Whiteness History Month
January 21, 2016 8:17 AM Subscribe
Portland Community College to launch a "Whiteness History Month." (April to be specific) The American Conservative disapproves: "... plainly designed to convince white students to despise themselves and their culture." The Washington Post hits the ground running with a listicle: Whiteness History Month is a great idea. Here are 7 ways to observe it.
You know that Portland is in America, yes?
posted by maxsparber at 8:23 AM on January 21, 2016 [23 favorites]
posted by maxsparber at 8:23 AM on January 21, 2016 [23 favorites]
Seriously, do they even know about the history of oppression of working class white people through the centuries here in the UK?
By white people, presumably.
posted by klanawa at 8:24 AM on January 21, 2016 [16 favorites]
By white people, presumably.
posted by klanawa at 8:24 AM on January 21, 2016 [16 favorites]
Done right, this could be brilliant. A month detailing exactly what it means to be white in America.
posted by bgal81 at 8:26 AM on January 21, 2016 [2 favorites]
posted by bgal81 at 8:26 AM on January 21, 2016 [2 favorites]
I guess Portland would be sort of an authority on pervasive whiteness.
posted by Strange Interlude at 8:27 AM on January 21, 2016 [23 favorites]
posted by Strange Interlude at 8:27 AM on January 21, 2016 [23 favorites]
Whiteness is constructed differently in different societies. What whiteness means in the UK is different from what it means in the US.
posted by soren_lorensen at 8:27 AM on January 21, 2016 [14 favorites]
posted by soren_lorensen at 8:27 AM on January 21, 2016 [14 favorites]
Seriously, do they even know about the history of oppression of working class white people through the centuries here in the UK?
Race privilege isn't class privilege.
posted by bgal81 at 8:28 AM on January 21, 2016 [36 favorites]
Race privilege isn't class privilege.
posted by bgal81 at 8:28 AM on January 21, 2016 [36 favorites]
White people are such privileged assholes they even like to other each other over whiteness so they can feel righteous about being assholes to other less well off white people.
posted by saulgoodman at 8:30 AM on January 21, 2016 [9 favorites]
posted by saulgoodman at 8:30 AM on January 21, 2016 [9 favorites]
Indeed race and ethnicity based privilege can correlate with class based privilege but it generally overlaps and supplements rather than completely replace.
Personally I like having PCC surface some of the very real concerns with looking through everything with a lens of white privilege. For me it took a fairly long time to unpack my own racial privilege and to think that perhaps college aged students are going to spend some time unpacking their invisible backpack is a really good sign.
Especially if it leads to less incidents of the loud white guy dominating every group discussion in every lecture class which is unfortunately ever present even at the graduate level in most programs.
posted by vuron at 8:34 AM on January 21, 2016 [5 favorites]
Personally I like having PCC surface some of the very real concerns with looking through everything with a lens of white privilege. For me it took a fairly long time to unpack my own racial privilege and to think that perhaps college aged students are going to spend some time unpacking their invisible backpack is a really good sign.
Especially if it leads to less incidents of the loud white guy dominating every group discussion in every lecture class which is unfortunately ever present even at the graduate level in most programs.
posted by vuron at 8:34 AM on January 21, 2016 [5 favorites]
Whiteness History Month is a great idea. Here are 7 ways to observe it.
Let me add an 8th.
Let me add an 8th.
Why to the man of untutored ideality, who happens to be but loosely acquainted with the peculiar character of the day, does the bare mention of Whitsuntide marshal in the fancy such long, dreary, speechless processions of slow-pacing pilgrims, down-cast and hooded with new-fallen snow? Or to the unread, unsophisticated Protestant of the Middle American States, why does the passing mention of a White Friar or a White Nun, evoke such an eyeless statue in the soul?posted by octobersurprise at 8:36 AM on January 21, 2016 [1 favorite]
Well, the listicle is all about how "white" is a construct (Gone with the Wind, in the listicle, and How the Irish Became White are specifically about prejudice against the Irish in the context of WASP definitions of "white" and the rest of it is about arbitrary lines other than "African heritage" or "very dark skin" and how those lines shift with the definition of "white" as class privilege). So I'd say that she is aware of "the history of oppression of working class white people through the centuries here in the UK" but that her context is the "US history of violent racism and bizarre white privilege which had to work through things like 'poor white trash' and ghettos for the Irish, the Italian and the Jewish immigrants to our cities".
