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

Tracer fwiw I see nothing wrong with your post but none of the posts I’ve responded to in this thread have made that particular point; or in pointing out that America has a unique racial history they simultaneously minimized their own, or suggested that the framework of an overlying racial system was the pure product of that American racial history, that it had no basis in ie colonialism or enlightenment thought

I’ve never argued america’s racial history is not in some ways distinct, but itt those “distinctions” were brought up less to point to differing ways of dealing with race than to dismiss the notion that racial issues external to the United States were any different than ethnic conflicts or anti catholic bigotry or etc

Fred I’m not responding to tone police bs like ppl weren’t being just as flip in response & also bc the point of this convo imho isn’t to validate me but to gain attention for a contested point

in pointing out that America has a unique racial history they simultaneously minimized their own

Do you have any examples of this?

(I'm not saying it didn't it happen, I just can't remember it happening)

(also I'm not sure the second part of your sentence is true either)

How about any reference to an American “obsession” with race?

I'm not sure that minimizes racism in their own nations - at this point it might be salient to point that that there are indeed people from different nations and cultures on this thread who seem to be being lumped together as 'European' who, in a very European way you might argue, don't seem to be arguing the same thing.

ace and ethnicity are asymmetrical concepts, and conflating the two is something conservative politicians who want to downplay the significance of racial discrimination.

FWIW making the distinction between the two is something right-wing politicians in Europe do sometimes, as I noted upthread, to downplay the significance of ethnic discrimination.

I don't think D-40 is wrong -I think the point that he* and others are making is right, that there is an underlying / overlying framework that distorts and poisons social conditions around the world and that it is distinct from ethnicity-based bigotry, that these are two different things with different sources and so on. This racism is, not seems to me, roughly equivalent to the situationist idea of "the spectacle", we're all just inside it and damaged by it, but the point of it is to damage some people more than others.

Where I disagree with D-40 is that I believe there is another definition of racism, one that is not the definition of a cultural condition but instead a definition of a set of stated or unstated beliefs and behaviours which enforce bigotry and discrimination. As I noted upthread, this is a recognised, viable and in-use definition. Just saying "that's not racism", like this definition never existed or has been abandoned, isn't enough. As a result it wouldn't be right to say that using this definition is "nuancing racism" as if it's an unhelpful re-framing of the word to minimise the effects of the cultural-condition definition.

I would really like to hear an argument that was "OK people have been using the word racism for years to include ethnic discrimination but I think that's harmful and should stop and here's why" - I could be persuaded for sure. "You guys don't even know the meanings of the words you use" probably wouldn't be the most helpful starting point for that discussion.

*(? apols if that's not the right pronoun)

I have no problem with the assertion that Britain has a unique racial history and as a country it is perhaps uniquely bad at acknowledging the more shameful episodes of its history. France and Belgium may be as well but I don't have enough first hand experience to judge.

You can tell by the way that slavery is seen as a shameful thing that happened in American history but Britain's role tends to be soft pedalled or just not really talked about. But there are plenty of other examples.

The fact that Britain's racial makeup and British racism (which is pretty difficult to ignore at this particular point in time) are so tied up in Empire means that things play out differently to the US and for that matter much of Europe. But its also a reason why I'm uncomfortable with anti-Irish bigotry being excluded from any definition of racism.

i went to my neighborhood dive bar on 9/11 and a tourist i had never seen before tried to fight me. he was restrained by nearly the entire bar, since i was a regular, though he was not 86’d

he was irish (as in visiting the us from ireland for a week)

about a year after that i was accosted outside a club i frequented by some navy seal type dudes (not sure if actually seals proper or force recon or what). they wanted not to fight but simply to brag about how many people they’d killed who looked just like me.

if you guessed they were african american you guessed right

discus

i'm just kidding, don't discuss my stories are not interesting

i just bring them up in relation to this booming post below

i have no problem with self-awareness, no problem acknowledging the global structures of racism, no problem with accepting my own complicity and privilege within those structures, and no problem listening to people's experience of being victims within those structures and trying to understand how i can work to resist and change my own complicity ...

