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Republicans are 'wannabe' whites, Democrats are 'wannabe' POC
Inspired by @ymeskhout 's thread below
The culture war in America is less religious, or even strictly ethnic, and more about whether a given group ‘identifies’ as white.
In America the GOP is the white party. That doesn’t mean it’s actually the ‘white party’ in some absolute anthropological sense, it’s entirely possible that largely native third-generation Central Americans might one day ‘identify as’ huwhite for the purposes of political alignment (cf Amerimutt memes). But certainly to be Republican has become to believe one is white, whether one is Scots-Irish, Italian, Cuban, Mayan, WASP, Jewish, Armenian or whatever else. Even black Republicans, even if they won’t overtly admit it, identify as white; Tim Scott was effectively raised by a neighborhood white businessman who owned the local Chick-fil-A franchise, Candace Owens is married to an English hedge fund manager and son of a peer, Clarence Thomas has a white wife etc. In several generations the modal black Republican with a white spouse will have white descendants.
Conversely, white progressives, even if they are literally as Nordic huwhite as it is possible to be under a Madison Grant-esque racial designation from 1890, do not ‘identify as’ white. Sure, they’ll tick white on a checkbox so they don’t get made fun of, Rachel Dolezal style, by their peers, but in the traditional, tribal sense they aren’t white. As the famous chart shows, white progressives are the only demographic in the entire western world (possibly the entire world) with out-group bias. Even if they would never admit it, they are transracial. Some part of Robin DiAngelo believes that, even if she knows she isn’t ‘black’ per se, she is on the PoC team in a tribal sense, just like Candace Owens, in marrying an Englishman, has declared her lineage to be ‘white’.
My grandfather, born in the 1920s, would never describe himself as a Jew, even though he, his parents, his wife, his children and (some of) his grandchildren were of course Jews. He would only describe himself as a “man of the Jewish religion”. He was a socialist in his youth, then became a Republican in the 50s and, in his final years on this earth, a devout Trump supporter. Before 9/11, when as is often stated, Muslims voted largely for the GOP (and pre-9/11 American Muslims were more Levantine/North African than they are today), they too identified as ‘white’, like my grandfather.
The political division in the US is and will remain between groups who ‘identify as’ white and those who do not, regardless of their actual ethnic origin. Religion won’t really come into it.
I mean... maybe. But only because woke types have decided "Whiteness" has nothing to do with skin color, and everything to do with encouraging pro social norms like stable marriages, property rights, staying healthy, rational thinking, etc. Which means "Blackness" is left representing anti-social norms that are being "oppressed" by
causality"Whiteness".When such a framing of race is being forced on the discourse from nearly all institutional mouthpieces, if you are still capable of forming a coherent thought in your head, it's probably gonna be "Well, I guess I want to be white then."
I need to nitpick this slightly, because I think the NYPost is being deliberately dishonest in their framing. Yes, there's some wokeish language in the body of the AMA report they're referencing and mocking, but that really isn't the punchline. Here's their actual conclusion:
Go read the whole thing for both the woke nonsense, but more importantly to get the sense that woke nonsense is emphatically not what they're hitting on, and they're especially not saying that it's racist to consider obesity a health risk. I've defended BMI as a decent enough starting metric, but more fine-grained distinction of looking at body-fat and other metrics really are superior, and there really is considerable heterogeneity across height, gender, and ethnicity.
That said, I'm sure there are plenty of other examples of more extreme people claiming that health is just a social construct promoting whiteness, since I've read such ridiculousness myself, but I find this example to be pretty weak.
Ok, how about this clip covering a woman of color, and equity director, who does not believe obesity has any health consequences, or that nutrition is real at all, to the Nutrition Council?
https://youtube.com/watch?v=cd-VnRofGcU
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