when it comes to africa for example i was taught that they're poor cause their land isn't harvestable or some bullshit like that, and then i find out as an adult it's actually cause western countries fucked the shit out of them and huh that makes a lot more sense
i was taught "the borders were arbitrarily made by white people and caused ethnic tension in the regions leading to excess warfare."
incomplete at best, but probably better than what most americans were taught.
It's worth pointing out that even though this isn't the whole truth, it isn't false either. You can see this in how sometimes neighboring countries are more successful than others by virtue of the more successful one having a stable government for longer.
yeah absolutely, thats why i wanted to use the term "incomplete" because theres so much to it.
"When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why they are poor, they call me a communist." —Câmara
I was always told places in Central and South America were poor because of corruption and drugs. Never was it explained to me where those drugs were going and how the whole thing got started though.
Every Christmas that fucking Feed the World song comes on, talking about Africa, the lyrics are “Where nothing ever grows, no rain or rivers flow”. It makes me so fucking mad
So many of the lyrics in that song are fucked up: "Where the only water flowing is the bitter sting of tears", "And the Christmas bells that ring there are the clanging chimes of doom", "Well tonight thank God it's them instead of you". The very premise of the song is wrong anyway, there are hundreds of millions of Christians living in Africa OF COURSE THEY KNOW IT'S CHRISTMAS.
It sounds like something Tom Lehrer would write, but without the irony.
I either got "that's just the way it is" or outright racism. No concept of rescource extraction or colonialism, of how different parts of the world had different levels of relative development at different times, almost entirely due to material forces like raw materials and availability of trade.
That's why for all the well deserved clowning it gets, I think there's some value in Guns Germs and Steel in terms of being a very lib friendly introduction to the idea that geopolitics (and history overall but let's not scare them too much) stems from material conditions rather than some weird spooks about different nations having personalities and shit.
do you believe zizek at all when he talks about national ideology permeating these things?
if we grow up within the big headed imperial core & hegemon, we can easily project that out into the world. cocky & dumb american tourists are rightly stereotyped all over the world. Americans literally think they're the richest & most loved & greatest country of all time, the dipshits
now, think about post-colonial & formerly war-torn countries in the global South & Eastern Europe who had to endure humiliation from the West (or Japan) for the last century & more. On some level, individuals in those places may also subconsciously carry that subaltern/overly humble worldview because they haven't been expanding and waging global resource war... people convince themselves of lots of things, even when monsters like the US are real
these are material drivers, but when we look at how the indigenous groups in Bolivia still can't get along with the bourgeois European/Spanish elites there, then we know that this shit is working on some cultural level too. reification comes on the back of sublimating the real material causes into this bullshit "clash of civilizations". problem is people actually believe it
Argentinian here:
A lot of idiots from my country hate it here cuz we are a shitty country, but the propaganda (and racism) is so strong they keep voting for rabid neoliberals that sunk the country even deeper in shit.
besides propaganda there's also the issue that the middle class tends to emulate (or attempt to emulate) the lifestyle of the dominant classes, so they kinda hate even "progressives"
for instance, here in brazil middle class homes and even apartments used to come with a special bedroom, built away from the rest of the house, obviously in poorer conditions, and usually right next to the service area/kitchen (some of us even called it "quarto de empregada", or maid room)
this kind of shit explains why the middle class was pissed when lula kept raising the minimum wage to the point where they couldn't have their own house servant anymore
not that i'm a fan of lula, but it really shows how even the slightest amount of liberal "reform" riles people up (and you can't even call this a reform, right? it's just raising the minimum wage ffs)
Exactly, the middle class absolutely hates seeing the low class improve their lives. There a shitton of racism mixed in there, but yeah, same in Argentina.
There a shitton of racism mixed in there
oh yea definitely, but even that racism is closely associated with the class issue
remember, the irish were basically treated like the "black people of europe" when they were the colonized/lower classes, in fact the "racial scientists" (phrenologists and the like) used to argue the irish brain was similar to the african brain and therefore they were also "made to serve", to "work with their hands", etc
as ireland became independent and started rising up as a 1st world country this no longer served a purpose and sounds absurd to us, but it was very real and deeply believed in up until the late 19th century or so
so that racism exists, but it's also built upon the need to dehumanize the lower classes so we can justify their conditions (though of course when this takes root in society it starts working at a subconscious level)
And yeah, we can all shit on soc-dems like Lula here, but in any other place of the internet if I catch a whiff of anti-pink-tide I react like
i'm still like that with evo/chávez, and even correa to a lesser extent, but i've grown so disillusioned with lula and his party that i don't really care anymore :(
after realizing how conservative his government was (and even reactionary in some aspects - he sanctioned a crime bill that was similar to that of the democrats from the 90s, or at least had similar consequences, literally doubling the amount of people in jail in ~10 years), i'm kinda just... whatever
oh god in the first page there's already someone getting overexcited because lula mentioned marx
being a leftist feels like painfully spinning in an eternal vortex of struggle sessions
alright i've joined the sub
these are material drivers, but when we look at how the indigenous groups in Bolivia still can’t get along with the bourgeois European/Spanish elites there, then we know that this shit is working on some cultural level too
those aren't separate
or rather, they aren't supposed to be thought of that way
yes, you're right, but people & things are different...
