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Notes -
(First of all, thank you for the informative and honest reply - and I apologize for my relentless edit-preening of my own posts - luckily I'm pretty sure I didn't add or remove anything of substance while you were replying, just streamlining phrasing and other minor choices.)
This is interesting. I see your reasoning here completely. In a vacuum, I think a world-naive version of me would happily claim that I'm both white and black, because my parents are white and black. If my parents were Korean and Mexican I'd be both asian and hispanic.
The non-naive me understands that this would run directly counter to just about all messaging I've ever seen about what it means to be white in America, in the historical record through my childhood and into the present, from white people and from black people, from segregationists and from integrationists, from people who are firmly opposed to race-mixing and from people who are a little overenthusiastic about it.
My impression is that claiming whiteness for myself would be widely seen as not only incorrect, but essentially fraudulent - whiteness, as it exists in the American perspective, is about not being mixed-race. It's what I understand the point of whiteness to be. I don't mean to point this out in a way that implies that it's unjust or that I feel that I deserve entry into whiteness and that it is being denied to me - it is what it is, value-neutral.
I concede that I might be wrong about this, and that say, Barack Obama could've been welcomed with open arms into the 'white' (or 'American') racial ingroup had he simply chosen to, but I am skeptical.
(Maybe one difference between the traditional 'white' ethnic group and your 'American' ethnic group is that biracial people can opt-in to the latter and not the former.)
Neither of my parents ever explicitly called me anything but "mixed" -- that was the terminology of the day, I think "biracial" has superseded it, I don't really know or keep up either. Neither side of the family ever called me white, but interestingly, neither side of the family ever called me black, either. That I picked up afterward, from friends (white and black and otherwise) calling me black, then later sampling the broader world for clues about what I ought to call myself. It always boiled down to "If you're half black, you're black. And, if you're half black, you're not white."
So, I don't know on this point. Like I said, in a vacuum, I agree with you that it should be equally appropriate for me to claim the race of either or both of my parents.
Yeah I'm more or less with you on this one, although I also think the treadmill is inevitable. I can't tell you the last time I heard someone unironically call themselves "African-American" in a casual context. To me it sounds impersonally clinical and weird, like when someone says "females" instead of "women" in a casual conversation.
But I'm on the back end of the treadmill, too. "People of color" has always been a very clunky phrase to me, and makes me feel bad for how disorienting it must be for people who had to unlearn "colored people" within their own lifetimes. Plus it's too broad, since it just means "not white people" it implies a coalition or community that doesn't exist for any practical purpose. I'll take it over "BIPOC" (black people, indigenous people, and people of color), which I don't see having a lot of mileage outside of identity activist spaces, but hey, I've been wrong before.
In actual American black communities, people don't say "people of color" unless they're specifically doing race identity coalition activism, which they ... usually aren't. And anecdotally, the very small number of people I've ever heard say "BIPOC" out loud have been white terminally online leftists. We're ... safe from that one I think, fingers crossed. My condolences to all the Latinxs out there.
The good news I bring is that it's fine to say 'black', it's fine to say 'black' if you're white, it's way simpler than anything else, it seems pretty stable as an identifier, and it's what the vast majority of black people in the US talk about and think of themselves as.
Personally I think 'mulatto' should be allowed back and should bring fun hyperspecific terms like 'quadroon' and 'octoroon' back along with it, but I don't control these things.
I'll give it to you that your perspective is self-consistent from where I'm standing. I think it's an unusual method of identitycraft, but I understand where you're coming from and why you want to do it and see it come into being. I was thinking at first, is there any particular reason you don't think of your new ingroup as "White American" or "Anglo-American" (vs. just "American") if American blacks and indians both have comparable and non-exclusive claims of ethnic primacy on the American continent? But I am assuming "American" in this sense has to do with the specific founding stock of the American colonial project and specifically its state system and cultural institutions, and has nothing at all to do with people who are white or European who weren't part of the country at the time of its founding or soon after. I can also see why there is not really an intuitive term for that.
Your position made a lot more sense to me once I understood that you are defining the bounds of a new ethnic group based on ancestral proximity to a particular series of people and events at a particular place at a particular time in history, and are not defining terms of entry into an existing political or cultural class, or defining what US citizenship should mean (at least not inherently, I'm sure you separately have a perspective about that).
From that perspective I understand completely why Robert E. Lee is within the bounds of that group - his ancestors were part of the founding settler stock of the United States, and that's what it means to be within the bounds of the group. (I don't actually specifically know anything about Robert E. Lee's genealogy but I assume you know this to be the case.)
I think your project is understandable and worthwhile, and I don't know how I would solve your terminology problem (what I see as a terminology problem) any better.
