It is THE national pattern. Race was invented by the society that colonized this land and setup this nation. The concept of the white race was invented right here in settler colonies before the USA even existed. It’s not just a national pattern, it’s literally the fabric of the nation.
Race was invented by the society that colonized this land and setup this nation. The concept of the white race was invented right here in settler colonies before the USA even existed. It’s not just a national pattern, it’s literally the fabric of the nation.
What?
You think racism didn’t exist until Europeans settled America?
Fucking India had a legal caste system based on amount of skin pigment centuries before that, and “you look different so you’re an enemy” has been a part of human history long before we even knew how to write shit down.
Quick edit:
Nevermind just saw the lemmygrad.ml, that explains your comment.
It sucks even tho I block all communities on there I still see comments from that shitshow
The concept of whiteness as being a distinct and unifying factor among people from a variety of countries led to the field of scientific racism, which went on for around 2 centuries. This is where terms like “Caucasian” came from. Scientific racism was used as a reason by the Nazis to murder millions of Jews. Now in the 21st century, we know it is pseudoscience even though its terminology lingers.
This doesn’t mean that people were blind to skin color before 17th century colonialism, as you pointed out with the Indian caste system that dates back as far as 3300BC. You can see in ancient Egyptian art a wide array of colored skin as well. From Egyptian literature, there aren’t signs they really obsessed over it the way society does now.
I think we can all agree that things didn’t go too well for non-white people after the invention of whiteness. The concept was founded in oppression and helps perpetuate oppression.
If there was a way without downloading an app I’d be down.
I don’t see the point in using apps for webpages, but lemmygrad might eventually make me change my mind. I’d probably just join an instance smart enough not to federate with them first tho
They may be a tankie but they’re not wrong that modern concept of race was invented as a part of the European slave trade and colonialism. I don’t think the United States has ever adequately reckoned with that fact as evidenced by this Karen Komittee crying about a fucking poster.
Here’s the subtitle: “Before the 17th century, people did not think of themselves as belonging to something called the white race. But once the idea was invented, it quickly began to reshape the modern world”
That’s right. There was no such thing as the white race until the 1600s. And here’s the relevant excerpt:
[…] the plantation owners initially sought to protect themselves by giving their “Christian” servants legal privileges not available to their enslaved “Negroes”. The idea was to buy off the allegiance of indentured Europeans with a set of entitlements that, however meagre, set them above enslaved Africans. Toward the end of the 17th century, this scheme witnessed a significant shift: many of the laws that regulated slave and servant behaviour – the 1681 Servant Act in Jamaica, for example, which was later copied for use in South Carolina – began to describe the privileged class as “whites” and not as “Christians”.
Whiteness, white supremacy, was invented in the new settler state that became the USA. It was an extension of European supremacy and part of the liberalization process that was occurring throughout Europe as the “age of discovery” began lifting the merchant class into positions of power. This new financial class sought new social forms that would allow them to supplant kings while still maintaining the power structures they needed to continue extending their dominance across the world. Since kings were kings by divine right, they were literally working against a social fiction that required them to attack religion, which was impossible, so they needed new systems that directed power away from religious explanations. They needed to maintain Christianity as a power structure but divorce it from kings. Thus, from the 17th century onward, an entirely new system of racialization was devised and expanded including things like race science, anthropology, cherrypicking from religious and philosophical traditions, eventually incorporating Drawinian theory, and focused entirely on making the imperial project manageable.
In the US you see this pretty damningly with regards to the native population. They were a different race, they were not Christians, they needed to be mass murdered, their lands needed to be blighted and destroyed, their ways of life (plants, animals, and water) needed to be made extinct and poisoned beyond repair. To do this, the US needed to field a military into the frontier. That’s the source of every town named “Fort Something”. Those forts were created to exterminate and oppress native Americans. Those towns never stopped being that. It’s just that they were victorious in their extermination campaigns. The laws are still on the books. The police force is still descended from the institutions of genocide. The roads, ports, prisons, residential neighborhoods, waterways, industrial zones, and agricultural zones around those towns are the living embodiment of the displacement efforts that trace themselves back to the frontier forts and their genocidal program, founded on racism.