and through this perverse accelerating global capitalism & imperialism the phrase "the material relations between people become social relations between things" really stands out. untapped resources are always conveniently where the enemy is
Me as a child in the shit country I live:
- "Dad, why are we poor and not like the cool countries in Europe"
- "Eeerhm... eeeh... dark skinned people don't work and vote peronists"
Then I learned history and shit.
That's all you got? I was basically flat out told these were all "backwards" cultures full of "savages" and essentially lead to believe that without white people, they'd still be in the stone age. And I live in an area full of liberals
I often think about this when all these countries celebrate “independence day.” Not one country in the world is totally free right now. But if you just tell them they are well they must be.
I was taught "Asian people are good at assembling computers because they're used to using chopsticks"
That's a very grandma thing to say.
Mine once told me in a restaurant "I know your generation is ok with it, but that sort of thing still bothers me". When I asked what she meant, she pointed to a mixed race couple.
Jokes on her, she'd have a mixed race great grandchild if she'd lived!
my grandma says white people are the devil and I believe her
She would humble brag about this as a sign she was an ally. The woman legit didn’t think Italians were white. 🤦
Italians were being considered non-white as recently as the 80s/90s. I remember seeing a job application from the 80s with the listed employee data as "white, black, asian, italian"
I really wish I'd saved it it'd be grade A meme fuel
Well if we're being honest Italians do look different on average. In a way that Irish/Polish etc do not. I'd imagine that was the rationale.
if you think an italian looks more differenter than an irish person does compared to someone polish... i dont understand.
like... maybe they all have some vaguely different features in aggregate i guess? but if i saw an italian person living in ireland, i wouldnt whip out my callipers like "hang on that there might be an italian!" ... i wouldnt know unless they told me all about how their family moved there thirty years ago or whatever.
so do they really look that different? im gonna go with no.
There are virtually zero Polish people who look like this
https://afar-production.imgix.net/uploads/images/post_images/images/XAlsxGnutL/original_sicily_occhipinti-16.jpg?auto=compress,format&lossless=true&w=845
Keep in mind that most Italian US migration came from southern Italy. Northern Italians look different too, but it's much subtler and they probably would have been considered white just because a paler appearance is so common there.
If I saw someone like that walking around Sweden, I'd immediately assume they were a tourist or a Middle Eastern migrant.
That's the point, you just named a bunch of places on the southern coast of europe
Such phenotypes are pretty much absent in northern europe, and the few of them that are (think someone like Mr. Bean but even he is white compared to picrelated) are very conspicuous and often even mistaken for foreigners in their own country
this is my point though. in aggregate there might be differences that you can point out, but if you take that as some kind of racial rule, its nonsense. there are obviously always outliers that make your racial definement look silly
this is my point though. in aggregate there might be differences that you can point out, but if you take that as some kind of racial rule, its nonsense.
The point is, you walk into Brooklyn in the 1920s and 9/20 people look like that
Then you walk into Iowa and 1/20 people look like thatnumbers are numbers and we notice them even if we don't mean to. There is an observable difference en masse so it is noticed.
And a greater number of outliers isn't the only thing--if you have more outliers it means you also have more people who are closer to the outliers. If 10% of your pop. lies outside the natural "Anglo" appearance variation, it also means that 60% of your pop. lies on the "darker half" of Anglo appearance variation. It's not "just" the outliers who influence the perception, because everything in nature is analog and continuous, not discrete. Those differences are very noticeable if you just walk into an explicit community of Italians.
The word "Italian" is an aggregate term, so aggregate differences are applied.
italian is a cultural term not a racial term but go off.
im not saying it cant be noticed en masse that people from different areas look a bit different.. what im saying is that on an individual level there isnt anything to differentiate that odd-duck 1/20 iowan from the "racially distinct" 9/20 folks in brooklyn, ergo the distinction isnt distinct and your race science shit is shit.
if you need to do a genetic test to look at phenotype markers to figure out if someone is italian or french or british or irish or polish or whatever with any significant degree of certainty absent them living in a community explocitly of those people... guess what? the only difference is cultural
italian is a cultural term not a racial term but go off.
