from other people of similar background, and form tight-knit communities. Generally speaking, they keep their heads down and work on rebuilding their lives, while trying to ignore the ignorant and/or bigoted crap they get from their new neighbours.
The second generation kids get caught between cultures, and sometimes kick up a bit. As well as the personal psychological strain, they see the prejudice their parents faced, but have less tolerance for it. Peak conflict tends to focus on this generation, because they interact more with the established locals and fight back when challenged.
The third generation are just locals with interesting names and good food.
That initial period of semi-ghettoisation does seem to be a necessary stage, though. And to accelerate it, support rather than compulsion looks like the better bet.
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Hah, I love the circumspection. Are you a scientist of some sort by any chance?
I agree with most of what you said there apart from this bit:
That is the official theory. I don’t think it actually works that way (leaving aside whether it should).
I think for example for Germany, you could be as integrated into German culture and social life as you like but if you are visibly different, you will still not be considered fully ‘German’.
You may be accepted and completely welcome but for many people there will still be that undefined point which you can’t cross to become ‘German’.
You’re right though that if you do try and assimilate, you will probably be treated better than someone ‘white’ who doesn’t.
Wouldn’t happen to have been Hogan’s Heroes would it?
Throughout European history we were always a separate people and just as often a separate “race” in various languages. “Be baptized or be executed” was not a religious matter as much as a matter of rejecting ones own people or die. FWIW Yiddish didnt even have a word for “Judaism” because it was simply the practice of our people and no other.
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I’m sorry, that’s not what I’m doing here. Pointing out that racism is a complicated social and cultural ideology that isn’t just an American problem. It manifests elsewhere in different ways and even here in the US, since the 70s “culture” has become the stand in for explicit claims of racism.
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Just a quick side-note. As a European, I have a feel that the definition of “race” is different in Europe and in the USA. I noticed that fellow americans identify some people as “black” or “latino”, which I identify otherwise. For example people presented in the USA as “black” or “african-american” (whatever that means) are, in my eyes as “mixed ethnicity”. For me people from the south of Europe and from the middle east have white skin. People from the south of India and Sri Lanka are “black”, but of a different “black” than people from Africa.
I am not sure what all this means in the context of this mostly US-centric discussion, but I wanted to point out that sensitivity varies even between western countries.
I have always found the term “African-American” (or Asian-American, or Mexican-American, and so on) to be kind of weird – almost a forced “politically correct” (and I don’t use this term lightly) thing people use to try really, really hard not to offend almost to the point of absurdity. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen Americans on TV in foreign places saying a black person is “African-American”. The reason I find the XXX-American concept strange is that it’s trying not to offend while making various assumptions about the person that may not be true – they may not even be American, and they may not identify with any ancestry from X country or region.
If someone called me “European-American” I wouldn’t necessarily be offended, but I would find it very curious for sure. I certainly wouldn’t feel any special kinship with someone native to any of the regions of Eastern Europe that my ancestors came from, nor would I identify as being “European”. I’m just an American white dude (feel free to call me a “stupid American”, I promise I won’t mind).
You are right though, in America, “black” has a very specific connotation – and that’s of someone that has features commonly associated with the people of sub-Saharan Africa more so than skin tone. Even someone who’s light skinned to the point of appearing Caucasian would probably be considered “black” by many. Dark skinned South-Asians for example would just be called “Indian” (because who the fuck cares what country they are from, right?).
As for sensitivity. I’ve had many black friends throughout my life (and no, not in the “I’m a white guy who has black friends so it’s OK for me to use the ‘n word’” sense, I mean most of my best friends throughout my life were black). Discussions about things like race and racism came up all the time because these were important and inescapable parts of our identity. Using skin tone as a shorthand designator was never considered any more offensive than saying “white”, “blond”, “short”, “tall”, or other obvious identifying characteristic about a person. (That said, if someone asked me to address them a certain way, I’d certainly respect this.)
Anyway I’m not sure if I actually made a point here or was just rambling on to the point of incoherency. As many have pointed out race, racism, and racialism aren’t things that can be solved just by carefully curating how you address someone’s ancestry.
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There has been one improvement over the past 80 years or so. The Brits no longer insist on keeping India British.
I agree. In no way are “black” and “white” strictly Americanisms exported to the rest of the world. As an example, in Zimbabwe and South Africa “black” and “white” are most definitely things and they are things with little or no help from the U.S. at all.
I don’t know about the entirety of the African continent but I think blame for that can be apportioned to the Dutch, English, and French more than anyone else.
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Yeah, I think racial constructs are certainly very localized in nature, but it’s something that is a common construct around the world. It’s constantly defined and redefined to fit people’s desire to keep a particular group on the outs.
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Humans love drawing arbitrary lines and categories as a way of simplifying things. Many an internet flamewar has been fought over what to categorize a particular artist or band. Same deal with people; human beings do it to everything, including ourselves.
Why we do it seems like a cognitive shortcut. If that’s the case, there’s hope that someday we evolve in our cognitive abilities enough that we no longer have need of such shortcuts.
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Race, religion, sex, weight, handedness… Anything to raise one’s stature compared to others.
We’ve got some evolving to do
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