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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   32379 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 10, 2025

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They're starting to remind me of native Americans. I do not mean that as a compliment.

Native Americans are indigenous. It used to be their land. And it's not anymore. We're here, get used to it.

Likewise, America was founded by white Christians. Today, they're 44% of the population and declining fast.[1] And that 44% includes "protect trans kids" mainline Protestants, Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses, and others people like Walsh won't consider "real" Christians. Maybe 33% of the American population qualifies as "real" white Christians. And Matt Walsh tells this population they should not go to college,[2] checking out of positions of power and influence. A population of farmers and plumbers living in left-behind parts of the country, locked out of power, pining for the glory days when they ran the country and praying for supernatural deliverance, is this the vision that "nationalists" want?

Native American advocates will do a motte-and-bailey with "native Americans are the indigenous population of America" and "therefore they should get special privileges." Walshites motte-and-bailey with "white Christians founded America" and "therefore the remaining white Christians deserve political authority over the rest of America." Well, the rest of America isn't having it.

  1. https://www.prri.org/research/2020-census-of-american-religion/

  2. https://x.com/MattWalshBlog/status/1854647166184067201

Today, they're 44% of the population and declining fast.

America will always be a white country, because the definition of “white” is constantly being adjusted and every new ethnic group that comes into the country ends up eventually becoming white. The Irish and the Lithuanians and the Jews were definitely not white when they first got off the boats. In 20 years Latinos will be considered white, and another 20 years after that so will Indians.

The Irish and the Lithuanians and the Jews were definitely not white when they first got off the boats.

The Irish/Jews/etc. were considered white, the idea that they weren't is a psuedo-historical myth advanced by certain activist historians like Noel Ignatiev. The main trick they pull is to define "whiteness" as not being discriminated against or "othered", point out that the Irish were discriminated against, and thus define them as not white. But the actual historical people who did the discriminating did not define white people that way, they both considered Irish to be a subcategory of white people and also discriminated against them. Being white was of real legal and social relevance, and groups such as the Irish were unquestionably included in that category.

The Volokh Conspiracy: Sorry, but the Irish were always ‘white’ (and so were Italians, Jews and so on)

Here are some objective tests as to whether a group was historically considered “white” in the United States: Were members of the group allowed to go to “whites-only” schools in the South, or otherwise partake of the advantages that accrued to whites under Jim Crow? Were they ever segregated in schools by law, anywhere in the United States, such that “whites” went to one school, and the group in question was relegated to another? When laws banned interracial marriage in many states (not just in the South), if a white Anglo-Saxon wanted to marry a member of the group, would that have been against the law? Some labor unions restricted their membership to whites. Did such unions exclude members of the group in question? Were members of the group ever entirely excluded from being able to immigrate to the United States, or face special bans or restrictions in becoming citizens?

If you use such objective tests, you find that Irish, Jews, Italians and other white ethnics were indeed considered white by law and by custom (as in the case of labor unions). Indeed, some lighter-skinned African Americans of mixed heritage “passed” as white by claiming they were of Arab descent and that explained their relative swarthiness, showing that Arab Americans, another group whose “whiteness” has been questioned, were considered white. By contrast, persons of African, Asian, Mexican and Native American descent faced various degrees of exclusion from public schools and labor unions, bans on marriage and direct restrictions on immigration and citizenship.

This might be true legally but you can go back and see (as I've pointed out several times on here) that excluding "tawny" foreigners such as the French and Spanish from the definition of "white" was a real thing:

Which leads me to add one Remark: That the Number of purely white People in the World is proportionably very small. All Africa is black or tawny. Asia chiefly tawny. America (exclusive of the new Comers) wholly so. And in Europe, the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians and Swedes, are generally of what we call a swarthy Complexion; as are the Germans also, the Saxons only excepted, who with the English, make the principal Body of White People on the Face of the Earth.

So yeah, unless Ben Franklin was a very weird outlier, I would say there's been an "expansion" of "whiteness" over time.

So yeah, unless Ben Franklin was a very weird outlier, I would say there's been an "expansion" of "whiteness" over time.

He's claiming Swedes aren't white. Swedes are obviously completely maxed out on whiteness genetically like all other Northern Europeans. We know Swedes, Germans and Russians are pale as can be and Franklin is an outlier and just plain wrong here.

I believe Sweden at the time included parts of Finland, the native inhabitants of which I am given to understand actually aren't all that white. (Regardless I don't think the Swedes are maxed out on whiteness genetically, I believe that is the Irish.)

Similar deal in Russia, too, which has groups that don't exactly code as "white."

I don't think his is entirely a minority view, at least as regards Italians, Spanish, etc.

Sweden had lost Finland to Russia relatively recently, and both Sami and Finns are extremely northern euro looking. Russia had also not expanded as much into Central Asia and Siberia as it later would.

Just from Wikipedia, the older photographs of Sami people often look a bit like the Inuit to me (of course, they are black-and-white photographs!).

I found one article that says it used to be common to suspect the Sami were of Mongol extraction, and some of them do appear similar, but (at least according to one theory) this is because the Sami were not an agricultural people and so they retained facial features that largely disappeared in other Europeans.

That seems sufficient to me to explain why, despite the Sami often having pale skin, Race Enthusiasts tended to classify the Sami as non-white.

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