News flash: ethnic identity is cultural, not genetic. If you’re a Euro-American and don’t carry on any traditions from your immigrant ancestors, you’re just white now.
Genetically, I’m probably only like 1/8th Italian, but my family is still very much run by my Italian matriarch of a great grandmother. I speak a little outdated Sicilian (dialect from prior to the Italian unification), I have a whole cook book of family recipes and I know how to deviate from those recipes to make them right. I know the stories of my family’s immigration and how my grandparents and great grandparents met and the challenges they faced with their parents not wanting them to marry (Protestants and Catholics, Italians and Swedes, etc). I’m Italian-American, for better or for worse.
I know, I know :anti-italian-action:
But here’s the deal. I describe this to so many other white people and it’s just so foreign to them. The idea that my “nuclear” family includes my aunts and uncles and cousins. All the family time we engage in. Having family stories. Apparently a lot of white people don’t even know stories about their parents’ lives, which is really weird to me. I can tell you stories about my great great great grandmother when she was living in a convent in Sicily. I know the name of the town and a description of a few of the buildings, or at least how they were like 100 years ago. I’m definitely white. But I also feel white culture in a way that other white people don’t seem to because I have something else too. I’ve always been confused when people say white people have no culture, first because I knew my family had a culture and second because I knew that broader whiteness was different and had its own characteristics.
It’s hard to explain to people whose families are fully atomized and also to actual Italians. I have very little in common with people today who grew up in Italy. The language I know isn’t modern Italian. The food I know was developed based on what was available in America and was a mix of regional cuisines. I think it also exemplifies how even people who are tied to their immigrant roots are still tied to a settler culture. My experience is shaped much more by being the descendent of immigrants than by being from Italy specifically. And I definitely have inherited a lot of the material benefit of that as well. Not a ton, but it’s enough to see the difference.
honestly there should be a blonde race and a brunette race, it would just make far more sense and be far less eurocentric
the way things are under mayoism, an Italian guy (who often looks indistinguishable from half the population of the Middle East, and is literally 80%+ Middle Eastern going by neolithic ancestry) is considered "white" simply because he is of a population geographically in Europe, and then by proxy all those Middle Eastern people that he resembles are also considered "white" which is fucking stupid because now you can have two different races born to the same Lebanese couple simply because one sibling inherited some of the darker skin genes. (Even further ironic because Middle Easterners have basically zero neolithic European ancestry, which is in stark contrast to the reverse situation)
eurocentrism is when natural skin color variation is racialized but eye and hair color variation are not (because the latter two occur frequently in europeans but the former doesn't)
worse are the useful idiots who don't understand this simple concept and larp as europeans because they have like 2 different SNPs even though they're 100% Punjabi or Lebanese or etc.
This is very essentialist, but so are the people who find your (valid) cultural ideas of ethnicity to be "so foreign", and I'm just saying that they're not even being consistently essentialist.
white people define race based on white people, and pretend other people aren't also races
somewhat less deranged than what we already have :shrug-outta-hecks:
This is also why I casually refer to European things in comparison to a non-European reference.
dark eyed white guy with maybe a narrowish face
"Oh he looks pretty Saudi"looking at Greek architecture
"it's funny how most of this stuff looks like Petra"etc
I've kind of had success with this, only once though. A chud I know was complaining about black history month, because he says it's unfair there's no white history month. I reminded him there's a ton of Euro centric holidays and events all year, like St Patrick's Day. My city has a Greek heritage festival every year. There are German beer festivals too. Not to mention Thanksgiving, but which on its very face celebrates white people colonizing America.
He had never considered any of that explicitly white
"Southern History" or "White History" that Dixie chuds constantly whine about is black history. What they want isn't equal footing for this "white history" it's the derealization of black history.
Find out who you were before you were white. Find out who you were before you stood erect. Go live among a tribe of bonobos and discover your true self.
MAKE EYETALIANS POC AGAIN!
