Exh whittnrss
I find the concept of whiteness interesting as it constantly seems to be described differently by different people.
I think it's fairly simple to define who is definitely white, but it's not always easy.
Is whiteness the color of a person’s skin? If so it is lots of Asians (in the east, west, and central) would be white, yet numerous Southern Europeans would be considered tanned
Is whiteness a geographical type of conception (European=white)? If it is so, then Gypsies would be white, but Caucasians and Jewish people would not be
Is whiteness a combo of factors? If that is the case then what war crimes have (for instance) Moldovans committed that can justify grouping them together with "the oppressors"
When is a mixed race person at point to they are white or not white? Is the one drop rule unracist? Or is it based off of the upbringing (people with white skin tone with a few or more indigenous ancestry for example)? If that is true does a white kid whose adopted into a non white home also is now a POC?
What about the whole "white-passing" label. But what the heck is white-passing, and how is it fairly distinct from being "White"? If whites have perks, and people see white passing people as white, do they not then become white?
People can shift from being white to not white and then back again without anything about themselves changing, making it basically an empty distinction.
Walter Benn Michaels article: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2935449. is about that exact issue.
What people are actually talking of when they critique Whiteness is clearly capitalism and imperialism, and I feel most fellow leftists understand that whites and non whites both have been victims and oppressors, and so placing a lot of much focus on race is reductive and removes the focus off the actual issues,
There's also the flip side, "what is a POC?" which is well, the same concept
The first chapter of Cedric Robinson's Black Marxism book talks about how Whiteness and racial capitalism developed...
Whiteness is people who gain disproportionate power via usury, financial scams, legal scams, tricknology and patriarchal religion /s
A formal definition is confusing, due to it being some mixture of whites themselves, whites culture, whites religion (like Islam, Judaism, Christianity), whites preferences.
Where the line is drawn these things is very much vague, as is the spot to draw said line on who is and isn't considered white, yet that doesn't mean anything because those aren't formal mathematical sets, those are societal and historical data clusters.
Nell Irvin Painter’s incredibly informative history of whiteness, succinctly entitled “The History of White People”.
Race is a social construct and has zero scientific basis whatsoever. What if it is a social construct and has a basis in biology at the same time?
Well whiteness doesn't exist yet everywhere its dictating everything, and manipulated by those with power. So whiteness must be like midichlorians.
Generally whiteness is a replacement for ‘evil’ in the Great New Religion
I believe whiteness is only a blanket term. Historically some woke people applied whiteness to what they deemed to be ‘privilege’ and ‘entitlement’ that whites supposedly in their minds , possess
Now the term whiteness is being thrown around at such a frenzied rate that it appears like it means anything which annoys people in regards to whites. As well as to parts of society that unfairly treat people that aren’t white unevenly.
Whiteness is more of a symptom of white supremacy despite the two terms being used interchangeably which is dumb. Whiteness is used so much without a obvious definition of it that it has transformed into a term that isn’t understood the alike amongst the people.
Has any person ever really thought this "gee, I wish there was an upper middle-class, white woman with blue hair, BPD, and one straw short of a basket case to lecture and chastise me over this delicate social subject" or am I just ignorant and being a negative simp, er I mean "allyship"?
This is not upper-middle class however--they typically don't make it above the 75th percentile, and usually hover circa the 40th-50th percentile.
Capital doesn’t value blue hair, unless blue hair is selling aesthetic, and remaining in its lane. It's not too loving of pudge, too, except as the natural side-effect of maxing profits for the food industry at the organizational level... can end up either way on BPD, due to contradictions, I think.
We should replace "whiteness" or "white" with bourgeois
Wouldn’t whiteness be all socioeconomic levels of whites? The working class appears to bear the weight of white sin with their, you know “clinging to god and guns”.
Whiteness means whatever I feel like it meaning so I can get huge amounts of funding from shareblue
Whiteness is all merely a mental construct. Similar to how there is five different definitions of what makes someone Jewish: https://youtu.be/V0WQPt8Lp6A (I am Jewish by 3 of the 5)
They made all admirable things into "whiteness"....so because of that, self correction and huge cultural correction will be nearly impossible. When good equals bad, then seeing the good will be a rarity. Buckle up.
White people are in a broad sense as Euromericans. If Asian Americans and African Americans need to put their continent of origin before American so too should “whites” and it would be perfect way to stop using the term whiteness as much as we see
Whites aren’t white but they are surely of different European ethnicities just like everyone else. Whiteness needs to go. Only two races are called colors.
