that thing white ppl do when they disparage 'white ppl'

wtf is going on here

racism perpetuated against white minorities

if we're talking about late 19th cent. discrimination against Irish and Italian immigrants in America, ok sure (with the caveat that Irish and Italians were definitely NOT considered white at the time). If you're talking about Jews, there's a different word for that. Otherwise this phenomenon does not really exist in modern America, and saying it does looks like dog-whistling about "reverse racism" etc.

I have to believe this dude is just trolling.

late 19th cent.

(in case anyone gets on me about this, yes I'm aware this carried over well into the 20th century. past WWII, not so much)

xp

I experienced some minor anti-Irish prejudice from a bigoted headmaster in the late 70's in the UK. But it is was nothing compared to the treatment meted out to Afro-Caribbean pupils. There was a black kid in my class who was 3 years older than me and had continually been put back a year at his behest, and this went on completely unchallenged until High school. The only thing that made you 2nd gen Irish was your name and you knew you were on team White, and different rules apply etc.

we're discussing whether racism is racism or whether its only racism when we say it is

in the thread perfectly apposite for same btw

trolling isnt exactly a fair description in the circs imo

course the simple introduction of /america/ tags would as always possibly remove a lot of the uncommon grounds idk

Οὖτις, do you really, honestly think that foreigners in america are never discriminated against? like a portion of whom may be white?

it doesn't even make sense to cite a country as racist and then assume that like a first-generation polish immigrant would just be fine because they're white.

I have to believe this dude is just trolling.

how is it trolling to suggest a country which treats minorities badly treats all minorities badly?

is there any country which doesn't have an undercurrent of prejudice towards any/all minorities?

if we're talking about Europe, that esteemed continent's rich tradition of every ethnic group hating every other ethnic group is sort of irrelevant, or at least a different sort of beast, not so tied to notions of who deserved to be enslaved in the New World.

xp

I'm talking white Hegemony period. At no point did I say over black people specifically. If I frame things in terms of blackness its cause I'm black and those are the examples I know most readily.

If there are white minorities who's grievances stand at odds with my conception of racism, I'd genuinely want to discuss and explorehow that plays out but my argument against a majoritarian control of language stands regardless.

i mean if we go way back up to tsrobodo's comment i just thought 'yeah fair enough' when i read this.

it doesn't even make sense to cite a country as racist and then assume that like a first-generation polish immigrant would just be fine because they're white.

it totally does, and this country is called America, where 1st generation Polish immigrants won't receive even a fraction of the discrimination that a Nigerian immigrant will, BECAUSE OF SKIN COLOR and thus perceived "whiteness"

and yeah you sound like a troll

i already said, repeatedly, not every experience is the same or as serious, but it's not a zero sum game.

and yeah you sound like a troll

well i'm trying to politely disagree, is all, i don't think it's fair to just call me a troll on that basis.

let me put it this way, whatever discrimination our hypothetical first-generation polish immigrant experiences will not be based on the color of their skin or perceived "race", it will be based on their being an immigrant, period. This is not racism. You could call it xenophobia or anti-immigrant but it isn't based on the "race" of the Pole. no one considers Poles a race distinct from other white Euros.

(I see in orbit already said this upthread)

you come from a country with a rich heritage of Polack jokes tbf

tbf I see you've been around for a couple months but I didn't recognize your username and someone new coming into race threads and implying some of the things you have raises some alarm bells. this is the internet after all. my apologies.

xp

And one notable jack

Xp

its been another wonderful thread weve it nearly solved see yis tomorrow

a rich heritage of Polack jokes tbf

the roots of these (which didn't really become a thing until the 60s afaik) are kind of interesting - German immigrants carrying over prejudices from the old world? WWII perceptions of Poles as Soviet stooges? In any case, the roots are more historical and socio-political than strictly racial. None of those jokes have anything to do with identifiable racial or physical characteristics.