While a "Whiteness History Month" could be a vile supremacist thing, the study of how we constructed "white" in the US is pretty important to understanding why we're so very bad correcting for the systemic bias and lingering impact of slavery and Jim Crow America.
posted by crush-onastick at 8:36 AM on January 21, 2016 [17 favorites]
While a "Whiteness History Month" could be a vile supremacist thing, the study of how we constructed "white" in the US is pretty important to understanding why we're so very bad correcting for the systemic bias and lingering impact of slavery and Jim Crow America.
posted by crush-onastick at 8:36 AM on January 21, 2016 [17 favorites]
marienbad- struggling to understand your point. Are you saying that because whites can, and have, treated each other badly then this invalidates the point of the article? To me it seems to support it. i.e. That in the UK you could find "no blacks, no Irish" signs in the 20th Century, surely points to parallels and the fluidity of whiteness and/or bigotry.
posted by Gratishades at 8:36 AM on January 21, 2016 [5 favorites]
posted by Gratishades at 8:36 AM on January 21, 2016 [5 favorites]
As a working class white English guy, I can only say, "what a crock."
As a Canadian (whose roots are about half working-class English), I say let the Americans figure their own deal out.
The US constructs "race" and deals with ethnicity differently than anywhere else (as any culture does). There are constructions in current US culture---"latin" for example that are pretty individual, and the white/black split is a national obsession.
IMO, these aren't ideas us outsiders can really contribute to except by analogy to our own cultural constructs. And even then it's really tricky. For example, the Canadian idea of First Nations doesn't overlap well with US "Indian" classifications.
posted by bonehead at 8:40 AM on January 21, 2016 [12 favorites]
As a Canadian (whose roots are about half working-class English), I say let the Americans figure their own deal out.
The US constructs "race" and deals with ethnicity differently than anywhere else (as any culture does). There are constructions in current US culture---"latin" for example that are pretty individual, and the white/black split is a national obsession.
IMO, these aren't ideas us outsiders can really contribute to except by analogy to our own cultural constructs. And even then it's really tricky. For example, the Canadian idea of First Nations doesn't overlap well with US "Indian" classifications.
posted by bonehead at 8:40 AM on January 21, 2016 [12 favorites]
This is interesting. I spend a lot of time reading about immigration circa 1900, and how different groups we consider to be very much white these days were most definitely *not* back in the day. I mean, Finns are about the palest, blondest folks I know, but guess what? They weren't white until 1908.
posted by RedEmma at 8:47 AM on January 21, 2016 [8 favorites]
posted by RedEmma at 8:47 AM on January 21, 2016 [8 favorites]
Marienbad:
Whiteness, in America, is something you have to be admitted to--you don't get to decide to become white, other people decide you are white, and not just any white person--you have to be white on the national news before you're really white to everyone.
One of the greatest horrors of white people was the idea of non-whites passing. Authentic whiteness must be guarded. It's like wearing a polo shirt with the wrong tiny logo on the breast, who the hell do you think you are?
For instance, at some point in the 1800s it was decided that the Irish were white, but not like, y'know, white. But then Kennedy got elected, and the asterisk was removed.
Jewish people are mostly white, but they still have a bit of an asterisk, in some ways by choice.
Italians, Eastern Europeans, all those folks weren't white for a long time. Spaniards? Still up in the air, depending on what part of the US you live in.
Portuguese are not white.
White trash, interestingly enough, are definitely white, no matter how badly some white folks wish they weren't.