Though Americans are basically a global culture that is boiled down.
Nothing in the US doesn’t have long term roots from another place. It’s the exact opposite of exceptionalism really.
White might be defined by a multitude things to different woke people:
- The original inception of it as a status of hierarchal structuring form means of control.
- A particular phenotype that is typical amongst Europeans.
- Western ideology and structures, which includes Christianity which is simply ironic. (I am if nothing else, against this form of ‘whiteness’)
A whole lot of Asians and Europeans have similar tones yet Eastern cultures are foreign from Western and there’s different phenotypic attributes that paint them as non-White.
However, this is too why Asians overall get put next to “whites” as ‘model’ minorities.
In the case of Arabs, who several southern and Eastern Europeans could be indistinguishable from, it’s a cultural thing. Arab/Muslim societies aren’t “white” if we are to use the 3rd definition, yet they can be moved in these societies without notice depending on if they’re colored Arabs or not.
But you can make the clear case that the 3rd definition Arab muslims are technically white. Islam is western and also Christian. Islam didn’t invade india from the East, its black slave trade was large, it is JudeoChristian, imperialist, and assisted in inspiring the emergence of capitalism.
IMO every one of these are still used in vogue today but I’d make the claim that #2 is the most popular definition that is understood. Though #2 literally probably means nada. It's like when people attempt to define what being a man or a woman entails without resorting to stereotypes or looks.
Some will counter this with “Europeans grnerally share similar Phenotypes. That’s essentially the way people distinguish race. By what a person look like.... tones and physical markers are seen as a phenotype, Its not to say it is exclusive... a bunch of Europeans have exceptions as do Africans.
It’s all really a super insignificant portion of people’s DNA but there is some slight factor that causes people in general to share similar physical characteristics. That’s how some differentiate “race” in the first place.
Anti blackness and to lesser extent whiteness come from European colonialism which had a big element of Christianity.... Though Christianity didn’t originate in Europe.
The more I think on it the more I see how the whole concept of race is a sticky, just really a broken way to categorize humanity born from the barbaric times that came before us.
"Race," a social fiction, is inaccurately and purposely conflated with the tone of human skin that people have. Being "white" was not an option always even for people with pale tones who are now considered as "white."
Whiteness along with racism, and race itself are interrelated social fictions which serve a long term strategy by the ruling class of divide-and-conquer .They all have to be understood, and the ruling class has to be dismantled entirely which will cause them to no longer by extension. https://jbattalora.com/white-people-did-not-exist-until-1681/. Apartheid states makes this more obvious which includes the US until a half century ago
It is not so obvious that race is a fiction but still a topic of controversy, Despite Reed, Lewontin, national geographic.
The majority of racism has zero to do with whiteness or whites
White is European, though European usually refers to people now living in Europe rather to say, people who live in a former European place, who are descended from Europeans. Thus the term white instead of an Italian American is a person who moved to the US from Italy.
Gypsies are migrants from India, Jews are understood to be from the Middle East.
Those have varying shades of assimilation though aren't in general to be included for some for the above purpose.
People who reside in the Caucasus region currently don't count according to some purists, so all European people whatnot are descendants of the people who migrated from there, a la Caucasian. But how about the Chechens? They are as pale as the rest of us white devils (almost like Slav Europeans). They migrates to East Europe from the Middle East.
Some sociologists say Asians are not white, since to them they aren't European. Europe admittedly to those particular sociologists have common ancestry with the Middle East, yet the Middle East is not Europe, so they claim they are not white.
Irish and Italian people were victims of discrimination due to the fact they were Catholics in a protestant country (like Jews in the US, Europe etc), not really because they were not white. White is merely a catchall term, like if you appear the part then it likely fits. It only ever matters to racists and people who try to shift the blame for natural power dynamics onto a convenient target.
Koreans are white only if tone is the criteria
Native Americans migrated to the US from Siberia, yet why aren’t they considered Asian/Siberian?. The thousands of years divided them into their own genetic roots is what makes the Native Americans appear different from Asian/Siberian people.
But if the Bering land bridge didn't vanish, and there was a small sprinkling of Siberian migrants into the US, would we consider Aztecs to be Siberian?
How much years does it take, precisely? Why are Native Americans, called, Native Americans due to their 15,000 years in the US, yet Jews aren't called European with their 2500 years in Europe?
counterpoint to the Aztec Siberian point: South Slavs moved to the Balkans a a millennia ago. So does that mean that Serbs, Croats, Bulgarians etc. are not from the Balkans? Hungarians moved to Europe a a millennia ago, are they European? Anglo-Saxons moved to the UK 1500 years ago, are they not British?