But no seriously if white people stopped identifying as white that would be a marked improvement in society, but of course :cracker: have no problem simultaneously identifying with this or that Euro ethnic groups, shit you have some white nationalists who consider themselves "part Cherokee"
The problem lays deeper somewhere in the material base of society and it takes more than just twitter threads to change that
Part of the problem is that the ethnic groups white people choose to identify with are often not even real groups in the US. Being "Irish-American" means next to nothing. There's little to no shared experience or history there, which means it is an ethnicity without a price to pick up or put down. White people in the US grow up with the shared experience of whiteness. Just because there's no rational basis for the existence of a white racial or ethnic identity being formed doesn't mean that there isn't a lived experience of being shielded by whiteness. You can't just decide to stop being white, because you have lived a life of whiteness. You can just decide to pick up or put down "German-American" or "Ang*o-American", however, because nothing actually binds them to you.
There is one group, one ethnic identity that has a real concrete connection to the American experience, a group that can transcend the all-consuming bounds of whiteness among Euro descended Americans, and that identity is.....
spoiler
G**MERS :only-good-gamer: :freeze-gamer: :gamer-gulag:
Irish-Americans when they get to Ireland and there's no corned beef to be found :frothingfash:
shit you have some white nationalists who consider themselves “part Cherokee”
:warren-snake:
The problem lays deeper somewhere in the material base of society and it takes more than just twitter threads to change that
the people with money are white, so they make good nice cool things about whites, so everybody who can do so wants to be considered white. it's pretty simple
Here's the source for that other 3/4.
I am pretty skeptical that you can just trick your brain into not being an oppressor, this seems like a pretty bad idea.
Yeah, chuds also do the BUT I'M IRISH thing. Literally just a vector for them to make excuses for themselves. Also, chuds have co-opted all the cool ancient stuff as fash symbols, so going "back to your roots" as a white person just covers you in symbols that make fashy people want to hang out with you.
Yea completely. I like studying religious history and pagan stuff is always super interesting to me but you’re always just three clicks away from VikingFuhrer1488’s blog when reading up on the stuff online
I think the OP was trying to point out the fact that whiteness is a social construct through historical example of how previous ethnic groups became "white" but totally bodged the phrasing of that.
I mean it's good historical context to show how much of a made-up concept it is but at the same time I just dunno how useful it is just in the here and now - I think that it really wouldn't change how those "new whites" feel about the current and historical marginalization of other groups.
According to the author
Maybe it’s how I worded the thread, or how capitalism demands the social reproduction of an individually view of the world. But many people have thought I’m talking about genealogy. When I’m in fact talking about sociology that forces you to shift a liberal understanding of white
‘Who were you before you were white’ isn't proposing an individualist perspective. More a sociological one that calls to you to learn how whiteness was violently enforced onto the working class to maintain the domination of capitalism and manufacture consent for colonialism.
I don't really care about this
It’s just not true, really. Whiteness was not forced onto the working class. Early colonizers imported and enslaved their proletariat, which allowed even white wage laborers to gain a petty bourgeois class character by the end of their lives. That is the American dream: white class mobility enabled by an BIPOC proletariat. It’s evolved to have more nebulous racial barriers, but is still largely intact.
The idea that whiteness hurt white prols and black slaves alike is yet another colonizer myth
I think they're talking about how race was used as a wedge in labor movements in the 20th century.
8 day old account arguing that being white is petty bourgeois lmao
I switch accounts once a month or so. Guess I’ll switch to an older one. Being white isn’t petty bourgeois. That’s not the point. Some relevant quotes from Settlers that should explain the point better (TLDR at the bottom):
This one on the myth of false equivalence between poor whites and black slaves:
The mythology of the white masses pretends that while the evil planter and the London merchant grew fat on the profits of the slave labor, the "poor white" of the South, the Northern small farmer and white worker were all uninvolved in slavery and benefited not at all from it. The mythology suggests that slavery even lowered the living standard of the white masses by supposedly holding down wages and monopolizing vast tracts of farmland. Thus, it is alleged, slavery was not in the interests of the white masses.
And then these accounts of the colonial class character during the American Revolution:
The Euro-Amerikan class structure at the time of the 1775 War of Independence was revealing:
- 80% bourgeois & petit-bourgeois:
- 10% — Capitalists: Great Planters, large merchants, etc.
- 20% — Large farmers, professionals, tradesmen & other upper-middle elements.
- 40% — Small land-owning farmers
- 10% — Artisans: blacksmiths, coopers, carpenters, shipwrights, etc.