I haven't read Painter's "The History of Whiteness" but writing this has made me realize I need to move it to the top of my stack. I'm currently reading "Hons and Rebels," which also has some characters with really interesting views on whiteness.
posted by turntraitor at 8:51 AM on January 21, 2016 [7 favorites]
Whiteness, in America, is something you have to be admitted to--you don't get to decide to become white, other people decide you are white, and not just any white person--you have to be white on the national news before you're really white to everyone.
One of the greatest horrors of white people was the idea of non-whites passing. Authentic whiteness must be guarded. It's like wearing a polo shirt with the wrong tiny logo on the breast, who the hell do you think you are?
For instance, at some point in the 1800s it was decided that the Irish were white, but not like, y'know, white. But then Kennedy got elected, and the asterisk was removed.
Jewish people are mostly white, but they still have a bit of an asterisk, in some ways by choice.
Italians, Eastern Europeans, all those folks weren't white for a long time. Spaniards? Still up in the air, depending on what part of the US you live in.
Portuguese are not white.
White trash, interestingly enough, are definitely white, no matter how badly some white folks wish they weren't.
I haven't read Painter's "The History of Whiteness" but writing this has made me realize I need to move it to the top of my stack. I'm currently reading "Hons and Rebels," which also has some characters with really interesting views on whiteness.
posted by turntraitor at 8:51 AM on January 21, 2016 [7 favorites]
I think the reality is that "we" still other "white trash" but we don't other them on the basis of race but other factors because it's quite likely that some "white trash" are our second and third cousins and so othering based upon a concept of "whiteness" could potentially call into question our fundamental whiteness.
But while there is a firm dividing line between "white" and "not white" that periodically moves as a minority group comes into favor with the white majority there are also gradients of "whiteness" that exist beyond those dividing lines. Those invisible handshakes are like Willy Wonka's golden ticket and serve as additional barriers to sharing too much power with those that are useful to be politically "white" but not useful to actually incorporate into formal power structures.
posted by vuron at 9:01 AM on January 21, 2016 [3 favorites]
But while there is a firm dividing line between "white" and "not white" that periodically moves as a minority group comes into favor with the white majority there are also gradients of "whiteness" that exist beyond those dividing lines. Those invisible handshakes are like Willy Wonka's golden ticket and serve as additional barriers to sharing too much power with those that are useful to be politically "white" but not useful to actually incorporate into formal power structures.
posted by vuron at 9:01 AM on January 21, 2016 [3 favorites]
As a working class white English guy, I can only say, "what a crock." Seriously, do they even know about the history of oppression of working class white people through the centuries here in the UK?
Do you know the history of Western European colonialism, and the Atlantic slave trade? Because the outcome of that was a global system of white supremacy, that most attempts to discuss are met with dismissal and hostility, and most attempts to dismantle are met with violence and death.
posted by billyfleetwood at 9:20 AM on January 21, 2016 [8 favorites]
Do you know the history of Western European colonialism, and the Atlantic slave trade? Because the outcome of that was a global system of white supremacy, that most attempts to discuss are met with dismissal and hostility, and most attempts to dismantle are met with violence and death.
posted by billyfleetwood at 9:20 AM on January 21, 2016 [8 favorites]
turtraitor: Portuguese are not white.
They sure as hell are in New England!
posted by wenestvedt at 9:34 AM on January 21, 2016 [3 favorites]
They sure as hell are in New England!
posted by wenestvedt at 9:34 AM on January 21, 2016 [3 favorites]
They sure as hell are in New England!
Oh yeah, that's another thing: whiteness works both nationally and regionally.
I have some half-Portuguese cousins who are as white (culturally) as the day is long, but dark enough that when we'd go to the pool in my home town, which had a very large Latinx population (now the majority) the Latinx kids would walk up to them speaking Spanish, asking them who they were, were they new to town?
It was hilarious because culturally, those cousins are much whiter than me, who was a towheaded blonde boy with a bowl cut in a Speedo.
posted by turntraitor at 9:39 AM on January 21, 2016 [3 favorites]
Oh yeah, that's another thing: whiteness works both nationally and regionally.
