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

Nell Painter talks about the white/black binary as a specific product of slavery, the US and "Enlightenment" Europe iirc. i'm not sure it's in the interests of anti-racism to try to universalize that binary or to wave away its political and economic roots

kudos to the Roman Empire on having a shitload of Emperors who weren't "real Romans", wherever that idea came from. must've been pretty awkward.

I think there are lots of examples of the dynamics of racial antagonism replicating in other areas but as a kind of displaced, diet-racist energy...

That it’s not so much that the Irish are seen as black in England as they’re seen as having greater proximity to blackness than the English ... that this conflict is a proxy battle for anti black sentiment generally

― Listen to my homeboy Fantano (D-40), Tuesday, August 7, 2018 7:30 PM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Ahh. I mean yeah as far as any kind of exoticism is defined in relation to a normalised whiteness, there are tons of avenues where it plays out without having to engage that tension

haha well they aren't unique in that regard. that whole ancient practice of recruiting/raising rulers from foreign ethnicities is kind of fascinating.

xp

cough windsors cough

there was a definite thing in some ancient and medieval city states of getting a kind of "neutral" in as ruler to keep the warring classes in balance

i'm just being sarcy about Rome tho, it is famously multicultural throughout the Empire, i don't even know why i'm arguing the point

America is famously multicultural too

cough windsors cough

cough plantagenets tudors stuarts cough

mostly not *invited* in tbf

I was thinking more of these dudes, but there are lots of examples: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mamluk

The need to weigh every single instance of historical discrimination on a preset, purportedly universal colour scale is just… myopically American? Unless we take 'white' and 'black' to be metaphysical, allegorical categories, i.e. the eternal oppressor and the oppressed (let's not).

― pomenitul, Tuesday, August 7, 2018 8:22 PM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

See, I would see interpret the idea that any such colour scale is an American invention as myopically American.

It didn't come exclusively from the Atlantic slave trade or Slavery. It was borne out of a nascent global modernity. The way we continue to talk about race the way we do despite it having no bearing on how we scientifically understand human beings to work, was set into play by the (primarily European) thinkers of late renaissance to victorian period.

yr first sentence is not clear there

lets try again then,

Assuming that the colour scale, has to be an American invention affords the American conception of race a uniqueness that is entirely unearned.

The idea that this dynamic is alien to Europe or wherever else is completely baffling to me.

has anyone said that, though? the specific "white ppl" stereotypes that are prevalent on the american-centric parts of the internet are american-centric

that doesn't seem like a revelation

I think it was kind of a nod and wink when nakh created the thread. It comes off as really odd to me when people not in north america, mostly those in the twitter hordes who somehow think they're part of the american political right even though they've never left sweden, buy into the bullshit hierarchy we've created on these shores

honestly, "whiteness" in the usa has very little to do with europe or any of the social animosities there, unless it's coming from someone who's an outlier or recent immigrant. it's a marker of assimilation, or perceived assimilation. and it's not even a one-way assimilation where speaking american-accented english and conforming to certain stereotypes makes you "white" because a number of groups that were immigrants at some point had their foods and some traditions pulled into mainstream american culture

people who visit the usa or immigrate but are from countries where there's an assimilated ethnic population get coded as "white but foreign". some groups are perpetually at the fringe and code as "white" in some areas but not others. finally, there are some genetic characteristics (skin color being the obvious one) that can make people unable to be coded as "white" due to institutional bias

the concepts exist elsewhere to differing extents but it's a dynamic that's completely different in the uk, ireland, continental europe

I think there are other lenses -- every area has its own -- but the nuances are so different that the only commonalities are groups that are universally *not* white

― mh, Tuesday, August 7, 2018 9:18 PM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Well you have for one if I'm reading the bolded correctly.

And its case in point that for the people you're describing no leap is required for them to internalise a hierarchy that by your reasoning should distant
and otherworldly to them.

Nothing you've described about how whiteness is coded in America isn't also true of Europe.

handily obscured by "I'm not white, I'm FRENCH!" (or whatever) thinking in Europe.

youll never be accused of obtuseness anyway will u

I thought oustic was coming back rejuvenated and a chill dood not to get back into heated debates

Yeesh im mystified how we jumped from “racism comes from American slavery” to the Roman Empire like there’s not a massive history of racist european enlightenment thinking that predates it in between those historical periods

“Western civilization” is built on Greco Roman philosophy it’s true and while race may not have been understood that way at the time the idea of the “slave” as a social role was very much a part of the basis of western civ -> enlightenment -> modernism. American race relations didn’t pop out of a void they’re a direct descendent of these modes of thought

Has anyone said racism comes from American slavery?