Btw, I read about the NFL anthem thing while looking into the matter to reply to your post, and I'm as disappointed as you are in that use of it, and I also believe it signals the thing you think it signals. I don't think the people who agitated for that to happen are as representative of the views of the average black person in America as they believe they are, and I think the distinction is important, but there's no way around conceding that that contingent does exist and they are apparently making things like that happen.
I've always thought that BIPOC meant only Black and Indigenous people of color, excluding Asians and White Hispanics by omission.
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I hate everything about this. I truly do. I sincerely wish you felt all the benefits of whiteness as defined by activist were available to you. The rugged individualism, the family structure, the emphasis on the scientific method, the work ethic, the future orientation, the system of justice, the written tradition. I'm even increasingly coming around to Christianity not being half bad. It's at least better than the hellscape my edgy atheist leanings have ushered in.
I loathe beyond words I can speak here how seemingly all pro-social behavior has become coded "white". Where as antisocial behavior, either be implication, or occasionally explicitly, has been coded "black". And naturally, white is bad and black is good. And I sincerely wish we didn't live in a world where you felt your birthright to a pro-social society was denied you. I swear, in the 90's, it didn't used to be this way. At least, I'm pretty sure it wasn't.
I don't know if it makes you feel better or not, but my life is very much a product of, and continues to be oriented around, the same rugged individualism, family structure (to some extent), emphasis on the scientific method, work ethic, written tradition, etc that you are pointing toward here. Those are strong values that I hold and respect, and I am grateful to those before me who established them.
(I'm not a Christian in any real sense but I share both your edgy atheist history and your coming-around to view it as a net positive.)
This does not really factor into the equation for me in terms of my racial identity.
There have been people in my life who have told me that I "act white" in a pejorative way because of how I speak or write or what kinds of things I like or don't like, especially other young people growing up, but I never really gave that too much weight, and those people were few and far between. I always wrote it off as inconsequential.
It's unfortunate that it seems like there is in fact a growing current of thought that really does seem to resent and push back against those values as inherently suspect and unwanted. I think it's a real problem and I worry that a lot of young people are growing up right now being told that it's racist for people to want you to do well on standardized tests or to ask you to be polite. That was not happening while I was growing up at all, it would've been borderline if not completely offensive, but I think it's clear that the kind of kids who would've told me I "acted white" pejoratively have in fact not grown up to be inconsequential at all and apparently have captured the messaging of institutions like the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture.
But this type of mentality is not what I mean when I say that the world has made it clear to me that 'white' is not a word that's accurate for me to use about myself. My impression of what whiteness means as a racial identity, and what the boundaries of it are, mostly come from people who assign a positive or neutral value to whiteness.
The values you consider 'benefits of whiteness' here, I would maybe describe as 'benefits of western civilization'? I have no problem thinking of myself as a beneficiary of, product of, and cultural heir to, western civilization. (That terminology is complicated by the fact that I can point to non-western cultures who also can claim many or all of these virtues as a people, but I still think 'western' is at least a better proxy for what you're pointing at than 'white' to me.)
To reiterate, I don't think any of the virtues that you associate with 'white' here are in any way not available to me, and I hold and value the majority of them exactly as I suspect I would if I had two white parents or two black parents. It's the specific racial category 'white' that I don't seem to fall within the accepted bounding conditions of, not any of the values I (or the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture) might associate with whiteness.
I want to be absolutely clear. I do not consider those values "white", but I was pointing out the framing activist use. I hate everything about it. I hate how much it increasingly dominates the terms of the argument, and even institutional policy. And I hate how it confuses what exactly you mean when you say you identify as "black" despite having a "white" mother.
I don't even consider those prosocial values inherently western. At least most of them, save Christianity. Asian cultures and Indian culture has a lot of the same values, with many of the same, and a few unique, foibles that we in the west have towards them as well. Nobody is perfect, but at least these cultures appear to acknowledge there are prosocial and antisocial behaviors, and you should encourage prosocial behavior. It's hard to say the same about the current state of the art crop of racial activist.
I'm glad to you hear you are older and haven't been sucked into the self inflicted systemic dysfunction of the modern "black" identifying community.
Understood, I wasn't sure initially if you were saying that yes, these are white values, but they're obviously good instead of bad.
It's probably clear from my indecisive wording that I also don't really think of them as inherently western values any more than I think of them as white values, so I think we're actually totally on the same page here.