I have some half-Portuguese cousins who are as white (culturally) as the day is long, but dark enough that when we'd go to the pool in my home town, which had a very large Latinx population (now the majority) the Latinx kids would walk up to them speaking Spanish, asking them who they were, were they new to town?
It was hilarious because culturally, those cousins are much whiter than me, who was a towheaded blonde boy with a bowl cut in a Speedo.
posted by turntraitor at 9:39 AM on January 21, 2016 [3 favorites]
> White trash, interestingly enough, are definitely white, no matter how badly some white folks wish they weren't.
Of no surprise, the cultural / immigrant histories of those groups we label as "white trash" have strong ties to the Scots / Irish Protestant immigration during the 1700 and 1800s - so it is kind of a "ok you are white now, but now white with pejorative" acceptance. Jim Webb (yes, that one) has a great history of the Scots-Irish influence in America's working class white history.
> that there will be little room for nuance or debate or free thinking in this program.
Give it's four week timeline and it's trying start the process of unpacking the notion of social constructs of race, and tackling "whiteness" as the example - given the inherent issues associated with attempting to unpack the privileged class instead of the unprivileged, I'd say that it is an aggressive course, but is requiring a lot of free thinking to even get started in there. Asking someone to unpack the powerful invisible and privileged social construct such as whiteness means having to think about everything in relation to it - since it is the default core upon which most other identities are viewed in relation to.
It's a much needed start in the right direction, but its not going to accomplish everything in a single month, semester, year, etc.
posted by mrzarquon at 9:40 AM on January 21, 2016 [7 favorites]
Of no surprise, the cultural / immigrant histories of those groups we label as "white trash" have strong ties to the Scots / Irish Protestant immigration during the 1700 and 1800s - so it is kind of a "ok you are white now, but now white with pejorative" acceptance. Jim Webb (yes, that one) has a great history of the Scots-Irish influence in America's working class white history.
> that there will be little room for nuance or debate or free thinking in this program.
Give it's four week timeline and it's trying start the process of unpacking the notion of social constructs of race, and tackling "whiteness" as the example - given the inherent issues associated with attempting to unpack the privileged class instead of the unprivileged, I'd say that it is an aggressive course, but is requiring a lot of free thinking to even get started in there. Asking someone to unpack the powerful invisible and privileged social construct such as whiteness means having to think about everything in relation to it - since it is the default core upon which most other identities are viewed in relation to.
It's a much needed start in the right direction, but its not going to accomplish everything in a single month, semester, year, etc.
posted by mrzarquon at 9:40 AM on January 21, 2016 [7 favorites]
**White courtesy call for Allan Gurganus**
posted by lazycomputerkids at 9:42 AM on January 21, 2016 [1 favorite]
posted by lazycomputerkids at 9:42 AM on January 21, 2016 [1 favorite]
The US constructs "race" and deals with ethnicity differently than anywhere else (as any culture does). There are constructions in current US culture---"latin" for example that are pretty individual, and the white/black split is a national obsession.
IMO, these aren't ideas us outsiders can really contribute to except by analogy to our own cultural constructs. And even then it's really tricky. For example, the Canadian idea of First Nations doesn't overlap well with US "Indian" classifications.
excellent point - race is socially constructed, and changes depending on the cultural context.
American race concepts are catching, of course - they are memes (in the original sense of a contagious or influential idea). A friend of mine tells me about how pan-Hispanism/pan-Latinoism wasn't really a concept in central & South America. But it's becoming one as people who have immigrated to the US export the idea of being "Hispanic" or "Latin*" (rather than a specific nationality) back to their home countries.
Canadian concepts of race are very weird. They are very influenced by American media; most Canadians know more American race and civil rights history than Canadian (certainly I do - and I'm a historian). But the context is also so very, very different. Canada has as many aboriginal people proportionally as black people, and the majority of our black population are relatively recent immigrants from Carribean and Africa. But many also adopt African-American cultural tropes and identity, under influence from the US.
posted by jb at 9:48 AM on January 21, 2016 [9 favorites]
IMO, these aren't ideas us outsiders can really contribute to except by analogy to our own cultural constructs. And even then it's really tricky. For example, the Canadian idea of First Nations doesn't overlap well with US "Indian" classifications.
excellent point - race is socially constructed, and changes depending on the cultural context.
