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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 26, 2026

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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.