It is how our argument was characterized cf

american ilxors mistrust any suggestion that white ppl can/do/should be able to identify as other than white as a primary personal identifying characteristic because to do so is an abnegation of an inherent moral duty to recognise the multifaceted and inalienable privileges accruing as a result of being white as well as making it too easy to not identify with the group culpable for slavery and the ensuing structural racism inherent in the system

I think there are lots of examples of the dynamics of racial antagonism replicating in other areas but as a kind of displaced, diet-racist energy...

That it’s not so much that the Irish are seen as black in England as they’re seen as having greater proximity to blackness than the English

any invocation of racial hierarchy is sort of this if you take 'proximity to blackness' as 'further down the hierarchy than the ruling white english', blackness as the ultimate otherness.

the empire could not have functioned as it did if race could not sometimes be trumped by class, and the ruling classes were, I think, always aware of racism as one system of difference among many, and although it seemed to have the weight of biology giving it a gravitas that ppl would sometimes seek to borrow, it was not always the most important.

"The negro, is in Jamaica as the costermonger is in Whitechapel; he is very likely often nearly a savage with the mind of a child." - Edwin Hood

A report in the Saturday Review about working-class life observed: "The Bethnal Green poor are a caste apart, a race of whom we know nothing, whose lives are of quite different complexion from ours, persons with whom we have no point of contact."

Lady Gordon, the wife of Sir Arthur Hamilton-Gordon, the governor of Fiji from 1875 to 1880, thought the native high-ranking Fijians "such an undoubted aristocracy". She wrote: "Their manners are so perfectly easy and well bred . . . Nurse can't understand it at all, she looks down on them as an inferior race. I don't like to tell her that these ladies are my equals, which she is not!"

When the Hawaiian King Kalakaua was seated in higher order than the Crown Prince of Germany at a royal banquet, then-prince Edward (Edward VII) riposted to a complaint, "Either the brute is a king, or else he is an ordinary black nigger, and if he is not a king, then why is he here?"

To which my counter argument was colonialism suggests racism predates American slavery and so suddenly everyone was talking about how there wasn’t anti black racism in Ancient Rome

Xp

sorry, meant to redact/clean that c&p up

It is how our argument was characterized cf]

I thought it was more about the American concept of racism coming from slavery and non-Americans resisting the idea that it applied everywhere equally.

Fwiw i only brought up ancient rome to emphasize how far back the roots of this went

I'm not sure who's arguing about what on this thread anymore tbh.

Were we ever

deems summed it up rather bluntly, from a non-US perspective:

the yank contributions are to remind you the only lens is american

Our argument is that its not american

Well you're not arguing about the same thing then.

... hold on, you're arguing the lens is not American, well you are arguing about the same thing!

What deems is characterizing as American is in fact a comprehensive analysis of a largely global phenomenon (thx to the reach of colonialism)

I think it's fairly uncontroversial that the predominant global systems of difference were religious from the rise of the christianity until... the C17th? religion definitely shaped early colonialism more than any nascent sense of biological race. maybe you can see the obsession with blood and lineage in post-reconquista spain as a sort of transitional system that expressed an anxiety that had religious and sort of racial elements

That assumption seems hugely controversial from what I know of history but idk

1492 Colombus sailed the world and didn’t see color

Americans' ideas of race are corny and outdated and everyone is sick of them

We just want yr stupid country to go away

Do us a favor and end it all for us

Every time someone says “American obsession of race” you get a good impression of where they’d stand on colonial reparations

If americans would go away we wouldn’t have all the controversies that keep ilx going though

xp lol do you

you havent heard a word

look

yanks

its ok

the americans all agree with each other its ok

but listen ill talk to the lads here about the reparations and get back to you with our verdict

how much dyou think we'd be in line for?

ban yanks

bán yanks

I think it's fairly uncontroversial that the predominant global systems of difference were religious from the rise of the christianity until... the C17th?

I woke up haunted by this terrible sentence, it's not true for at least most of the world, but the rest stands. early colonial figures like columbus saw the world through an often evangelical religious framework. a sense of racial difference in anything like the modern sense and the vocabulary to go with it was only just starting to develop at that time

I see the medieval poc tumblr is sadly no more, now just on twitter, but that was full of v interesting illustrations of how modern ideas of colour and race are incommensurable with medieval ideas of blackness and difference. it's not that people didn't read significance into skin colour, it's that they did it differently

What exactly have Americans posited in this thread you guys disagree w? Like, what is so objectionable about this “American” consensus (pretending for the moment that anything I’ve argued is actually somehow more provincial than the European ilxor argument)

not messing im actually just waiting on one or two more sentences that make up a good round ten for a poll

its been good tho almost like old ilx

The American consensus mostly makes sense for the US at the moment but is short-sighted when applied elsewhere. I could do without the bullheaded attempts at cultural colonisation universalisation.