But it's true there is an ethnic component to this type of humor about backwards/foolish/weird immigrants (usually eastern European, but not always) - see Borat, Latke, Chico Marx, Yakov Smirnoff, Balki from Perfect Strangers. It's lame.

and as you've said yourself, the nationalities admitted to Whiteness have shifted over time. i basically agree with everybody on the thread who wants to distinguish "racism" from "prejudice" but the definition of racism that some of you are pushing is so US-centric that invites objection, honest or not

and reducing for example European racism to "lol none of those guys get along" is ignoring a brutal history of pogroms, antisemitism, anti-Slav racism, anti-Irish racism etc etc

oh twas harmless fun we enjoyed it sure

I find European racism too tangled and depressing and omnipresent to contemplate tbh - I've have a hard enough time with ours over here sad lol

tbf I see you've been around for a couple months but I didn't recognize your username and someone new coming into race threads and implying some of the things you have raises some alarm bells. this is the internet after all. my apologies.

i p much accept your distinction about racism/xenophobia. honestly, and this is prob as a euro, i'm quite used to thinking of discrimination as something affecting multiple groups at any one time. but also as a person it seems wanting a better world is not about making a prioritised list but about many goals working in tandem.

i guess i'd say even if it's not strictly racism in the example i gave it's extremely similar. like a person with prejudice choosing to discriminate against someone based on their nationality. yes, nationality is more easily hidden and more transient than race, but i dunno, i felt like itt to even bring up the fact that there are people who lack privilege who may happen to be white was like i'd said the earth was flat or something.

i mean if someone calls a person a slur based on their nationality it starts to feel hard to say that's not racism. or yeah, does a borat voice for a person from eastern europe.

i've been racially abused as an immigrant a fair few times and i'm well aware what a privileged life i lead and how close to not being a minority at all i am as an irish person in britain. i can laugh it off as it has no real effect on me or my job but obv it does suggest to me that anyone moving to another country is going to experience prejudice, if i was from poverty, if i didn't speak the language, and if the country i moved to was thousands of miles away as opposed to a basically similar culture presumably there would be many barriers to surmount. and yeah they'd be worse if i wasn't white - i never once denied that.

i dunno, i felt like i wanted to broaden the scope of the discussion of prejudice, not narrow it, and not diminish by broadening either. genuinely surprised at how antagonistic this briefly got.

Is it okay for me to disparage the wite person I just watched have a nuclear-grade meltdown in the pharmacy and steamroll over every polite entreaty and kindly-worded pseudo-threat offered to her on a satin pillow when any POC in her position would be getting fingerprinted atm instead of maniacally swerving down the road toward her comfy comfy couch?

and as you've said yourself, the nationalities admitted to Whiteness have shifted over time. i basically agree with everybody on the thread who wants to distinguish "racism" from "prejudice" but the definition of racism that some of you are pushing is so US-centric that invites objection, honest or not

Well the name of the thread should really be "that thing white Americans do when they disparage 'white Americans'", let's be honest about it.

self-identified whites are fucking evil don't get me wrong

I'm currently an immigrant in South America and with all the Haitian refugees, the racism is becoming depressing here. Since I am whiter than most citizens here I am treated so well that it's laughable. Like, being pulled out of a long line at a government building so I can sit down. Every time we get weird treatment like that we just go "it's because we are white."

lol tipsy exaggeration - worrying about a slur to your whiteness qua whiteness is a dick move, invariably, is closer to what i meant

I find European racism too tangled and depressing and omnipresent to contemplate tbh

Now there's a coincidence.