American race concepts are catching, of course - they are memes (in the original sense of a contagious or influential idea). A friend of mine tells me about how pan-Hispanism/pan-Latinoism wasn't really a concept in central & South America. But it's becoming one as people who have immigrated to the US export the idea of being "Hispanic" or "Latin*" (rather than a specific nationality) back to their home countries.
Canadian concepts of race are very weird. They are very influenced by American media; most Canadians know more American race and civil rights history than Canadian (certainly I do - and I'm a historian). But the context is also so very, very different. Canada has as many aboriginal people proportionally as black people, and the majority of our black population are relatively recent immigrants from Carribean and Africa. But many also adopt African-American cultural tropes and identity, under influence from the US.
posted by jb at 9:48 AM on January 21, 2016 [9 favorites]
And I would add: our police have very much followed the racist attitudes of American policing. I don't know if this is a parallel development or direct influence, but our training is dominated by American professionals.
posted by jb at 9:50 AM on January 21, 2016 [3 favorites]
posted by jb at 9:50 AM on January 21, 2016 [3 favorites]
White people love to say "race is a social construct" when they can use it as an excuse to avoid talking about the legacy of white supremacy, so anything that shines a light on what the idea of race being a social construct actually means for whiteness is a good thing.
(Incidentally, Portuguese is also "white" in Hawaii these days, but it didn't used to be. The first generation of Portuguese immigrants weren't, but subsequent generations are.
I think it has a lot to do with the idea of provisional whiteness. Some ethnic groups are allowed into whiteness so long as they adopt the trappings of whiteness in their culture -- primarily language, dialect/accent, dress. Which is why I think we've seen a some Asian groups lately being allowed into white spaces as long as they don't act too "ethnic". Wearing a sari to a wedding is "adorable", wearing it to work is "weird".)
posted by tobascodagama at 9:57 AM on January 21, 2016 [4 favorites]
(Incidentally, Portuguese is also "white" in Hawaii these days, but it didn't used to be. The first generation of Portuguese immigrants weren't, but subsequent generations are.
I think it has a lot to do with the idea of provisional whiteness. Some ethnic groups are allowed into whiteness so long as they adopt the trappings of whiteness in their culture -- primarily language, dialect/accent, dress. Which is why I think we've seen a some Asian groups lately being allowed into white spaces as long as they don't act too "ethnic". Wearing a sari to a wedding is "adorable", wearing it to work is "weird".)
posted by tobascodagama at 9:57 AM on January 21, 2016 [4 favorites]
As a Portlander and native Oregonian whose community college days are well in the rear-view mirror, I think this is the right time and place to have this conversation. Oregon has an ugly racist history, and the sooner our students address race and privilege in their own lives, the better. If I had my way, everybody -- but especially fellow white people of all ages -- would attend diversity training. It's amazing to me, although I can't say it's surprising, how lazily we can gloss over the issue of privilege when we're confronted with it on a near-daily basis.
posted by vverse23 at 10:06 AM on January 21, 2016 [6 favorites]
posted by vverse23 at 10:06 AM on January 21, 2016 [6 favorites]
mrzarquon
I was taught, white trash/cracker were mostly from south England and were known for not living any better than the enslaved blacks. Scotch-Irish/white savages/hillbillies pissed off the Puritans and Quakers with their wild ways. To this day they are the other white, disreputable, not really white despite their genetics.
posted by ridgerunner at 10:14 AM on January 21, 2016 [1 favorite]
I was taught, white trash/cracker were mostly from south England and were known for not living any better than the enslaved blacks. Scotch-Irish/white savages/hillbillies pissed off the Puritans and Quakers with their wild ways. To this day they are the other white, disreputable, not really white despite their genetics.
posted by ridgerunner at 10:14 AM on January 21, 2016 [1 favorite]
Whiteness is a socially and politically constructed behavior. It has a long history in European imperialism and epistemologies. Whiteness does not simply refer to skin color but an ideology based on beliefs, values, behaviors, habits and attitudes, which result in the unequal distribution of power and privilege based on skin color. Whiteness represents a position of power where the power holder defines social categories and reality—the master narrator.
