Who are the next "white people"?

[lpetrich]

 White people,  White Americans,  Caucasian race

What is the "white" race? From the name, it might mean very light-skinned people. But it originally meant northern Europeans, like Britons, French, Dutch, Germans, and Scandinavians. In 19th cy. Britain, Irish were often considered nonwhite, since they seemed very backward, even though they were fellow northern European.

But in the late-19th-cy. US, Irish were accepted into whiteness, along with southern and eastern Europeans, like Irish and Hungarians and Poles.

In the US, Hispanics are not generally considered white, even though many Hispanics have a lot of European ancestry. But if the white-nationalist wing of the Republican Party tries to become more inclusive, might it accept the more European-descended of Hispanics as white people? If it goes that route, it may also accept eastern Asians as "white" people, creating a big coalition of light-skinned people in opposition to dark-skinned ones.


Biologically, people with physical features similar to Europeans are the Caucasian or Caucasoid or Macro-European race, and before the great colonizations of recent centuries, such people lived not only in Europe, but also in North Africa, the Middle East, and the Indian Subcontinent. In fact, some Caucasoids are relatively dark-skinned. I remember once watching a movie about a white man who wanted to make himself black. With his new skin color and his facial features, he seemed to me to look Southern Asian.

Why "Caucasian"? In 1795, a certain Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, an early anthropologist, decided to use the skull of someone from the Caucasus Mountains as a reference or type specimen.

I've come across some additional terms, like "honky" (likely "from "hunky", short for "Hungarian"), "cracker" (likely from "corn cracker", a poor rural white person), "haole" (Hawaiian), "pakeha" (New Zealand), "toubab" (West Africa), "oyinbo" (Yoruba, a West African language: "peeled person"), "oburoni" (Akan, a West Aftrican language: "person from beyond the horizon"), "mzungu" (Swahili, an East African language: "wanderer" or "dizzy person").


Also, I note that many white nationalists do not consider Jews to be real white people, despite most Jews being as Caucasoid as those white nationalists.

 

[Politesse]

Yes, these definitions change with every generation. Has a way of making census data useless, it's hard to tell the difference between an objectively observeable demographic shift and a new trend in social identification.

Mexicans: actually were considered whites under the law during most of American history, one reason why many people of indigenous heritage took Hispanic names during the final years of the American genocide. Mexicans were not respected, but was safer to be identified as Mexican than N---- or Indian. Despised, but not subject to forced schooling or the apprenticeship acts.

A small note: "Toubabs" aren't "whites", they're foreigners, of any ethnicity. For instance, the word is used often in Mali to refer to the French and the Chinese, but not to the ethnically Arab Touareg people from their country's northern desert; those are "blancs", ie "whites", in literal translation.

Ditto "haole" and "oburone". For all the reasons you describe above, it's important not to accidentally map the American system of race onto the sociopolitical situations of other communities.

 

[J842P]

"Hispanic" isn't really a race/ethnicity. It basically just means "relating to Spain". As a category of people, it is a very loose term to mean "people from a country that speaks Spanish, or was part of the ex Spanish colonial Empire, sometimes including Brazillians, sometimes including Iberian Spanish people, depending on the context".

There are white Hispanic people, there are Black hispanic people, there are (a lot) of mixed indigenous/European mestizos Hispanics. I would argue that you could really even include Filipinos as Hispanic.

In the US Hispanics are generally not considered white because there are not a lot of white Hispanic people in the US, although there are some, but generally, they use it to refer *specifically* to mestizos. White Hispanic people are generally just considered white in the States, albeit they come from, say, Mexico or Argentina or Columbia, and they speak Spanish.

The Spanish Empire itself had a meticulous racial caste system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casta#Racial_terminology

 

[Trausti]

But in the late-19th-cy. US, Irish were accepted into whiteness,

Yeah. Who can forget that poignant scene in Gone with the Wind when Scarlett O'Hara is shackled in chains and put to work picking cotton.

 

[Metaphor]

Well, according to intersectional feminists, straight black men are the white people of black people.

 

[Tom Sawyer]

Right now, we're discussing letting rich Asian people in. They're pretty much PLUDs anyways, so it's weird to exclude them.

 

[dismal]

Right now, we're discussing letting rich Asian people in. They're pretty much PLUDs anyways, so it's weird to exclude them.

Asians can be counted as white people when it's helpful to the narrative. Like in college admissions or in articles criticizing google's lack of racial diversity.

It's the same principle that turned George Zimmerman into a White Hispanic.

 

[Tom Sawyer]

Right now, we're discussing letting rich Asian people in. They're pretty much PLUDs anyways, so it's weird to exclude them.

Asians can be counted as white people when it's helpful to the narrative. Like in college admissions or in articles criticizing google's lack of racial diversity.

It's the same principle that turned George Zimmerman into a White Hispanic.

Look, so long as white people benefit and profit, we are more than willing to temporarily pretend that someone other than white people matter in some way. You know, provided they don't get too uppity about it and want to sit beside us in the cafeteria or anything.

 

[Tammuz]

Biologically, people with physical features similar to Europeans are the Caucasian or Caucasoid or Macro-European race, and before the great colonizations of recent centuries, such people lived not only in Europe, but also in North Africa, the Middle East, and the Indian Subcontinent. In fact, some Caucasoids are relatively dark-skinned.

What kind on pseudoscientific tripe is this? Just stop it.

Caucasians, in the world outside of the US, refers to peoples from the Caucasus region, i.e Chechens, Ingushes, Dagestanis, Georgians, Armenians, etc.

As for this entire subject matter, it sounds like something alt-right pseudoscientists would discuss over a beer or two.You are not that, I assume. But it shows that the nationalist alt-right and the identity political left are not very different, they meet each other from their different ends. Both are obsessed with "race", skin color, etc, and are adamant about keeping different kinds of people segregated, be that in the name of "racial purity" or to prevent "cultural appropriation".

As for the part I quoted, it should be considered a monument of shame to write such things in 2019. Just stop.

 

[lpetrich]

Adam Serwer: White Nationalism’s Deep American Roots - The Atlantic discusses Madison Grant, author of "The Passing of the Great Race" (1916). The "great race" is "Nordics", northern Europeans, the people who founded the United States, the people who were then getting swamped by eastern Europeans and southern Europeans who were immigrating to the US in large numbers back then. Jews he considered especially troublesome.

Not surprisingly, Adolf Hitler loved that book.

Meanwhile, the Supreme Court was struggling mightily to define whiteness in a consistent fashion, an endeavor complicated by the empirical flimsiness of race science. In one case after another, the high court faced the task of essentially tailoring its definition to exclude those whom white elites considered unworthy of full citizenship.

In 1923, when an Indian veteran named Bhagat Singh Thind—who had fought for the U.S. in World War I—came before the justices with the claim of being Caucasian in the scientific sense of the term, and therefore entitled to the privileges of whiteness, they threw up their hands. In a unanimous ruling against Thind (who was ultimately made a citizen in 1936), Justice George Sutherland wrote:

What we now hold is that the words “free white persons” are words of common speech to be interpreted in accordance with the understanding of the common man, synonymous with the word “Caucasian” only as that word is popularly understood.

The justices had unwittingly acknowledged a consistent truth about racism, which is that race is whatever those in power say it is.