And even The Guardian, shite rag that it is, is able to write about it.
You’re right that they’re not exactly the same, but they are intrinsically linked. Racism is an advanced form where, instead of just and us-vs-them mentality is used to protect against invaders, it is weaponized as tool to use lower echelons on the class hierarchy against themselves to empower the upper class and keep the masses from realizing how shit they have it.
Tribalism is the root instinct that drives it, its just been modified for use in class warfare.
They are linked, but they’re talking about how modern race ideas are evidenced in racism. It used to be that Irish people weren’t considered white even though they largely have pale skin. Today that’s a very weird idea because of course Irish people are white. But that wasn’t the case when the US was getting a mass of immigrants. Yes, people were bigots hundreds of years ago. Yes, racism and tribalism are linked, but the sheer concept of being white, black, red, yellow, etc didn’t exist until relatively recently.
This is a lie white people use to justify their systems and make themselves feel better.
Racism, as we understand it, is a historical system that was, in fact, invented soley by white male Europeans and their descendants for the purposes of managing their empire.
Tribalism isn’t racism. Racism uses tribalist tendencies to achieve its aims. Racism is a very specific historical phenomenon.
Why is looking at the root cause of something a “justification” in your mind? If all we do is react to what’s happening now instead of finding out how to prevent it from happening in the future, we’re just fighting a losing war of attrition for the sake of ideology. In order to solve this problem we need to look at more than just the surface, and do more than just point fingers at everyone else.
Why is looking at the root cause of something a “justification” in your mind?
Have you ever heard of a leading question? This is an example of one, because you assume tribalism to be the root cause of racism. What evidence do you have to support this argument? Why does tribalism exist for tens or hundreds of millennia but racism only get constructed as capitalism is in the process of emerging from feudalism? Doesn’t sound at all like tribalism is the root cause of racism.
If all we do is react to what’s happening now instead of finding out how to prevent it from happening in the future, we’re just fighting a losing war of attrition for the sake of ideology
Yeah, that’s what I’m saying. Don’t react to people “being racist” as though it’s just individual behaviors. See it as a historical process. When you see it as a historical process, you see that racism is THE national pattern of the USA, because the USA emerged in the same context that racism was being constructed in. It’s accurate to say that the USA and racism are deeply related because racism was being invented as part of the colonial project and the USA emerged from the colonial project and because racism was being invented as part of the capitalist project and the USA emerged and extended and ultimately maximized the capitalist project.
In order to solve this problem we need to look at more than just the surface, and do more than just point fingers at everyone else.
Do you think that seeing racism as a system that was constructed by Europeans as they entered the 1400s and through to the present day is looking at just the surface or pointing fingers at everyone else? Really? That’s your assessment of that position? Well, blow me down, I don’t really know what to say to that.
It seems to me that saying “racism is just tribalism and everyone engaged in tribalism” is quite literally a surface level analysis that quite literally points the fingers at everyone else. Your assessment is pretty on the nose for exactly the position you hold. But I’ve come to expect projection from white liberals at this point. You seem incapable of seeing the irony of accusing me of the very thing you are doing.
Racism is not the same as personal bigotry. Whether Columbus was “racist” or not is irrelevant. European society was still developing racism as a system back in the 1400s. The concept of blood quantums, however, was developed around the same time Columbus was alive. So yes, there was systemic racism in Europe during Columbus’s time, but there wasn’t a “white race” concept at the time. It was mostly smaller races of different countries and what bound them all together was Christianity. White was explicitly codified as a concept in law in the Americas.
You have to explain that your basing the definition of racism from a sociological textbooks. The Oxford definition does not require the prejudice race to be in control of the society of the persecuted race.
It is THE national pattern. Race was invented by the society that colonized this land and setup this nation. The concept of the white race was invented right here in settler colonies before the USA even existed. It’s not just a national pattern, it’s literally the fabric of the nation.
What?
You think racism didn’t exist until Europeans settled America?