Ashkekenzi Jews were shaped by Europe way more (and that's an understatement) than by legacy Israel
The Ashkekenzi Jews migrated from the Middle East to Europe at some time during the Medieval period.
But at the end of the day, I am talking the difference between 15,000 years and about 750 give or take a few millennia. I'm not some type of Eugenicist or sham race realist so I'm not gonna make arbitrary distinctions. It's sad and terrible that some people will constantly only perceive Jews as different.
Whiteness is a linguistic device that is used to refer to whites without appearing to do that. Whites are a race. race is seen by some as a racist idea. Whiteness is a linguistic device used to refer to racist concept. Whiteness refers to racist concepts.
This is basically how in essence it goes down. Just take some true statements and hack together all of the vagueness as your mark won’t catch on to until you have paradoxed your way into saying anything that you want.
I do wonder how far the religious tinge of the CRT is only because of a process of elimination?
The woke academics don’t say that whites have racism genes.
The woke academics say that there is a culture that exists of racism amongst whites, since that gives people a viable escape that they might not be a participant in such a culture, at least to at least some extent.
Thus so they are left with for all intents and purposes postulating this mystical white "Rassenseele".
The obvious reasons for “anti-racist” idpol race theories are the types that those right wing “race realists” talk of, because even though they’re saying the same thing, the naughtzies cut out the fancy schmancy lingo
“anti-racist” idpol race theories... “race realists” "Corporate wants you to find the differences between these two pictures."
Karl Marx spoke many times on the topic of slavery for instance, contextualizing it within capitalism in the 19th century as well as the way that it impacted the true movement to abolish capitalism.
“Labor in a white skin cannot emancipate itself where it is branded in a black skin,” being a Karl Marx quote. Race, a social construct, was used both in the past and also in the present for building anti black structures as per Afro Pessimism and anti blackness has a material effect on society due to the impact of such structures which maintain them.
But as mentioned elsewhere in this blog in conjunction with Afro Pessimism I also keep in mind Karl Marx’s race analysis (like how capitalism propagates racism which Cedric Richmond writes).
If we subscribe to the notion of rejecting the concept of race, it is not hard to not put much importance on race. Whatever we think, others still will put a lot of importance on it, which causes all of it's related injustices. It is sort of a tightrope walk yet I believe in a perfect world people should be at least ‘trying’ to do both (like most woke radlibs ‘try’ to do idpol and anti capitalism at the same time) .Some concepts including whiteness run counter to this.
One thing to remember is that the problem of "other people still will put a lot of importance on it" is rooted in no small part to how our anti blackness structures (per Afro Pessimism) propagate it. To ensure race does not materially touch our lives, we must endure anti blackness structures. Even if we can personally reject the concept of race, that act alone won’t not materially end anti blackness and all that comes with it.
We're still a bit of paralyzed in one a recursive problem again, since the only given of permanently altering those injustices and making it clear they stay that way is in getting the masses to personally reject the concept of race. However it will be a long road.
Race as a concept did not just come out of nowhere. It is the MSM and politicians who reinforces racial animus, the anti black structures such as the police, the jobs that outsource which significantly harms African American communities, etc. that perpetuate these material impacts of said injustices.
Based on the way such anti black structures perpetuate anti black racism and other types of oppression, these anti black structures might have to be abolished. Negating the negation as Afro Pessimism puts it
Ending anti blackness via negating the negation provides a huge impetus for the rejection of socioeconomic classism, anti blackness etc
The antagonisms born out of the anti black systems and racial capitalism provides the negation by which people could organize to negate the negation and build a better future free of anti black structures, socioeconomic inequality etc
In ways, I guess colourism is a real concept.
So too is ethnic nationalism and the hatred/fear of "the other", and such realities can fuse together with financial struggles to make life more difficult for a few or more disadvantaged groups.
However that has not one thing to do with the abstract concept of race in modern terms, and to observe people here and there totally dismiss those issues as "idpol" instead of balancing them like I do is unfortunate
I certainly take issue with this notion that "there is no white proletariat". This is a strawman, yet people really do say that nonsense. The liberal 2.0 conceptualization of race can abstract concepts from their material basis. But then again, it is not only Liberal 2.0ers spouting that, it's the position of Sakaists, a lot of whom falsely refer to themselves as principled ‘marxists’
Karl Marx never claimed that whites could not be proletarians and he in fact worked to organize “white” labor.