anyway

iirc, and its quite a path back tbh, the post that kicked this off was a p interesting investigation into whether a constant insistence of whiteness as a primary (and ofc negative) personally-held self-identifier was a productive furrow to achieve real gains in oh god only remembers what fight for sanity in the current discourse

think it rather degenerated into a debate ranging from "poc cant be racist" (interesting but lol) thru "can wites be a minority"- i think we do this all the time and any disavowal of same is aggressively treated as bad faith strategic disavowal of privilege, when tbh in the context of ilx and obv twitter-informed orthodoxy the strategic push is quite obviously to wring the admission of whiteness in order to move to sequence no.2, "well ur point is automatically discredited ur wite" which is in itself a reasonably bad-faith pre-sprung trap

also feel as if, again, behaving as if the anointed object of such discussion is for the doubting thomas to submit to your obv correct position as a result of these pre-set rhetorical devices is lame, it leads to frustration with genuine disagreement and eg declarations of trolling or idk "you care or you dont" simply because of the presumption of the script and result and object from the start which idk feels like what we do now but didnt when we were good at being a duscussion board

xp oh we got reasonable in the meantime

Is it okay for me to disparage the wite person I just watched have a nuclear-grade meltdown in the pharmacy and steamroll over every polite entreaty and kindly-worded pseudo-threat offered to her on a satin pillow when any POC in her position would be getting fingerprinted atm instead of maniacally swerving down the road toward her comfy comfy couch?

― My Name is Pants and I Fit Snugly (Old Lunch), Friday, 3 August 2018 22:06 (eight minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

its telling that this is the lens you pulled out maybe? idk.

its probably a very valid lens like idk fuck structural racism obv

It probably is telling. This stuff is on my mind a lot these days.

Like I don't know how many POCs (in the US, always forgetting the necessary qualifier) are used to hearing someone fairly calmly threaten to call the police like three or four times and then being allowed to go on their merry way.

NV otm

Borat is specifically central Asian / Muslim but there has always been a racial component to a lot of anti-Eastern European prejudice, often based in the idea that they are not ‘fully white’ - either because Slavic nations are inherently Asiatic as well as European or because of their long history of interaction with the Ottoman Empire, etc. Certainly, as you progress into Armenia, Georgia, etc, the idea that second/third generation people would even code as white to everyone seems off.

tbh, having roots in a country’s where almost nobody is white and there are no clearly defined hierarchical systems of racial dominance but deeply rooted racism is everywhere, the power+prejudice structure doesn’t work so well. You can frame it as a legacy of white colonialism, which is probably true in part, but not in whole. I’m sympathetic to the idea that, as race is a social construct and that construct has historically been formally codified to reify white Anglo power, anti-white prejudice exists outside the boundaries of what should be properly be called racism but it’s not as though, internationally, the perception of race only persists in terms of its relationship to Anglo whiteness, however powerful that might be.

idk if the revive was prompted by the Sarah Jeong stuff but I can’t remember the last time I saw any genuine prejudice against white people on Twitter, or wherever, but there is a pretty huge amount of deliberate winding-up of racists, ranging from the absurd (Husein Kesvani claiming he works in a cafe and charges white people for soup when they order coffee, carrying on a three-day string of arguments with idiots who took it seriously) to more pointed stuff from people using it as a platform to, as Jeong did, push back against racist harassment. I kind of wonder how many of the likes and retweets, etc, are scratching the same itch - in terms of white people performatively distancing themselves from whiteness - as the theme of the thread.

In terms of legit looking Kazakh/Asian/Mongolian/Turkic/etc and therefore NOT reading as white in America no matter where someone is born, then that’s not a subset of whiteness...? Errr yes? Whereas the Georgians and Armenians and Albanians and Russians that I know are all very clearly white ppl and as soon as their kids don’t have an accent anymore they can go anywhere in the US and fit in. Obv I know that the ppl I have happened to meet don’t represent THEIR WHOLE ENTIRE COUNTRIES. But I’m still confused about this direction we’ve gone and how it relates.

the absurd (Husein Kesvani claiming he works in a café and charges white people for soup when they order coffee, carrying on a three-day string of arguments with idiots who took it seriously)

idk that lying about that counts as an absurdity, at least for anyone who has never heard of Husein Kesvani (like myself) and therefore has no basis whatsoever for judging its truth, other than its innate plausibility, which is far from absurd on its face.

