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

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.

Not that this hasn't been repeated ad nauseam already.

Well for one thing, d-40, you don't seem to know a single thing about the subject at hand. Confusing Rwanda and Sudan, seemingly not knowing about the Ottoman empire colonizing large swaths of Europe, continuing to think Ireland benefited from colonialism that killed millions. You just look at the fact that Europe is richer than Africa, and because you know nothing about the specific history behind those differences you use it as a 'gotcha' to say that actually it's only white/black racism that matters, and anytime someone from Europe tries to talk about the many many events and details that influenced the current situation you begin dismissing it as myopic and provincial.

To sum up, half the time you're writing: It is tough to have a conversation w people abt a serious subject when they haven’t done the knowledge yeah and the other half the time complaining that we don't consider the importance of Andre 3000s choice of shirt.

What exactly have Americans posited in this thread you guys disagree w?

I don't think there's always a neat distinction between race and ethnicity for one, or that this is a minor point

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

― ogmor, Wednesday, August 8, 2018 1:42 AM (six hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Great, except this isn't about what shaped early colonialism, but a question of what formed the basis of the model of race we use today.

Religion served primarily as a source of justification, We must bring the light of god to the heathen savages, even if it means having to own their land and resources. The role it played in colonialism did not form the basis of a global system of difference.

Where such a system does manifest is in British officials measuring noses and grading skin tone in India crystallising a race based caste system there. It manifests in the divide and rule tactics used by all the imperial powers.

Such systems of difference were founded in various schools of pseudo-scientific thought, the vast majority of which propagated hierarchical models of race. That is where the modern conception of race comes from. The terms we use and the characteristics we stress today, stem directly from that period of time.

These ideas were so compelling and so widely internalised, that being thoroughly discredited through the revelation of genetics wasn't nearly enough to shift the foundations of racialism.

If America seems preoccupied with this it's because it would never be able to externalise this legacy the way in which most European powers have chosen to.

Should also probably clarify, I'm not a yank. The Americanness of my perspective boils down to 2 years of middle school and family ties. Was born in and have lived the vast majority of my life in England, where in the national curriculum, empire and colonialism are treated as little more than awkward footnotes.

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

― Listen to my homeboy Fantano (D-40), Wednesday, August 8, 2018 5:37 AM (six hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I am English, my wife is Chinese, our two boys are therefore mixed race, but raising them in the UK (or to be exact a very liberal, multicultural part of the UK) this never even seems to be noticed, let alone made an issue / a reason to stereotype / a source of expectations. Meanwhile in America this would apparently make them "Hapas" which has a whole load of this sort of baggage - I remember reading this - https://stuffeurasianslike.wordpress.com/ - and being just horrified. For this reason I feel glad that they are growing up somewhere they can be themselves rather than defined by racial or ethnic descriptors.
So where do I stand on colonial reparations? I think the British Empire is one of the most shameful things in history, what we did in China in particular is disgusting and disgraceful, we still benefit unfairly from what we did there, and yes of course there should be extensive reparations as well as proper education in British schools into what we did there. Little hope for any of this of course, due to the many failings of the country, the people, the media, and our leaders.
Are these two things somehow contradictory?

tbc I don't think religion has been a globally-pervasive system of difference. the points of disagreement here as I see them are about to what extent modern racism can be thought of as a consistent, globally-pervasive system, and how it interacts with other senses of difference. it's the issue of why&when you might see tackling islamophobia as part of a wider anti-racism & anti-imperialism, and why&when you might treat it separately.