― the Joao looked at Jonny (Noodle Vague)

what i'm trying to say is that i understand i'm part of the global structures of racism, that i have been both a target and a beneficiary, that i have been both complicit and resistant ... but i have not really made any progress toward self-awareness, or even really understanding of these two events that happened 15+ years ago. aside from one or two very traumatic early childhood incidents (during the hostage crisis) it has been much been a lifetime of microaggressions and very few overt aggressions. but the overt aggressions are really the hardest to process, the ones i keep thinking back to.

so i bring it up - and like NV i plan to check out in a second because this is a pretty intense conversation - just to ask how does a conversation like this help people process those types of traumas? is it possible for an abstract conversation to help people process specific trauma, or should conversations like this be rooted in the real?

answer: i don't know either

*it has very much been

deej i am positive that matt and pretty much everyone else itt knows that modern-day racism is part of the deep structuring of capitalist society, and not just a matter of individual animus.

this is all to say that i don't really agree with the project of figuring out the way racism is built into the deep structure of capitalist by looking for similarities and connections between individually experienced events, at least not before figuring out the dynamics of those matters of individual animus first ... i just feel like it's too hard to understand the big structure because it's too hard to look at dispassionately, even having experienced relatively few mildly traumatic events

I just want this thread to stop at this point

― Frederik B

if it's any consolation nobody who isn't posting to this thread is reading it. hell, i'm posting to this thread right now and i'm sure not reading it.

i think the thread is actually going in some interesting directions & that the conversation *has* progressed to some extent

this entire conversation ive had a somewhat conflicted feeling about whether i was making the conversation *worse* or if I was pushing the point far *enough*. I do think in these conversations, in my experience on different sides & w/ different roles, there's *always* a tendency to push things towards a comfortable "its too complex for us to consider changing our relationship towards the world" position. at the same time, i am concerned that if it comes across like me lecturing 5 yr olds then it undermines my ability to persuade ppl that im making this argument from a sincere place. How do you forcefully disagree without either compromising to maintain your social position of being a Serious person, or marginalizing yourself as either irrational or concerned w/ some ulterior motive (ie social capital from being more Woke etc.)

my pov in this conversation doesn't come from nowhere or from an effort to feel superior, at least no more than i think the average poster in this thread. it does come from years of conversations w people engaged deeply with this issue, who try to take a global look at it; from my own experiences in my career; from study i've done over the course of years, going back to college in the early 00s.

one thing this thread has made me think about is how as slavery erased ethnic distinctions it helped to construct a generic, non-specific blackness under which other differences were subsumed. for colonial powers trying to control established societies in which white ppl were a tiny minority, this wasn't functional: you needed ppl to have a reason to buy into the idea, so you either had to had to import another group of people (ppl from the indian subcontinent being sent to fiji, kenya, caribbean etc.), or play-up/create distinctions in the existing population.

"We pigeon holed everyone by caste and if we could not find a true caste for them, labelled them with the name of hereditary occupation. We deplore the caste system and its effect on social and economic problems, but we are largely responsible for the system we deplore."

why wouldn't imperialists import scientific ideas of racial difference to a population they wanted to divide? biology lends authority and a sense of immutability to what otherwise might become surmountable differences. afaik really old ideas of race/skin-colour prejudice often pointed to environment in constructing blackness (aethiopia = burned face), so declaring it truly innate is a significant change.

gary younge has said recently that he wants british discourse on race to step out of the shadow of america and address the particularities of the black british experience. there is a tension between paying attention to the specifics of local dynamics and building wider solidarity, and ppl disingenuously exploit it all the time. pushing back against this shouldn't have to mean being blind to how race can be formulated differently.

saying that the rwandan genocides were 'merely' ethnic obscures the role of colonial powers in fostering the sense of biological racial difference which was used to justify their brutality. pan-africanists like kwame nkrumah included north africans in 'the african race' not out of ignorance but bc it made good sense as part of their anti-imperialism.

Several older (mostly Indian) relatives of mine lived in British African colonies up until the mid-20th century, I remember a lot of them from childhood. From what I can gather from people who knew them better, they were fully aware of their place within the colonial hierarchy - not just in relation to black Africans but also people from other Indian regions - and they relished and enjoyed that position.