I suppose such an assertion could bait a few rabid racists into a rage, but then, why tell lies that degrade yourself like that? All he has done is create a situation where he is being dishonest if it's true and being dishonest if it isn't.

I suppose such an assertion could bait a few rabid racists into a rage, but then, why tell lies that degrade yourself like that? All he has done is create a situation where he is being dishonest if it's true and being dishonest if it isn't.

Because it's funny. I know, I know, this is a thread about race so nothing can be funny ever, but that's funny. Baiting hair-trigger idiots almost always is.

I have a niece who, when she was about 14 would make 'prank' phone calls ordering pizzas for delivery to nonexistent addresses. She thought it was hilarious that the 'idiots' at the pizza place believed her.

Whereas the Georgians and Armenians and Albanians and Russians that I know are all very clearly white ppl and as soon as their kids don’t have an accent anymore they can go anywhere in the US and fit in.

If so, that’s phenomenal progress given that, in the mid-90s, over three quarters of Armenian-Americans said they felt they’d been racially discriminated against when seeking employment. Perhaps even more so for Albanians given the post-9/11 profiling of other Muslims with Mediterranean complexions tbh. It’s a digression from the crux of the thread but categories of “acceptable” whiteness are still malleable today and blanket statements that groups some people perceive to be within the bounds of whiteness can’t be the victims of racism-proper are unhelpful.

when i was a kid everything i knew about albania came from that simpsons episode

lest we forget "iron heart" Heydrich was part Jewish, maybe if he had a Mediterranean complexion he'd have been on the other side of the ghetto. I always remember the story of the Babi Yar survivor, whose mother basically said: you leave now, you don't look Jewish.

The 'edge' cases are always interesting studies in the fluidity of US racist perceptions. Albanians, Sicilians, Turks, Moroccans, all can slide back and forth on the 'whiteness' scale and often occupy a place not much different from light-skinned 'blacks' passing for white in the Jim Crow southern USA. I'm pretty sure European racism provides some interesting edge cases and variants on the overall theme of its own. As usual, the logic of racism is wholly irrational, but the harm is all too real.

Sharivari otm

Like in Los Angeles i had an armenian colleague and i noticed on quite a few occasions that non-armenians thought he was some type of middle eastern, and this was just a year ago

I also sensed that this particular armenian guy would go out of his way to make sure i knew he was more aligned with white/US/western european countries

He once asked me what continent I thought armenia was in, and i just answered with what they taught me at school and he did not seem pleased

The interesting thing for me is the question of what happens when unambiguously non-white categories become those edge cases. By and large, Indian Americans aren’t going to get shot by the police, many have skipped the bootstraps poverty grind by emigrating to the US as grad students and slotting in to the middle class, they are increasingly being courted by the racist-right, politically, etc. Idk if there is a point at which we can say they face endemic personal prejudice but not systematic structural racism.

like being the only Asian family in Kerry, scaled up a bit!

Going back a bit - I know we have a word "antisemitism" but.

It may be tangential to the issue white supremacy (and discussions of white/black racism in the US), but... how is antisemitism not a type of racism?

loved the tsrobodo posts on meaning, 'reverse racism' & particularly the point about what discussions are had and the shape they take

as I see it

"that thing white ppl do when they disparage"

is the phenomenon, and the own-group disparaging is the reductio ad absurdum that brings it into focus

so many conversations I've had with white people about race just get turned into condemnations, and they're so often cheap, and they so often seem to be primarily about soothing anxiety about responsibility and making people feel comfortable. you offer a statement condemning something when you don't want to do anything else about it.

there was a really good recent nabisco NYT op-ed I posted a few months ago to a different thread, which got a little discussion, that dealt with the nature of internet conversations and “speech as inquiry” vs “speech as activism”, and I think this thread is a good example of how unproductive things can be when everyone involved doesn’t think about what it is they’re really trying to accomplish by engaging in these discussions

as fate would have it, nabisco himself started a different thread about this very topic years ago