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The Philosophy and History of Cracker-ness

04:26 / 27.02.02

No, seriously....

Part One:

It occurs to me that the idea of the social category "white" fairly recent, and to this day has a lot of fuzzy space, yet is constantly deployed.
Was wondering if y'all would help me play with the textual/historical dimensions of this question....
Where does the idea of unified "whiteness" first pop up? When does it really become a subject of philosophical inquiry? When does it become a part of social and political dialogue, and where? What is the interplay between othering constructs of whiteness [haule, kuei-lo, gaijin] and the self-referential category?

Off the top of my head, I can only come up with Las Casas, some dubious interpretations of the Bible [but when?], and the process of "Americanization" of generations of immigrants.

Part Two:

What constitutes "White," and what degree of contestation is there over the concept [particularly in the US]? What categories and traits - cultural, geographic, economic, etc. - are considered relatively central and marginal to the [rough] construct?

14:51 / 27.02.02

Are Jews white?

14:55 / 27.02.02

Certainly not if they are Ethiopean Jews. Apologies, cannot remember the tribal name.

gozer the destructor

15:07 / 27.02.02

this is something that i have recently been thinking about quite a lot as i have moved from the north of england, Manchester, to Lambeth, South London. In the North, where due to the majority of people being what I presume you mean by white, you really don't have to consider the cultural identity of white, at all, ever. In Lambeth I, as a white, am totally in the minority. I wonder if it is this growing pressure of minority in cities in the west, and the popularity of Black culture through Hip Hop/Black literature/the obsession PC in the eighties-early ninties and the encouragement of being proud of your own culture that the great Black speakers of the sixties ie Malcolm X, King made popular,that has led to what some may call the crisis of culture for the Whites. However the fact that MTV and other popular youth culture madia powers have glorified what was originally Black music as opposed to the deprresing white middle class music of recent years may be just as much of an influence.

I have offended some people already today on this board site and if you have had the patients to read this to the end, please don't let it offend you, it's public debate, ideas to help form opinions, not give them.

15:17 / 27.02.02

the not-so nice term for ethiopian jews is "Falasha."

and typically Jews aren't considered "white" by modern standards. Or ancient standards.
indeed, one of the "crisis" issues introduced in Weimar Anti-Semitism, and echoed by Hitler, is that the danger of Jews was their intermarriage into the "Aryan/white/Germanic" race, allowing them to "pass."

An odd one I picked up on recently: working as a waiter at an Organization of Black Students event last year, I ran across a lot of individuals who characterized Arabs and other Muslim Semites as "white." Working the same type of event this year, post-9/11, Arabs and Muslim Semites are now "brown."

So, is part of the characterization of "white-ness" the occupation of a position of hegemony?

15:41 / 27.02.02

quote:Originally posted by [monkeys violating the temple]:

So, is part of the characterization of "white-ness" the occupation of a position of hegemony?

This is a fucking humb-dinger of a quetstion that I have neither the time or the skill to answer.

But an answer would rock.

15:41 / 27.02.02

i don't really know how to respond to your post, gozer, as the point of this thread is to discuss the dimensions of a rough concept.
I personally think that "white" as a racial/ethnic/cultural category is an entirely empty set: there is no such thing as "white" culture, etc., as a singular object of study....
In fact, I'd say the category of "white" has been re-invented and deployed in history simply as a contra-distinction to the [also artificial] "racial" categories of subject peoples with darker skin and different physiognomies, thus creating an effective barrier to their inclusion in social discourse...the "in-group," "out-group" distinction.

Thus my open question about what traits constitute "whiteness," hence "in-ness" and centrality in the US context, and how have these criterion changes over time.

15:54 / 27.02.02

quote:Originally posted by [monkeys violating the temple]:
and typically Jews aren't considered "white" by modern standards.

Is this true? Husband is Jewish, and well on the census there's no box for Jew & he pretty much checks white without thinking too much about it.

quote:So, is part of the characterization of "white-ness" the occupation of a position of hegemony?

I think so... e.g., I don't think that Irish or Italian is commonly thought of as "sub-white" as they once were in the U.S.

There's an interesting book out that talks about how "white" American culture is really anglo culture. Title escapes me, Anglo Dominance in America-something... I'll see if I can google it up.

On the flip side, as your brown Semites evidence, "colored-ness" can also be an occupation of a position of...something.

Whatever it is "whiteness" does not exist and exists, if you know what I mean.

15:59 / 27.02.02

precisely, persephone. you get 'nother pomengranite.

and good point about the "anglo" thing. i'd goas far as to say that the US is "protestant anglo-germanic" in classifying centrality-versus-marginality within the loose category of "whiteness"

i wonder how racist organizations divvy this sort of thing up? i know the Ku Klux Klan used to be savagely anti-Catholic...I wonder if they still are....