This meant they were spectacularly unprepared for the moment of arriving in 1960s Britain and finding out that most white Britons had no conception or understanding of that hierarchy and didn't really care about it. For a lot of people they were all pretty much as bad as one another. It must have been an immensely sobering experience but also one that's difficult to feel much sympathy for.

(Then again I had a relative who would noisily drink a toast to Salazar every Christmas well into old age)

It's amazing how many (South) Asian people, of a certain age, I work with who were born and grew up in East Africa.

For the record I also think it's 'interesting' that I'm the one who is constantly accused of not knowing what I'm talking about with regards to US politics when not I day goes by where I don't feel like I'm smarter than everyone else on here. So how do you all account for that, eh?

― Frederik B, Sunday, August 12, 2018 2:06 PM (twenty-seven minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is possibly the greatest, Frederikiest Frederik B post ever

im not sure that fred b has posted the top 3 freddest posts itt

fwiw, the bulk of the Indians sent to the Caribbean were brought in to replace slaves who no longer had to work on plantations and are still, to this day, looked down on by a lot of black Caribbean people as peasants / hicks / second-class citizens.

I vaguely remember posting something a while back about the British conception of India being somewhere you could find people to position as superior to, or inferior to, other races depending on your requirements.

in before the yanks to let you knkw that its not india fyi its native america

very helpful. I must remember that.

Ok, dying and hyperventilating at that fred b post shakey quoted

in before the yanks to let you knkw that its not india fyi its native america

― liberally social (darraghmac), Monday, August 13, 2018 7:00 PM (forty-two minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

its been fun listening to the ppl on "your side" complain abt having their views stereotyped when this is yr default baseline for the entire thread

shit i didnt delete three baseline responses just so i could genuinely encourage you to respond to the many good posts itt before and after that one

dont uh dont go down to my level man

be the change man, be the change

glad we've gotten to the real issue: europeans dealing with oppressive american discourse

Big news! @RedHourBen and I are opening up our own hedge fund! Want to work for Lake Success Capital? Check out our recruitment video and give us a call today!https://t.co/NmOoGSsjt2

— Gary Shteyngart (@Shteyngart) August 14, 2018

I'm thinking of killing myself as an example to other white men

― Scam jam, thank you ma’am (Sparkle Motion), Thursday, October 11, 2018 7:12 PM (three hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

who gives a fuck. I'm sick to death of it all.

you don't have to equate yourself with the evil monsters in charge

thanks for that, I'm sure you're right

the ones who could best learn from your example are pretty much guaranteed not to

They would even use it to their advantage.

this is a good piece with some interesting stuff on the construction of whiteness contrasting with ancient ideas about race, including this bit about how the hippocratic understanding of the humours gave a sense of racial difference, which I'd never heard of before:

"“Cold weather made you stupid but also courageous, so that was what people from the Far North were supposed to be like. And the people they called Ethiopians were thought of as very smart but cowardly. It comes out of the medical tradition. In the North, you have plenty of thick blood. Whereas, in the South, you’re being desiccated by the sun, and you have to think about how to conserve your blood.”

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/10/29/the-myth-of-whiteness-in-classical-sculpture

Good piece, thanks. D-40, you should read it.

https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/features/liam-neeson-interview-rape-race-black-man-revenge-taken-cold-pursuit-a8760896.html

An Irishman having a totally normal one about race

yeah "liam-neeson-interview-rape-race-black-man-revenge-taken-cold-pursuit-a8760896.html" sounds very promising in this regard

neeson is british fyi

i dont expect the gradation obsession you seem to expect of other cultures to extend to your own treatment of them but it might be the kind of thing you double check before the cheap effort above lest you appear even more of a tawdry guttersnipe than is usual.

the irish are backward about this kind of thing

Did you end up reading that New Yorker piece ogmor posted D-40?

"the irish" oh nice xp

you a mate of d40s school of collective responsibility are you?

what would you like to happen to #allirish now that youve a crime theyre all guilty of

this is exactly how the brits (who are remember, the progenitor nation of wite america) justified an gorta mór

can't blame it all on the brits, there were a bunch of Frenchies too, fyi

all colonisers look the same to me

Yeah how could I confuse an Ireland born catholic for an Irish person

.......

Neeson is American