Ethnic nationalism has commonly been a tool used to divide the working class. On the Transcontinental Railroad, foremen and forewomen encouraged antagonism among the workers of various ethnicities to prevent them from organizing with each other. It continues to this day to wreck solidarity between our workers.
Race and Gender are nonsense, and any attempt to really define them beyond its use (formally speaking, misuse) is nonsense too. The ideal definition of a whites/man is "those who will be seen as white/male", and that is completely variable.
Unfortunately, we are in a world where people buy into race and gender, which then translates to people enacting them as this reality. But the main point is that there is no real definition for a concept that, inherently is nonsense. It's only whatever raced or gendered (and so inherently racist or sexist) ideas become enacted by a society.
“ Whiteness",and "Masculinity", are both seen as these pejoratives that are used to refer to any negative (or perceived negative) tendency, action, past event, or basically just anything bad, that is in one way or another linked to whites or men in the user's head.
This might range from hierarchy to keeping time to science to the empires. If there is a practical usage of these words that historically and anthropologically is based off of reality I have not seen it. They both appear to be conceptual abortions in my view.
I’ve never got the whole creating a new id around “non-binary” thing
It’s like rather than only being an atheist and going on with your day, you must wear a fedora (a dress) and refer to yourself as an atheist (he/them) to all who you meet.
It's only the heckin' legit enby crowd who annoys me. Why can’t they use one of these non-binary genders instead? Agender, Genderfuck, Androgynus, an appropriated indigenous third gender, Bigender, whatever neogender that is of your own making
So what is whiteness then? A Hulkamaniac; he or she piledrives wrestlers into thumbtacks
Whiteness is actually an original sin for the cult of wokeism. We were born with this original sin and we will never be fully able to rid ourselves of it, but we can partially make up for that by constantly flagellating ourselves to our unearned whiteness freedoms
Discussing "whiteness" and "blackness" as concepts (not how I use them or define them) is eerily fascist, and not in that "everything I don't like is a naughtize" sort of way- I mean that the concepts of whiteness and blackness are intentionally abstract, nebulous concepts embodying biology, legacy, the past, homelands, culture, aesthetics, state of mind, and tone. My political blogs posts reflect this notion
When I list such stuff, don't think on what they really are/were, think on how their feel (from the left or the right)
When an IDpol brainlet or some Bronze Age minded pepe troll sheetposts on "whiteness", know full well that it's not something to be defined, it's something to be felt. Both camps here, the radlibs and alt right know this themselves
Whiteness (not how I use it or define it) is used now exactly like how "jewery" was used by the different fascist movements in their evil heyday.
Whiteness is a catch all term encompassing the way they feel about groups, not really as individuals, but as some metaphysical force within our world.
This is how come IDpol is dangerous, both from woke raclibs like Robin DiAngelo and from "race-conscious" nationalist cells like Identity Evropa:
When we don’t need to use autistic language with particular definitions to articulate a certain objective definition, it opens up our unconscious to deal in such types of esoteric collective forces.
After all of this, all actions may be justified regardless of the way it materially or physically effects the individual, since that action targets a non-physical entity, so it feels justified no matter the case
There was a moment in time where all people could make light hearted inoffensive fun of white stereotypes, black stereotypes, and so in and it was all in good fun. Like one time years back at a fast food place , a white and a BIPOC had this type of sarcastic relationship and they would mess with each other a ton and one thing they would perform was to make light hearted inoffensive good fun of each other's races-ethnicities in silly types of ways in regards to the the thing they typically ordered and it was all in ironic/post ironic friendly fun.
Whiteness actually is a multiracial concept
Downing a green meal of organic, free-trade quinoa with kale salad prior to stepping into a Subaru with mandatory Coexist bumper sticker to ride to the local farmer’s market to see people with blonde dreadlocks perform a pan ocarina recital.
Whiteness is a middle-aged Karens having a temper tantrum in Target, who you can record with a video recording device caption reading "the Caucasity!" and farm tens of thousands of Twitter likes and retweets off of her at the same time as plugging your minted-new etsy store selling dropshipped Aliexpress things.
White people use Aliexpress? Not just Russians?
Years back when Aliexpress was born, probably not, yet dropshipping on Shopify boomed in the last few years in conjunction with the emergence of the "gig economy" and resources such as Oberlo making it much more friendly. It seems like every other Tweet who hits viral has a person plugging their or their buddy’s "new store" nowadays.