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I always thought of identity as mostly imposed anyway. You don’t really get to pick. What my race, class, religion (unless I specifically rejected it and make a declaration of it) and social class are not things that one chooses for oneself but things that through interactions with society you’re taught. Especially if you’re visually distinct, as minority groups tend to be, the wider society doesn’t exactly let you ignore it. A black person is black no matter what because we’ve somehow decided that black and Hispanic and Native and Indian ancestry makes you not white.
I’m not personally in favor of Bipoc simply because it sort of implies that every person of color has an identical experience— that the Chinese students in California have the same experience as the Latino in Arizona, the Native in Wyoming, or the black in Chicago. It’s a political term, more or less, much like LGBT is; meant to unite the people in those groups into a polity for the purpose of gaining power and rights in American electoral politics. But I think for me at least in nonpolitical conversation, it’s much more useful to consider the needs of any groups individually, and to consider the person you’re talking about as a specific type of bipoc within the whole.
Currently we've decided that Hispanic ancestry is orthogonal to white ... and for that matter I'm not sure we demand an ancestry component to that ethnicity. Many people with 75% native Mesoamerican ancestry are still universally accepted as part of an ethnicity named after the Hispania region of Europe, on the basis that the assimilation into the culture descended from that region is more important than the genes from that region. If someone with 100% native ancestry is equally assimilated and self-identifies as Hispanic, would anyone really argue it?
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This thread has been hugely educational about how non-idiots see race relations in America. Thank you to KMC and rallycar-jepsen for having an incredibly polite conversation about an incredibly fraught topic, and to everyone on the Motte for creating a community where they feel safe to have it.
@KMC did indeed come in hot, but to be fair, when confronted with someone who didn't just slot into his preconceived idea of black people, he cooled off and engaged civilly and a good conversation followed. That is the purpose of the Motte: mission accomplished. You seem like you are just trying to go back and reignite things.
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The word is so overused (mostly, it must be said, by the left) that I now treat it as a fnord. I realise I managed to read the OP without noticing it, and had to go back to check that it was there after reading your post.
FWIW, my own opinion is that melting down the statue is a good start, but I would prefer if it was publically blown up on the 4th July with red, white and blue pyrotechnics while a military band played Battle Hymn of the Republic. But I'm not American, so it doesn't matter.
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He admittedly could have done better, but you're probably being just as if not more inflammatory with your description. KMC managed to find his footing and have a civil and productive conversation, you seem to be determine to derail it again.
I'm talking about "a statute glorifying a war over the right to own people "
That's what most of the Confederacy was fighting over. Most of the Union was only fighting over preventing secession. Evidence includes the presence of slave states in the Union, the Emancipation Proclamation explicitly excluding those states, and that quote where Lincoln literally said "If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it".
It's awesome that the Civil War ended up abolishing chattel slavery in the US anyway, but that seems to have been a final "screw you" aimed at the Confederate slave states and John Wilkes Booth fans, combined with a "we really need to make sure this doesn't get out of hand again" aimed at the Union slave states, not a foreordained victory of steady principles.
That said, there were many awesome people in the Union who were in the fight specifically because of their opposition to slavery ... but admitting that, I have to admit that there were probably people in the Confederacy, and far more people in the South afterward, for whom "Southern pride" was about something other than "the right to own people". Even clearly-not-pro-Southern "The Onion", when trying to speculate about modern root motives of "The South Shall Rise Again" pride, imagined an end state that would "build us a bunch of big, fancy buildins and pave us up a whole mess of roads", not "resume slavery". We had the "General Lee" car in a movie as late as 2005. Was everyone upset because this was an obvious dog whistle from the populous pro-slavery faction of the Hollywood community? Of course not! They were just upset because the movie sucked.
Today we're well down a vicious signaling spiral, and maybe it's too late to stop or unwind that. If your favorite color is blue, and a crazy person says "but only racists like blue!", you're going to laugh and ignore them. But if that goes viral and the most sensitive half of the population decide they don't want to risk any association with racists so they disavow blue ... well, now blue-lovers really do have twice the rate of racism as the rest of the world, don't they? Maybe the 25th through 50th percentile are kind of creeped out by a real correlation, and learn to love green ... and now racism among the holdouts is 4x overrepresented and still rising! Eventually the last remaining people who admit they like blue are either unrepentant racists, stubborn fools, or confused autists. Maybe the remainder are all pathetic by this point, but the last two at least deserve more pity than disdain.
Your comment made me face the truth that while I don't have objections on principle to people calling for public monuments of general Lee to be torn down and removed, the mere thought of someone vandalizing or destroying a General Lee for political reasons pierces right into my classic-American-car-respecting soul.
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Cool, that's not necessarily what the statue glorifies though.
That's not actually what he said. He said it was glorifying the war fought in an effort to go on owning people, which it is surely is.
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