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PaperclipPerfector  8d ago (text post)   24541 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 26, 2026

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I'll presume this to be another 'I'm white and imagining my white norms and priors unto this very non-white family in a very non-white predicament'.

I remember as a progressive being fed all the statistics of how horrible and backwards America was socially. Not understanding that most if not all of those statistics were being inflated by a large black and brown underclass that was, back then at least, not present in most of the 'civilized world' in Europe. But me, being completely incapable of even conceiving of such a world view consistently imagined all the stats applying to white people. It really helped cement the idea that Americans were a sort of different breed of human.

The mother and father are both white.

'I'm white and imagining my white norms and priors unto this very non-white family in a very non-white predicament'.

The mother is Ukrainian, the father is Russian. The only thing whiter than this coupling is flying over the apls in the winter.

Russians are not white.

The mother is Ukrainian, the father is Russian.

I wonder if they have read The Drummer's Fate as kids. In the novel the 14-yo protagonist is also left home alone by his (adoptive) parents when they go on vacation. Doesn't go well and ultimately leads to him getting shot in the throat by a capitalist spy.

A rare L for racism.

The mother is Ukrainian, the father is Russian.

Wow. Their last four holiday seasons must have been awkward....

Next you'll be telling me Sicilians, or the Irish, are white too.

"White" has only recently been understood to refer to skin color rather than certain ancestral clusters and the psychological traits associated with them.

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

Slavs definitely would not qualify.

"White" has only recently been understood to refer to skin color rather than certain ancestral clusters and the psychological traits associated with them.

"White" as a political category in the United States has always been understood to refer to all people of 100% European ancestry - the edge cases were and are Middle Eastern/North African. Nobody suggested that guineas, polacks or micks were anything other than white when applying the Founding-era laws restricting citizenship to free whites, or Jim Crow laws segregating "Whites" and "Blacks". What changed was that the ethnic group American nativists considered ingroup changed from "WASPs" to "Whites" (and now to "Heritage-Americans", which is at least supposed to include ADOS blacks and American Indians). The 2nd Klan and the popular nativist movement it was the pointy end of used anti-Catholicism and not racism as their prejudice of choice, and the 1924 Johnson-Reed Immigration Act was explicitly targetted at reducing immigration of undesirable white subgroups.

Reading the article I am overjoyed to learn that St. Petersburg is not a slavic city.

"White" referred to certain ancestral clusters, but the Irish were definitely always included. And the Sicilians, at least in the US (the other Italians might disagree). Certainly Slavs are included. Unless you take Ben Franklin's definition, and honestly I can't tell if he was trolling.

The Hajnal line is not about whiteness.

And the Sicilians, at least in the US (the other Italians might disagree).

I think that is why forms have the ethnicity category for white latins vs non-white latins. /sarcasm

One of my favorite scenes from the show community: https://youtube.com/watch?v=15QFAppht5o

"sweedish dogs! your blood is tainted by generations of race mixing with lap-landers. you're basically finns."

There was an original American conception of the importance of Englishmen. But I feel that quickly changed. When the Hessian soldiers were captured there was a specific and intentional decision to treat them as victims of their over-bearing monarchs/princes, and give them the opportunity of a free life in America. The religious divide was considered far more important at the time than any racial divide, and Americans were fully willing to make concessions on religious tolerance. They even let Maryland in.

I don't see how this is a problem caused by the family's race rather than state policy.

State policy doesn't fall from the sky.

Which race do you think supports helicopter parenting and infantilization the most and which the least?

Do you think CPS and other related institutions having ridiculous protocols for how to deal with certain things is downstream from helicopter parents or parents who leave their infants in the bathtub unattended?

I think the protocols are set by using helicopter parents as the baseline (and probably the opinion makers) and the bathtub parents as scaremongering. In practice, that means a plurality of less-than-helicopter parents get raked by CPS because of a few bathtub parents, who are outliers and should not be counted.

If the nonwhite underclass is used by the state as an example to set the policies for regular people, it is a problem with the state.

I'd assume that to be completely inaccurate, and that the protocols are designed around both the worst and most common cases that land on the institutions desk. And the internal pressure on the decision makers mostly comes from how to prevent the 'big bad' cases that make the headlines from ever happening again. The parenting styles of those who work in those institutions, if they even have children, isn't a factor at all. It's a separate world to them. One to be managed, one to be lived in.

If the state decides to house a hundred odd million non-whites then yeah, that's a 'state issue'. But it's not possible to maintain first world institutions that are saddled with a third world population to manage. Especially whilst not being allowed to differentiate between folks despite how obviously different they are.

Which demographic are the ones reading the sordid headlines and demanding that the state Does Something About It?

I think most demographics are horrified by stories of child neglect, abuse and death. But if you want to pin the want to organize to prevent such things on white people specifically, sure. Is there a point that follows?

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