I understand the point here, and appreciate the way the idea is used Noel Ignatiev's book How the Irish Became White that's discussed in the Washington Post link along with Gone With the Wind to illustrate the Irish-Americans were not initially considered white, and that the meaning of what it meant to be white had to be changed to accomodate them as their social position improved.
But the U.S. Naturalization Law of 1790 offered citizenship to and "free white person" who lived in the U.S. for two years, and as far as I know Irish weren't denied citizenship under the act. So it seems more like the current definition of "white" as being "not generally subject to prejudice and discrimination" is being read back into history to make a claim that wouldn't have been comprehensible to people of the 19th Century. If you asked the people who hung out signs that said "No Dogs or Irish" if Irish people where white, wouldn't they have said yes they are, the same way that the law said that they were?
posted by layceepee at 10:25 AM on January 21, 2016 [3 favorites]
I understand the point here, and appreciate the way the idea is used Noel Ignatiev's book How the Irish Became White that's discussed in the Washington Post link along with Gone With the Wind to illustrate the Irish-Americans were not initially considered white, and that the meaning of what it meant to be white had to be changed to accomodate them as their social position improved.
But the U.S. Naturalization Law of 1790 offered citizenship to and "free white person" who lived in the U.S. for two years, and as far as I know Irish weren't denied citizenship under the act. So it seems more like the current definition of "white" as being "not generally subject to prejudice and discrimination" is being read back into history to make a claim that wouldn't have been comprehensible to people of the 19th Century. If you asked the people who hung out signs that said "No Dogs or Irish" if Irish people where white, wouldn't they have said yes they are, the same way that the law said that they were?
posted by layceepee at 10:25 AM on January 21, 2016 [3 favorites]
My problem with a lot of whiteness theory is that I fall on the side that sees "white privilege" as an element of divide and rule. The working class, divided by race, is more readily conquered by the ruling class. Whiteness theories have gone further and put it as a direct "social wage" – the stuff I don't agree with, that it's an actual material benefit to whites to have this privilege. In reality, if white privilege didn't exist, all of the working and middle classes would have more, because the dynamic would be different. Whereas the people like Ignatiev, Allen, Roediger et cetera took a further step.
Studying the "whiteness history" can be useful; it's funny personally that I have olive skin and an Italian name, which makes me white, but if my name was a different ethnicity I might well be non-white. But I find that Black history is a lot deeper and does a lot more to build anti-racists, whereas "whiteness" just mires people in white guilt. I mean, given the choice between Malcolm X and Noel Ignatiev, for god's sake pick Malcolm.
posted by graymouser at 10:36 AM on January 21, 2016 [1 favorite]
Studying the "whiteness history" can be useful; it's funny personally that I have olive skin and an Italian name, which makes me white, but if my name was a different ethnicity I might well be non-white. But I find that Black history is a lot deeper and does a lot more to build anti-racists, whereas "whiteness" just mires people in white guilt. I mean, given the choice between Malcolm X and Noel Ignatiev, for god's sake pick Malcolm.
posted by graymouser at 10:36 AM on January 21, 2016 [1 favorite]
Do I have to choose? They actually have a lot in common.
posted by maxsparber at 10:52 AM on January 21, 2016
posted by maxsparber at 10:52 AM on January 21, 2016
What's really fun about deconstructing race and privilege is that you'll always have a handful of white dudes trying on the "denying privilege guy" role. And then you know who to never go out for drinks with or date.
posted by vuron at 11:00 AM on January 21, 2016 [9 favorites]
posted by vuron at 11:00 AM on January 21, 2016 [9 favorites]
There is more than one way to theorize whiteness; certainly white people love to become mired in white guilt, but there are increasingly many discussions about how not to do that.