16:28 / 27.02.02

White/black/jew/catholic etc etc etc blah blah blah. Folks just aren't happy unless they can easily label things. Especially people.

I would guess the idea of 'whiteness' became common with the advances in forms of travel and it's widespead availability. So initally, in a small way, with the domestication of the horse, more so with shipping, but massively more so with the industrial revolution and the technology that produced.

19:30 / 27.02.02

quote:Originally posted by [stupid, stupid monkeys]:
i wonder how racist organizations divvy this sort of thing up? i know the Ku Klux Klan used to be savagely anti-Catholic...I wonder if they still are....

Actually, it was a link I followed off the old Stormfront BBS that made me think of the question (that, and a grad class in ethnic lit). According to at least one neo-Nazi group, there is a group of "white Jews" - they're Nordic in appearance and come from somewhere like Estonia or Lithuania. But (according to these guys) most Jews aren't white, they're brown.
I love that level of obsession.

In Miami, the Cubans are generally thought of as white, but not Anglo. I got a different vibe about Mexicans when visiting similar areas along the borders with Texas & Arizona. (Odd, since Cubans are typically more racially mixed than Mexicans.)

And in South Florida, all but the most hard-core nutcases realize on some level there's also a similarly monolithic construction of "blackness" in America - and that Haitians, Trinidadians, and even Nigerians don't fit that mold.

And for the record, most Klan groups are fine with Catholics nowadays. Even if those types do tend to be... a little dark.

I kind of grew up outside the idea of monolithic whiteness, myself, since my parents were South African. In America in the 70s, you never heard of anything in Africa except Tarzan movies and Muhammad Ali's Rumble in the Jungle. The idea that there was a whole country of white folks who'd been there as long as there'd been white folks in America was, like, totally mindblowing to most people.
Then, of course, the 80s hit, and everyone learned about apartheid.

Less anecdotally and more to your original question, I'm pretty sure the idea of monolithic whiteness came from either the British Empire or Manifest Destiny - forging a group identity by conquering the wild, barbaric "other".

Morlock - groupie for hire

16:06 / 28.02.02

First thoughts are that this probably dates right back to colonial/slavery days. 'Blackness' covering all those cultures us whities decided were sufficiently primitive (whatever that means) for us to invade/enslave the population and get them to work for us.

Then when slavery is abolished and dominant colonialism becomes a bit uncool, suddenly we're surrounded by people with the same rights as us who might be a bit pissed about it all. So we huddle together in a group we call 'whiteness' for safety, as a counterpoint to 'blackness'.

Tragic, really.

17:10 / 28.02.02

...it seems that the term "white" is sort of a leftover grouping from the basis that all of the other peoples have been packaged and categorized over history.

quote:An odd one I picked up on recently: working as a waiter at an Organization of Black Students event last year, I ran across a lot of individuals who characterized Arabs and other Muslim Semites as "white." Working the same type of event this year, post-9/11, Arabs and Muslim Semites are now "brown."

Wouldn't this be an example of that? Were "white", until otherwise noted?

I never thought too much about me being "white" cause it never brought with it an overall identity that I could relate to per se. Just sort of began to encapsulate me a little...but then again, I guess this is oftentimes how it occurs for everyone. Either you choose to be a part because it can empower you, or it is given to you to do otherwise. Well, there's obviously other instances of its use, but there's two...

23:31 / 04.03.02

My partner recently remarked off hand:

"There's nothing cuter than little black kids dancing and little asian kids doing martial arts."

To which I added: "And little white kids sniffing glue."

06:32 / 05.03.02

I can't recommend Richard Dyer's book White highly enough in this context. He says that part of the construction of whiteness is, of course, as not being a race at all: but there's also some interesting stuff about the white relationship to the body, which is ideally that it shouldn't be there because whites are all about rationality, the soul, mind over matter, etc (and more earthy/fleshy characteristics are projected onto the non-white races). I wrote an essay once using this text on how JonBenet Ramsey (dead six-year-old beauty queen) is the ideal white body: dead, innocent, photographed in a haze of light (white flesh is constructed as ethereal). There's also some *really* interesting stuff about the history of photographic technology as it has been racially determined by the assumption that the people who will be photographed are white (since white skin absorbs/reflects light differently from black skin, this means that the way colour film works is based around white skin...)

I also learned yesterday that the modern concept of 'race' (as permanent, fixed, hereditary and determined by the climate in which a population lives) was invented by Kant in 1775, although obviously in practice it had already solidified around slavery/colonialism.

Certainly the boundaries of whiteness shift around depending on particular circumstances. I have a Polish mother and have been interested to see "Eastern European" start showing up in census categories (it's one of the 'white other' categories) recently, since I suspect this kind of box-ticking is influenced by the recent conflict in the former Yugoslavia - an "othering" reaction to the presence of Eastern European refugees.

More later.