Pressure release from batshit intelligentsia
Whiteness is like to “jewry” but now for whites. They don’t only mean the person they also mean the culture, historycality, and the pecking order that they perceive.
See "The Invention of the White Race" by Theodore W. Allen
Whiteness is a rhetorical apparatus, a series of mental gymnastics, to skip implicating the actual culprit of what they accuse whiteness of, that is the neo-liberal, plutocratic, and global elite.
There is a bunch of difference between average white, middle class Americans and average rural, working class Bulgarians.
Or whiteness is persons of European diaspora
Also see this good video on whiteness (from Jacobin Whiteness” Doesn’t Explain Deaths of Despair)
I second Noel Ignatiev saying that those who are able to identify as white to “be reverse Oreos”. “
This means if we use his strategy, we should defy the rules of 'whiteness' (though by how I defined it in my blogs) – flagrantly, publicly …
He says we should challenge behaviors that reproduce race distinctions
One way of doing this would be to embrace Transracial (identity) and racial voluntarism
Through that, we can highlight the artificial and constructed nature of race and ethnicity (i.e challenging assumptions about the stability and categorical organization of race and ethnicity itself). and that through such racial ethnic voluntarism may celebrate, not simply appropriate, “black culture”; and, may embody a self-conscious critique of being white. This would go along way in reversing the oreos ,defying the rules of whiteness, and challenging the behaviors that reproduce race distinctions.
Reading his work and that of his colleagues, it becomes obvious that almost every element of what he sees as white identity that person may desire to preserve is already found in other identities – ethnic, religious, national, cultural which evidently (in the minds of woke people) marginalize and dominate (at the expense of others) and whose positive characteristics are diminished instead of being augmented by association with whiteness.
Perhaps most importantly, Ignatiev assists us in understanding that “the white race is a club, which enrolls specific people at birth, against their will, and brings them up in accordance to its rules”. “For the most part the members go through life accepting the benefits of membership, without thinking about the costs. When individuals question the rules, the officers are quick to remind them of all they owe to the club, and warn them of the dangers they will face if they leave it.”
This is just what is happening in the city of Columbia, as yet more modern members of the “white club”, such as those of Indian and East Asian heritage, have been joined in fighting against desegregation efforts, in spite of the fact that the historical and ongoing prejudice against them.
Ignatiev’s historical argument for the abolishment of whiteness was developed most fully in his 1995 book How the Irish Became White.
Since the English colonisation of Ireland, the Irish were considered less than fully human.
Though Irish immigrants to the US were accepted as white in the before the civil war as a lot supported slavery and violence against (free) African American people. It was a transformation that caused hem to achieve better jobs at better wages and be accepted as full citizens in what was at the time a juridically white republic.
The book was a portion of a slew of research by scholars that began to emerge in the 1980s – like scholars such as David Roediger, Theodor Allen, Karen Brodkin, Steve Martinot, Cedric Robinson, Nell Irvin Painter, Alexander Saxton, Matthew Frye Jacobson, George L Mosse, David Theo Goldberg, and Alana Lentin – who sought the idea of whiteness as an ideological, psychological, social and political construct and a bunch of governing mechanisms, instead of a biological or even determinatively cultural bunch.
What all of the analyses had agreed on was a focus on the intersection of race, class and gender in expansive and hierarchical ways over long periods.
But what set Ignatiev apart from them was his belief – drawn from his years as an activist instead of just an academic – that the construct of whiteness not only should, but could be done away with. However I define whiteness differently as can be seen throughout my blogs so keep that in mind here.
It was not the kind of neoliberal “post-racial” society envisioned at the outset of the former President Barack Obama era that he wanted to reign in, but the emergence of an actually progressive set of identities that would be able to build the alliances needed to fight against the larger capitalist system that required whiteness (but how I use it in my blogs) as its core ideology.
These arguments are put out by Noel Ignatiev and similar minded scholars in the journal Race Traitor, established in 1993 “to run the film backwards, to find out how people who had been raised as white might become unwhite”.
With a masthead that decreed “Treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity”, and whose beginning words in its first issue instructed readers to “Abolish the white race – by any means necessary”, it was clear what the political and scholarly aim of Race Traitor would be.
In 16 issues over a dozen years, scholars from a wide array of disciplines unpacked how whiteness popped up and why and how it could be “abolished”, build on the belief that “until that task is accomplished, there can be no universal reform, and even partial reform will prove elusive, because white influence permeates every issue in US society, whether domestic or foreign”.
fffffhuu
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