Fucking India had a legal caste system based on amount of skin pigment centuries before that, and “you look different so you’re an enemy” has been a part of human history long before we even knew how to write shit down.
Quick edit:
Nevermind just saw the lemmygrad.ml, that explains your comment.
It sucks even tho I block all communities on there I still see comments from that shitshow
Lemmygrad is wrong about a lot of things, but they’re not wrong about this. It’s important to learn from the past so it does not keep repeating.
The concept of the “white race” was developed in the 17th century with the Atlantic slave trade. It is indeed a product of British colonization. The concept literally didn’t exist before this. Before the 17th century, people who we would now think of as white identified mainly by nationality and religion.
The concept of whiteness as being a distinct and unifying factor among people from a variety of countries led to the field of scientific racism, which went on for around 2 centuries. This is where terms like “Caucasian” came from. Scientific racism was used as a reason by the Nazis to murder millions of Jews. Now in the 21st century, we know it is pseudoscience even though its terminology lingers.
This doesn’t mean that people were blind to skin color before 17th century colonialism, as you pointed out with the Indian caste system that dates back as far as 3300BC. You can see in ancient Egyptian art a wide array of colored skin as well. From Egyptian literature, there aren’t signs they really obsessed over it the way society does now.
I think we can all agree that things didn’t go too well for non-white people after the invention of whiteness. The concept was founded in oppression and helps perpetuate oppression.
Why not block the instance?
deleted by creator
Just gonna drop in here to let any kbin users that might be reading know: this doesn’t apply to you.
Go to your.instance/d/instance.to.block and you can block the entire instance from the sidebar
Cough…
deleted by creator
If there was a way without downloading an app I’d be down.
I don’t see the point in using apps for webpages, but lemmygrad might eventually make me change my mind. I’d probably just join an instance smart enough not to federate with them first tho
Oh I didn’t know you couldn’t do it on the web page, I’ve only used an app (connect) since I joined after the fall of rif.
Still a little fuzzy on how the fediverse works.
Where are you getting this “quality” education?
They may be a tankie but they’re not wrong that modern concept of race was invented as a part of the European slave trade and colonialism. I don’t think the United States has ever adequately reckoned with that fact as evidenced by this Karen Komittee crying about a fucking poster.
I’ll make this one easy for you. The Guardian is a garbage white supremacist liberal rag that does the bidding of North Atlantic imperialists. But here’s a shit article they wrote that explains this particular thing: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2021/apr/20/the-invention-of-whiteness-long-history-dangerous-idea
Here’s the subtitle: “Before the 17th century, people did not think of themselves as belonging to something called the white race. But once the idea was invented, it quickly began to reshape the modern world”
That’s right. There was no such thing as the white race until the 1600s. And here’s the relevant excerpt:
Whiteness, white supremacy, was invented in the new settler state that became the USA. It was an extension of European supremacy and part of the liberalization process that was occurring throughout Europe as the “age of discovery” began lifting the merchant class into positions of power. This new financial class sought new social forms that would allow them to supplant kings while still maintaining the power structures they needed to continue extending their dominance across the world. Since kings were kings by divine right, they were literally working against a social fiction that required them to attack religion, which was impossible, so they needed new systems that directed power away from religious explanations. They needed to maintain Christianity as a power structure but divorce it from kings. Thus, from the 17th century onward, an entirely new system of racialization was devised and expanded including things like race science, anthropology, cherrypicking from religious and philosophical traditions, eventually incorporating Drawinian theory, and focused entirely on making the imperial project manageable.
In the US you see this pretty damningly with regards to the native population. They were a different race, they were not Christians, they needed to be mass murdered, their lands needed to be blighted and destroyed, their ways of life (plants, animals, and water) needed to be made extinct and poisoned beyond repair. To do this, the US needed to field a military into the frontier. That’s the source of every town named “Fort Something”. Those forts were created to exterminate and oppress native Americans. Those towns never stopped being that. It’s just that they were victorious in their extermination campaigns. The laws are still on the books. The police force is still descended from the institutions of genocide. The roads, ports, prisons, residential neighborhoods, waterways, industrial zones, and agricultural zones around those towns are the living embodiment of the displacement efforts that trace themselves back to the frontier forts and their genocidal program, founded on racism.