- 15% — Temporary workers, usually soon moving upwards into the ranks of the small farmers
- 5% — Laborers
Not only was the bourgeois class itself quite large, but some 70% of the total population of settlers were in the various, propertied middle classes. The overwhelming majority were landowners, including many of the artisans and tradesmen, and an even larger portion of the Euro-Amerikans were self-employed or preparing to be. The small "poor" element of lumpen and permanent laborers was only 5% of the settler population, and without influence or cohesion in such a propertied society.
The plantation areas, which were obviously the most dominated by a small elite owning a disproportionate share of the wealth, showed no lesser degree of general settler privilege and unification. South Carolina was the state with the highest degree of large plantation centralization; yet there, too, no settler working class development was evident. The South Carolina settler class structure shows only an intensification of the same bourgeois features evident at the national level:
- 86% bourgeois & petit-bourgeois
- 3% — Great Planter elite (above 1,000 acres landholding)
- 15% — planters (500-999 acres)
- 8% — merchants & shopowners
- 5% — Professionals
- 42% — Middle & small farmers (under 500 acres)
- 10% — Artisans
- 14% — Laborers (majority only temporary)
When we speak of the small, land-owning farmer as the largest single element in settler society, it is important to see what this means. An example is Rebecca Royston of Calvert County, Maryland, who died in 1740 with an estate worth 81 £ (which places her well in the middle of the small-medium farmers). That sum represented the value of 200 acres of farmland, 31 head of cattle, 15 of sheep, 29 pigs, 1,463 lbs. of tobacco stored for market, 5 feather beds, 2 old guns, assorted furniture, tools and kitchen utensils, and the contract of an 8 year-old indentured child servant. No wealth, no luxury, but a life with some small property, food, shelter, and a cash crop for market. Certainly a far reach upwards from the bitter, bare existence of the colonial Afrikan proletariat (or, for that matter, the British or French proletariat of the period).
TLDR Read Settlers
- 80% bourgeois & petit-bourgeois:
It’s just not true, really. Whiteness was not forced onto the working class.
Yea some seem to think that only the elites benefitted from whiteness and that every bad take is a deliberately constructed FBI op
by focusing really hard, you can regain the mentality of your last non white ancestor who was a Proto-Proto-Proto-Proto-Proto-Proto-Hittite nomadic herder 45,000 years ago in Anatolia and become not white or something i don't fuckin know
by focusing really hard, you can regain the mentality of your last non white ancestor who was a Proto-Proto-Proto-Proto-Proto-Proto-Hittite nomadic herder 45,000 years ago in Anatolia
nah You could just go back 5,000 years ago to the Proto-Indoeuropeans
https://i.redd.it/a8kbspvesw871.jpg
physical "whiteness" (in the sense of a population-level pigmentation that is lighter than Middle Eastern ethnicities) is only a few thousand years old, and happened due to agrarianism (bordering on lactovegetarianism) in a dark climate (much more need for vitamin D)
You can see the same thing in East Asia, where Chinese people are lighter skinned than Siberian tribes despite living further south--they ate less animal flesh.
However there were some hunter-gatherers in the north of Europe (mainly Scandinavia) that could be considered very close to "white" in terms of skin/eye/hair pigmentation
I don't think this tweet is bad at all. Say you're an American with Irish heritage. In 2022, you basically get all the privileges that white supremacy has to offer in this country (death to America btw).
But travel back in time to say, Manchester England in the 1840s. Had you been an Irish person in that social context, you absolutely would be experiencing a fair amount of ethnicity-based oppression and prejudice. Read about what the Irish lived through in that time and place. Even Engels, despite being completely sympathetic, ends up reflecting some of the prejudices of the time. Now, because you're an Irish-American, try putting yourself in those shoes. Might actually help you understand and empathize with current systems of oppression.
Would it be better to read about actual oppression and prejudice going on today towards the African-American community, indigenous people the world over, etc? Of course it would! But for a lot of people they need to imagine themselves in that situation to even begin to empathize.
i don't see the problem with this tweet, other than that this person is probably sort of annoying to be around, like most twitter users. i don't see the point in trying to imagine what their argument might be and then getting really mad about it. people divesting from white supremacy will probably need to learn some history at some point, yea.
Pulling out my callipers so that i can acertain which part of the central european plain yall's ancestors come from
