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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 26, 2023

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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.

In America the GOP is the white party ... But certainly to be Republican has become to believe one is white,

Dunno about that. Most white nationalists/strongly identified white people I know consider the Republican party as too philosemitic to be the party for Whites.

it’s entirely possible that largely native third-generation Central Americans might one day ‘identify as’ huwhite for the purposes of political alignment

Yeah, but they won't be White.

But certainly to be Republican has become to believe one is white, whether one is Scots-Irish,

White.

Italian

White

Cuban, Mayan,

Not White.

WASP

White!

Jewish, Armenian

Not White.

or whatever else.

White means European derived people. Everyone knows what it means. It doesn't matter if you identify as being European derived if you aren't. You won't be 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

If your ancestry can be (reasonably recently) traced to a black person, you aren't White.

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.

Well, they are.

My grandfather, born in the 1920s, would never describe himself as a Jew

Well, he is.

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.

That was a misleading lie. They aren't white. It's a shame people feel the need to lie on census forms.

Man, I could do this all day. White: Overwhelmingly genotypically European, overwhelmingly phenotypically European. Everyone else ain't it.

This is low effort, consensus-enforcing, and a bit antagonistic. Don't post like this.

Cuban

Not White.

Ok, so I understand the rest of these. I disagree with some of them, but I understand.

But do you think people born in a place colonized by the Spanish won't have a bunch of European genes floating around in their system?

Pretty much everyone who hasn't specifically convinced themselves otherwise is going to look at, say, Mark Zuckerberg and go "he's white" on the basis of a basic "just look at that guy" test.

Also, even elsewhere within my example, there are plenty of unambiguously white Cubans.

So, as one of the most vocally white-identitarian (I don’t use the self-descriptor “white nationalist”) posters here, you might imagine that I agree with your simple “white=European ancestry” model, but I actually believe it’s woefully limited and does not capture the complexities of the world as it is rapidly becoming.

I have laid out my expansive concentric-circles model of whiteness before, and as far as I’m concerned, several of the groups you ruled out as absolutely-not-white are, in actuality, either already white - at least conditionally/contextually so - or are approaching the transition to whiteness.

For example, you state definitively that both Jews and Armenians are non-white, but I don’t think that actually captures the way that the vast majority of Jews and Armenians are perceived. After all, Scarlett Johansson is fully 50% Ashkenazi, and it’s the correct (maternal) half to be considered halachically Jewish. Not a single person on Earth does not believe that Scarlett Johansson is white. Johansson’s ancestry is fairly bog-standard for the Jewish diaspora, and as non-Orthodox non-Israeli Jews continue their massive levels of out-marriage, the gentile percentage of their ancestry will only continue to cascade upward until more and more Jews look every bit as pale and indistinguishable-from-gentiles as Scarlett Johansson does. Similarly, Shavo Odadjian, bassist for System Of A Down, is fully ethnically-Armenian and was born in Armenia, yet his skin and (beard) hair are lighter than mine!

I’m slightly more sympathetic toward your stance that someone cannot be white if they have a black ancestor - I’ve commented elsewhere on this site (it already took me forever to find my past comment that I linked to, and I’m not going to go searching again for this one) that the ultimate criterion for Whiteness in the future will be “people who have no significant African/Negrito ancestry” - but I do think you’re not taking seriously enough the complicated question of just how significant and how recent the black ancestry needs to be. For example, during the Obama presidency, amusing commentary was made about the fact that Obama was, contrary to popular perception, descended from at least one American slave, but it was through his white mother’s side! Apparently she had some black ancestor 150+ years back. Again, not a single person would clock her as anything but fully white, and this obscure revelation about her distant ancestor does absolutely nothing to change that.

So, given that basically everybody accepts that if the black ancestry is far enough back that your phenotype doesn’t show any signs of it - and after all, all of us have African ancestry if you go far enough back, assuming that the Out-Of-Africa theory is in fact true - at this point we’re haggling over the definition of how to define the cut-off. I can easily imagine a Castizo Futurism that embraces people with 25% black ancestry as white, provided that such an individual also accepts and embraces that identification. And such a model could even embrace people of 100% East Asian descent as white, like I did in my concentric-circles model. This model of whiteness might strike you as eccentric and far-fetched now, but you may want to consider that things might like very different in even less than a century.

If largely genotypically and phenotypically European counts as white then many Ashkenazi Jews are white unless you take a one-drop rule perspective for haplogroups.

It's rather weird that you can't decide whether a person is white or not just by looking at his photo. You need to know his genealogy in some cases, and it's not even about mixed race people. Muricans!