Every attempt to bust down this system is going to cause problems, but maybe also open up just a bit of space in the cracks.
You don't have to choose, but you could do worse than George Yancy's several collections on race and whiteness. Painter is good, also Karen and Barbara Fields's Racecraft.
I'm happy these folks are trying something!
posted by allthinky at 11:05 AM on January 21, 2016 [4 favorites]
Every attempt to bust down this system is going to cause problems, but maybe also open up just a bit of space in the cracks.
You don't have to choose, but you could do worse than George Yancy's several collections on race and whiteness. Painter is good, also Karen and Barbara Fields's Racecraft.
I'm happy these folks are trying something!
posted by allthinky at 11:05 AM on January 21, 2016 [4 favorites]
One thing I find weird about the concept of "whiteness" in the US, is how, for instance, people talk of Adam Driver as he's the only white dude in the new Star Wars, when to my southern-European eyes, Oscar Isaac looks just as white as Adam Driver. Even seeing him on Ex-Machina and Inside Llweyn Davis, the first thing that came to mind was "this dude kind of looks like Jake Johnson", who, I'm guessing, is "white" anywhere.
posted by lmfsilva at 11:17 AM on January 21, 2016 [1 favorite]
posted by lmfsilva at 11:17 AM on January 21, 2016 [1 favorite]
It would be interesting to see what would happen if we chose any other name than "whiteness" to describe this constructed identity. If people didn't see "whiteness" when they looked in the mirror they'd take it a lot less personally, but then people who exemplify "whiteness" would be able to distance themselves from it. It seems like a no-win situation.
posted by klanawa at 11:51 AM on January 21, 2016 [2 favorites]
posted by klanawa at 11:51 AM on January 21, 2016 [2 favorites]
As a working class white English guy, I can only say, "what a crock." Seriously, do they even know about the history of oppression of working class white people through the centuries here in the UK?
I guess the way I see it is this:
There is a system which does several things, among them constructing "whiteness". Let's call the system white supremacist capitalist heteropatriarchy, or "the system". Under "the system", the more white/straight/male/rich/etc you are the better off you are, and whiteness is marked as one component of being normal and virtuous. Being a poor sick white queer isn't that virtuous, for instance.
In order for the system to emerge, it had to conquer Europe, either first or alongside other colonizations. Hence, the Irish laws, the highland clearances, the enclosure acts; in a proto form, hence the attacks on "heretics", Levellers, etc.
I think that at least in the US, not a lot of people know about the aggressive violence deployed against peripheral populations in Europe as part of the consolidation of European states. We know, maybe, about how Roma people have been treated, but we tend not to know about the enclosures and other similar measures. I was exceedingly surprised, for instance, to learn about the treatment of Irish people in the 18th and 19th centuries, even though I had a general sense that things weren't that great.
Also, I think that most people in the US don't know very much working class/protest history - partly because US history is organized around recent slavery and recent genocide, and our working class history looks different as a result. We don't have the consciousness of, say, Tyburn Tree or Captain Swing or exiling people for theft or even relatively contemporary events like the Easter Rising.
As a result, I think that when we write the history of whiteness it's very easy to run into a mass of contradictions - we don't have the internal colonization model that we need.
The oppression of some pink/light-beige/European-origin people is part of the creation of whiteness. It's not a process of admitting certain people into whiteness, although that happens.
Obviously, oppression and violence against indigenous peoples, African peoples and ultimately Asian peoples is/was worse, more violent, more pervasive and more celebrated - nations are openly constituted by the violence we have done to people of color. The internal violence against white people has to be concealed, if anything, because whiteness needs a unity myth. If you start saying "well, actually we got to a unified white England by crushing lots of smaller groups of white people", then it makes whiteness seem less inevitable, totalizing and natural.
