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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   36220 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 24, 2022

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These classifications seem so bizarre. Like, I get why the term 'white' replaced English, German, French etc in the new world as the settler groups admixed. But if you define white as a literal skin colour, them surely you don't need to classify different ethnic groups, you can just look at them?

And if 'white' means European, then in what world are the French somehow more European than the Italians?

If you're trying to classify European ethnic groups, it would be better to think like a European and not an American. 'White' is not a meaningful category in this context.

The rule for white in American history is that you look around the room and figure out what is the minimum number of people you need to classify as white to have a sufficient (loyal) white majority in numbers/money/power to oppress the non-white, then inventing the rule that will deliver this majority with the minimum number of extraneous inclusions.

That's how you get from ilforte's quote from Ben Franklin excluding most of Germany to "idk, maybe we count the Jews and the Japanese and some Indians and throw in Persians too and see how the math comes out?" You go from needing only the English/Scots/some Germans to have a supermajority, to needing all the Germans and the Swedes and French, to needing the Irish, to needing Italians, etc. That's why Mexicans went from being considered white in Texas before sufficient quantities of outside European immigrants had shown up, to Mexicans briefly "Losing" their white status after enough European immigrants made Texas majority non-hispanic white, to now having their white status "restored" as white Texans need the numbers.

White has no functional definition outside of that algo, everything else is backwards rationalisation to justify and give credibility to what the rule spat out as the line that would give "whites" a majority and exclude someone else. OP's concentric circles of whiteness are just different solutions to the same problem.

I think whiteness is about not standing out because of your appearance to euro-americans. Under this definition there are large swathes of south european people who would not pass because you could tell them apart based on their appearance but its fuzzy because race is not a discrete thing.

'White is the minimum number of ethnic groups needed to do racial oppression' does not seem like it would pass the ideological Turing test, at all.

How about 'white' means 'assimilated into Anglo-American culture'?

In fairness, colorism is a bit of a strawman promoted by people who oppose racial perspective and seek to make it appear more ridiculous. When Anglo racists with above room temp IQs say that Eastern Slavs are not white, they aren't literally trying to compete on fair pigmentation (and by the way Turks can have very Aryan skull shapes)... it's an unfortunate conflation of terms.

There are some distinct cultural traits with the English, French, and Germans that southern Italians don't share.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manorialism

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hajnal_line

Very loosely, under Manorialism a couple could get a chunk of farmland to work by presenting themselves to the lord as honest, hardworking, and not a source of trouble. It lead to more atomic family structures and smaller families.

It replaced a clan centric system, where individuals had to preserve the honour and reputation of their clan. Tolerating an insult could lead outsiders to think that your clan would tolerate injuries. So it was critical that everyone understood that they should not mess with your clan.

For instance the Scotch-Irish were famous for feuds like the Hatfields & McCoys.

There's also a zero-sum aspect to altruism where the more you care about your extended relatives the less you care about your unrelated neighbours.

So for a traditional resident of small town America it's expected that they would help their old school friends and neighbours before their second cousins.

That's not going to be the case for more clannish societies.

There's no good name for "within Hajnal" societies but it's generally what people are thinking.

I am trying to promote the terms "cisHajnal" and "transHajnal".

Your certainly right, but to classify people north of the hajnal line as 'more white' doesn't make any more sense than classifying them as 'more redheaded'.

'More outbred' would be more accurate, and actually hint to what you are taking about.

Although I doubt OP was talking about outbreeding, nuclear families and manorialism. I'm pretty sure they were awkwardly trying to apply idiosyncratic American ethnic terms to a world where the terms make no sense.

Yeah, but white southerners are mostly scotch-irish by extraction and these people consider them white.

Hajnal put all of Scotland inside the line. I have seen arguments that the Scottish Highlands were actually transHajnal, but my understanding was that the Borderers (from whom most of the Scots Irish are descended) were clearly inside it.

The traditional Irish culture is also transHajnal, but the Scots Irish put a LOT of effort into not assimilating into it.

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