And even The Guardian, shite rag that it is, is able to write about it.
Racism also wasn’t invented solely by “white” people. That kind of myopic thinking is a big factor in why we can’t get over that shit.
Tribalism has been a way of life since life began on this rock.
Racism and tribalism are not the same thing at all.
You’re right that they’re not exactly the same, but they are intrinsically linked. Racism is an advanced form where, instead of just and us-vs-them mentality is used to protect against invaders, it is weaponized as tool to use lower echelons on the class hierarchy against themselves to empower the upper class and keep the masses from realizing how shit they have it.
Tribalism is the root instinct that drives it, its just been modified for use in class warfare.
They are linked, but they’re talking about how modern race ideas are evidenced in racism. It used to be that Irish people weren’t considered white even though they largely have pale skin. Today that’s a very weird idea because of course Irish people are white. But that wasn’t the case when the US was getting a mass of immigrants. Yes, people were bigots hundreds of years ago. Yes, racism and tribalism are linked, but the sheer concept of being white, black, red, yellow, etc didn’t exist until relatively recently.
This is a lie white people use to justify their systems and make themselves feel better.
Racism, as we understand it, is a historical system that was, in fact, invented soley by white male Europeans and their descendants for the purposes of managing their empire.
Tribalism isn’t racism. Racism uses tribalist tendencies to achieve its aims. Racism is a very specific historical phenomenon.
“Oh no, that’s just sparkling tribalism. REAL racism comes from the Champagne region…”
Why is looking at the root cause of something a “justification” in your mind? If all we do is react to what’s happening now instead of finding out how to prevent it from happening in the future, we’re just fighting a losing war of attrition for the sake of ideology. In order to solve this problem we need to look at more than just the surface, and do more than just point fingers at everyone else.
Have you ever heard of a leading question? This is an example of one, because you assume tribalism to be the root cause of racism. What evidence do you have to support this argument? Why does tribalism exist for tens or hundreds of millennia but racism only get constructed as capitalism is in the process of emerging from feudalism? Doesn’t sound at all like tribalism is the root cause of racism.
Yeah, that’s what I’m saying. Don’t react to people “being racist” as though it’s just individual behaviors. See it as a historical process. When you see it as a historical process, you see that racism is THE national pattern of the USA, because the USA emerged in the same context that racism was being constructed in. It’s accurate to say that the USA and racism are deeply related because racism was being invented as part of the colonial project and the USA emerged from the colonial project and because racism was being invented as part of the capitalist project and the USA emerged and extended and ultimately maximized the capitalist project.
Do you think that seeing racism as a system that was constructed by Europeans as they entered the 1400s and through to the present day is looking at just the surface or pointing fingers at everyone else? Really? That’s your assessment of that position? Well, blow me down, I don’t really know what to say to that.
It seems to me that saying “racism is just tribalism and everyone engaged in tribalism” is quite literally a surface level analysis that quite literally points the fingers at everyone else. Your assessment is pretty on the nose for exactly the position you hold. But I’ve come to expect projection from white liberals at this point. You seem incapable of seeing the irony of accusing me of the very thing you are doing.
LOL what do you think these settlers came from? It sounds like you’re telling me Columbus wasn’t a racist until he landed here.
Racism is not the same as personal bigotry. Whether Columbus was “racist” or not is irrelevant. European society was still developing racism as a system back in the 1400s. The concept of blood quantums, however, was developed around the same time Columbus was alive. So yes, there was systemic racism in Europe during Columbus’s time, but there wasn’t a “white race” concept at the time. It was mostly smaller races of different countries and what bound them all together was Christianity. White was explicitly codified as a concept in law in the Americas.
You have to explain that your basing the definition of racism from a sociological textbooks. The Oxford definition does not require the prejudice race to be in control of the society of the persecuted race.