Helloooo FRians! This Tuesday’s post comes to us from Stephen. Thank you, as always.
Every so often in an alternate dimension called the internet, typically after some tragedy or another, people will comment that we need to have a conversation about guns, or race, or some other hot button political issue popular in the day, frequently in the guise of a “national” conversation. They never actually have such conversation; they never attempt to engage in such conversation; they don’t really want to have such conversation; and they would do nothing but insult and call names anyone who did attempt to actually have such a conversation with them.
So, let us have such a conversation.
What leftist really mean when they say we need to have a national conversation is that they want to express their desired outcome, blame everyone but themselves for the current situation, and shriek at the top of their lungs when people point out the glaringly obvious flaws in their ill-conceived and unreasoned proposed solution, which is typically just a simplistic statement of their desired conclusion with no real means of accomplishing their goals.
Typical leftist comments concerning having a “conversation about race” begins with phrases like “dear white people”, “white women”, “white men”, “white allies”, and contrary to what one would naturally expect, more than 80% of the time, the person saying this is themselves white while pretending to speak for those they view oppressed or marginalized.
The charged example that the speaker would refer to “white” people, “black” people, or “brown” people is often a glaring red flag that the speaker actually knows little to nothing about race, certainly not enough to actually engage in any productive conversation concerning the topic.
For all of their many other faults, it must be said that far more actual racists, generally speaking, know more about race than the leftist virtue signalers claiming we need a conversation about race. (The racists should not gloat to much at that statement, knowing more than the ignorant is the proverbial tallest midget contest, it doesn’t say very much.)
Lets start with the actual definition of race, to allay people of some misconceptions and ignorant misuse of the words. A race, in scientific terms, is a scientific classification of divisions within the same species, in particular the species homo sapiens as the same classification in other species is termed a sub-species. Race is only a term applied to human sub-species.
This term is often, and often intentionally, in non-scientific discussions conflated with the term ethnicity. Ethnicity is more properly a sub-sub-species, or a further breakdown of the classification system within a sub-species. Again, it is a term exclusively applied to humans as other flora, fauna, and microbes if they are subdivided that far, my be referred to as varieties, breeds, or strains.
For example, everyone knows that dogs descend from wolves, what most people don’t know is that all dogs descend not from Timber, or Gray wolves, but from Mediterranean wolves, a particular sub-species of wolves, or race of wolves if you will. Likewise, the many breeds of dogs correspond to the various ethnicities in human populations, sub-sub-species.
Just as there are boxers, shih tzus, and collies, as breeds of those tamed Mediterranean wolves, there are Indian, Arab, and Celtic “breeds” or ethnicities of the Caucasian sub-species, or race, just as there are Ethiopian, Zulu, and Ashanti ethnicities of the Negroid race.
However, people on the internet referring to “white people” are not referring to all Caucasians. For example, Saira Rao, one internet troll who repeatedly posts Tweets beginning with such aforementioned phrases addressing “dear white people”, is an American of Indian descent, therefore Caucasian.
By “white people” they are only referring to a select few of the Caucasian ethnicities and not Caucasians in general, specifically those of Scandinavian, Germanic, and some Celtic ancestry. They are not referring to Arabs, Indians, Berbers, Libyans, or even Iberian Celts, all of whom are Caucasian.
Of course, there are always idiotic examples where history reveals just enough stupidity to fuel the animosity of people like Saira Rao. The Supreme Court erroneously decided that the language “free white persons” in a US statute did not refer to all Caucasians in the common understanding, and thus a man of India was not “white” for purposes of immigration law. United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind, 261 U.S. 204 (1923).
Much of what we refer to as Latin America is not what one would call racially pure, in that there is a large admixture of Iberian European heritage mixed with native Americans as well as a fairly large amount of Negroid heritage from being the predominant destination of the slave trade. Although the admixture varies substantially from country to country and even within those nations, they are not as homogenous as people like to pretend.
So why do leftist keep insisting on calling such ethnicities “brown people” to distinguish them from the lighter toned Caucasian ethnicities? Aside from the trite excuse to just divide people of course.