Italian is a term used to denote people from Italy. If people from Italy look recognizably different in aggregate from the people in country X, then the X people will begin using "Italian" as a "racial" term. Race is a social construct that only exists due to perceivable visual differences from what people are "used" to seeing.
im not saying it cant be noticed en masse
great, so you agree with me. Italian, en masse, look different enough from Anglos to differentiate.
what im saying is that on an individual level there isnt anything to differentiate that odd-duck 1/20 iowan from the “racially distinct” 9/20 folks
No there isn't. The difference is that when it happens 1/20 times in your ethnicity, and 9/20 times in another, you notice the difference in aggregate. The difference that Italians, on average, look substantially darker and with more Mideast leaning features than Anglos.
And since the term "Italian" is an AGGREGATE TERM, the Italians, IN AGGREGATE, are seen as less white than Anglos.
We are literally in complete agreement here.
if you need to do a genetic test
Noone said anything about genes. Different extreme ethnicities of Europe look different. South Europeans look different in aggregate from North, and even Eastern look different from Western (the difference is in features, not color, so it's harder for a white American to spot)
Can a single particular individual Italian pass for Russian? Of course. Can a single individual Ukrainian pass as Dravidian South Indian? Of course.
In aggregate though, the differences are very observable (with the Italian-Russian difference being much smaller than the Ukrainian-Dravidian difference, obviously)
That also someone who is from the south of Italy vs northern. It’s really going to differ.
Like I said, a disproportionate amount of Italian-americans are from the south.
Related, but inversely. It was interesting for me living in PR, a very poor country, and having the American education system imposed on us. What did we say about ourselves? How did we justify our predicament?
We've never been anything but a colony. So our political framework exists entirely in the colonialist mindset and status related issues. Except for brief periods of economic prosperity, we've always been poor. And a big part of why we're poor is colonialism.
American propaganda is a very very strong force. When you're poor as shit and the cheques you get from the government have a big ol american flag, that seeps into your subconscious. When you can't afford to feed your family and the Army offers you the chance to move up in society, you start to revere them. Our slang tells stories. We used the word cangri (derived from congressman) to describe a really really cool and legit person who had it all together, because we saw US congresspeople come down in their tailored suits and thought they looked so well put together and like total bosses with their fancy clothes. We were pretty poor.
And then all you have to do is convince the people who already think you're cool and good that if you went away, all that aid would disappear and we'd be poorer and even more fucked. People aren't necessarily super vested into political "what ifs" and abstract laws, good luck telling them that getting rid of the USA would mean we wouldn't have to pay completely absurd US shipping taxes because we'd be free of the JONES Act, good luck telling them that it means we could trade with other countries. They see that they're poor, they see the monthly cheque, they see the US passport that enables them to move to Kissimmee so they can do hurricanes in English. They trust the US, and they don't trust in themselves.
It's also a lot of self hate. The "lazy islander" stereotype persists and is validated by a lot of people here honestly. A lot of Puerto Ricans think we're fundamentally incapable of running our own country. That we'd descend into chaos, that we'd be like Cuba and Venezuela (more American propaganda there). That we're simply too corrupt to function without the US. It's a weird codependency mentality.
Of course that's not literally everyone in PR. We have people who want independence and people who want to be a Spanish colony instead again (lol). But that's just the prevailing mindset for why we justify being the way we are.
"Yes I know my enemies They're the teachers who taught me to fight me"
I was never taught WHY anyone was poor. It seemed like most education just focused around the fact that there just WERE poor people and it was something you always had to accept... Hmm wonder why that is....___
Warning: This comment contains weapons-grade radicalizing fluid, handle with care:
https://youtu.be/eHyDUQAHCJw
I know all of us here are familiar with it, but I have had great success with the application of Parenti to the liberal brain, particularly this clip.
One thing that I didn't find out until a few years ago--I'm old--is that Latin America and Africa were deliberately excluded from the Marshall Plan development loans, and actually left talks over that, because why the fuck would they stay in them if the plan was "we're going to continue making sure your economy remains brutally extractive and what wealth it does produce leaves as capital flight". It was always made out to be that the Marshall Plan was just the US helping out the whole world etc. etc.
No, because in liberal ideology poverty is treated as some immutable force of nature rather than something with structural causes.
Poverty can't be acknowledged under liberal ideology in any other way, because one of the most sinister aspects at the heart of functioning of the capitalist system is that it MUST keep a large and significant portion of the population in perpetual poverty and/or precarity. This being the reserve army of labor.
The explanation I got was something along the lines of “it’s because their cultures don’t value hard work as much as American culture does”
hard work is when you are by sheer luck located closer to 2 continents full of free resources that effectively dectuple your GDP and the only work involved is genociding the Natives who already have a sparser population due to being cut off from the bronze age developments of Afroeurasia
