[ Contents | Search | Post | Reply | Next | Previous | Up ]
From: Prof. Pearson
Date: 1/23/01
Time: 6:49:04 PM
Remote Name: 159.91.92.113
As we discussed in class, maintaining the social construct of "whiteness" requires the policing of people inside and outside of the circle. So yes, being a white racist means hating "whites" who aren't white enough.
As for Jen's questions, the answers have varied at different places and times. For example, Dr. Ann Marie Nicolosi has done research on the concept of "derivative citizenship." During the years that the Chinese exclusion act was in effect, a white woman who married a Chinese man legally lost both her whiteness and Americanness.
Here are some provocative links from the emerging field of whiteness studies:
Review: How the Irish Became White "The Irish, the Blacks and the Struggle with Racism," by Elijah Wald, Globe Correspondent
© 1995 The Boston Globe
As some sage once said, "The problem ain't all the things a man don't know; it's all the things he does know that ain't so." That thought is singularly appropriate in discussing America's treatment of racial differences. We have invented categories and behave as if they were facts. We call someone with one African and three Italian grandparents an African American, and even geneticists often act as if this silliness had scientific reality, doing studies to find out whether "black" children are genetically less intelligent than "white" children, though this makes no more sense than asking if blonds are genetically dumber than brunettes. http://www.afn.org/~dks/race/wald-ignatiev.html
From the Race Traitor Website: What We Believe
The white race is a historically constructed social formation. It consists of all those who partake of the privileges of the white skin in this society. Its most wretched members share a status higher, in certain respects, than that of the most exalted persons excluded from it, in return for which they give their support to a system that degrades them.
The key to solving the social problems of our age is to abolish the white race, which means no more and no less than abolishing the privileges of the white skin. Until that task is accomplished, even partial reform will prove elusive, because white influence permeates every issue, domestic and foreign, in U.S. society.
The existence of the white race depends on the willingness of those assigned to it to place their racial interests above class, gender, or any other interests they hold. The defection of enough of its members to make it unreliable as a predictor of behavior will lead to its collapse.
Race Traitor aims to serve as an intellectual center for those seeking to abolish the white race. It will encourage dissent from the conformity that maintains it and popularize examples of defection from its ranks, analyze the forces that hold it together and those that promise to tear it apart. Part of its task will be to promote debate among abolitionists. When possible, it will support practical measures, guided by the principle, Treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity.
The editors publish things in Race Traitor because they think that publishing them will help build a community of readers. Editorial opinions are expressed in editorials and unsigned replies to letters. http://www.postfun.com/racetraitor/
And finally, here's a classic New Yorker article on the changing definitions of race:
"One Drop of Blood," by Lawrence Wright
Copyright 1994 The New Yorker
Washington in the millennial years is a city of warring racial and ethnic groups fighting for recognition, protection, and entitlements. This war has been fought throughout the second half of the twentieth century largely by black Americans. How much this contest has widened, how bitter it has turned, how complex and baffling it is, and how far-reaching its consequences are became evident in a series of congressional hearings that began last year in the obscure House Sub-committee on Census, Statistics, and Postal Personnel, which is chaired by Representative Thomas C. Sawyer, Democrat of Ohio, and concluded in November, 1993. http://www.afn.org/~dks/race/wright.html