One needs to look back in American history to see how racial and ethnic differences have been used politically to really understand the present day situation, and it is far from what most people think or understand.
Early American settlement came largely from the United Kingdom, Scandinavian countries, and Germany, with a bit of French and the Netherlands thrown in for good measure. In fact, in the early years of our nation’s history more Americans were of German ancestry than English due in large part to the fact that Germany itself was not really pulled together into a single nation and had no colonies of its own.
The new nation was formed on the philosophy and ideal of the Enlightenment era, in part modeled after the Dutch government as well as more ancient Greek and Roman traditions, but primarily founded upon English Common Law, which itself had grown out of German Common Law including the Magna Carta and the Doomsday Book. This enlightenment philosophy upon which our nation was founded developed directly from the Protestant Reformation and it is no accident that except for a few Frenchmen, almost all of the citizens came from Protestant nations.
However, as the new nation grew it found itself in need of laborers and had plenty of jobs for any immigrants willing to work, but this influx of new people was not without its own share of problems, controversies and worries.
While the Renaissance was largely an Italian, French, and Spanish (i.e. Catholic) revival of culture, science, and philosophy, the Enlightenment was largely an assertion of Protestant intellectual independence, with important philosophical breaks and separations rooted in religion as much as science.
Most of the wars in Europe were between the Catholics and the Protestants, and America was wary of inviting European divisions and hostilities onto our tranquil shores, but they still needed the workers. The influx of immigrants had shifted towards southern and eastern Europe, and after 1842 a lot, I mean a lot, of Irish. On the west coast, there was also an influx of Chinese laborers.
(Prior to 1842 most immigrants from Ireland had been the Scots-Irish who were mostly Protestants from the county of Ulster whose ancestors had came from Scotland and northern England, so while they kept to themselves settling in Appalachia, there was no religious or philosophical tensions.)
Many people opposed these waves of immigration largely because of the Catholic and Orthodox religious philosophies of the new immigrants were thought to not be compatible with the foundational principles of our nation.
It was not as unreasonable as it might now seem, those new immigrants did bring with them different ideas and beliefs about how a nation should be ran, and what powers and responsibilities a government should have. Progressive politicians actively courted the power which these new voters could provide. The politicized union movements largely began with the organization of these newer immigrant populations. Much of the political divisions we see today got their start in the progressive movement’s courting of political support along these philosophical and ethnic lines.
The human mind finds it easier to catagorize people by outward appearance rather than philosophy, so there developed a distrust, even resentment, for the “swarthy” or darker skinned southern Europeans and Slavic peoples who were the recent immigrants. Skin color was a very visible distinction which was highly correlated with political and religious beliefs, and became a proxy for those political differences, and it was not an inaccurate proxy.
Time passes, and successive generations are more successful, start businesses, work their way up the social ladder, and their children and grand children’s politics become less progressive, more American. The Irish lass marries an Italian man, the Bulgarian girl marries a Norwegian man, and suddenly their children don’t look quite so different from their fellow Americans as they did a couple generations before. The old world accents are lost, and with the accents, the clannish old world political divides.
What’s a progressive to do if they can’t keep promising to improve the lives of people who have already moved up into the middle class? The Democrats, who for centuries had tried to keep black people out of politics because they kept supporting Republicans, looked around and found a new group of poor people they could promise to lift out of their oppression, conveniently forgetting to mention that they were the ones who had passed and enforced those segregation laws for decades.
A new racial division sprang up as a proxy for political division, it was no longer the Italians, Irish, and Spanish, they would create dividing lines along larger differences of skin color and language, black, white, and pseudo-Spanish (primarily Mexican) by pretending they were not really European in origin.
And this brings us to the real point. Race, in America, is never really an issue about race, it is a visual division used as a proxy for political division, a strategy of dividing people along an us versus them mentality stoked and played by a progressive media which uses such divisions as pawns on a chessboard for no greater purpose than supporting the political class pushing ideologies contrary to the limited government ideals of the Enlightenment philosophy of the Founding Fathers.
(Notice, we still haven’t actually talked about race . . . that’s a whole other topic.)