My point isn't "oh look at the poor white people, so sad*"; it's that the story of the emergence of whiteness includes and relies upon violence against certain groups of white people. It's all one story, not two competing stories.
*Although honestly, Ireland really got fucked over, and as far as I can tell you can see the evidence of that to this day.
posted by Frowner at 12:11 PM on January 21, 2016 [15 favorites]
I guess the way I see it is this:
There is a system which does several things, among them constructing "whiteness". Let's call the system white supremacist capitalist heteropatriarchy, or "the system". Under "the system", the more white/straight/male/rich/etc you are the better off you are, and whiteness is marked as one component of being normal and virtuous. Being a poor sick white queer isn't that virtuous, for instance.
In order for the system to emerge, it had to conquer Europe, either first or alongside other colonizations. Hence, the Irish laws, the highland clearances, the enclosure acts; in a proto form, hence the attacks on "heretics", Levellers, etc.
I think that at least in the US, not a lot of people know about the aggressive violence deployed against peripheral populations in Europe as part of the consolidation of European states. We know, maybe, about how Roma people have been treated, but we tend not to know about the enclosures and other similar measures. I was exceedingly surprised, for instance, to learn about the treatment of Irish people in the 18th and 19th centuries, even though I had a general sense that things weren't that great.
Also, I think that most people in the US don't know very much working class/protest history - partly because US history is organized around recent slavery and recent genocide, and our working class history looks different as a result. We don't have the consciousness of, say, Tyburn Tree or Captain Swing or exiling people for theft or even relatively contemporary events like the Easter Rising.
As a result, I think that when we write the history of whiteness it's very easy to run into a mass of contradictions - we don't have the internal colonization model that we need.
The oppression of some pink/light-beige/European-origin people is part of the creation of whiteness. It's not a process of admitting certain people into whiteness, although that happens.
Obviously, oppression and violence against indigenous peoples, African peoples and ultimately Asian peoples is/was worse, more violent, more pervasive and more celebrated - nations are openly constituted by the violence we have done to people of color. The internal violence against white people has to be concealed, if anything, because whiteness needs a unity myth. If you start saying "well, actually we got to a unified white England by crushing lots of smaller groups of white people", then it makes whiteness seem less inevitable, totalizing and natural.
My point isn't "oh look at the poor white people, so sad*"; it's that the story of the emergence of whiteness includes and relies upon violence against certain groups of white people. It's all one story, not two competing stories.
*Although honestly, Ireland really got fucked over, and as far as I can tell you can see the evidence of that to this day.
posted by Frowner at 12:11 PM on January 21, 2016 [15 favorites]
The oppression of some pink/light-beige/European-origin people is part of the creation of whiteness. It's not a process of admitting certain people into whiteness, although that happens.
so technically, "whiteness" = "WASPness"?
posted by lmfsilva at 12:52 PM on January 21, 2016
so technically, "whiteness" = "WASPness"?
posted by lmfsilva at 12:52 PM on January 21, 2016
"this dude kind of looks like Jake Johnson",
Who is half-Jewish, which makes his interactions with Schmidt on The New Girl kind of weird for me. I pinged him as a landsman the moment I saw him.
posted by maxsparber at 1:06 PM on January 21, 2016
Who is half-Jewish, which makes his interactions with Schmidt on The New Girl kind of weird for me. I pinged him as a landsman the moment I saw him.
posted by maxsparber at 1:06 PM on January 21, 2016
No, because getting hooked into a location-specific, heritage-specific definition of "whiteness" seems to me to just get you back into searching for an explanation that can't be found - it pushes things back to "what is the single source of whiteness in genetics or region or ideology? who is the whitest of all? How can we locate whiteness in a single place?"
For me it's much more useful to think about the emergence of whiteness as a set of processes and outcomes that are oppressive to various different people in different ways, and that are held together by an imaginary "perfect whiteness". Very, very few people are perfect exemplars of white supremacist capitalist heteropatriarchy - it's not that whiteness is created by a race of ubermenschen and imposed on others. It's that people believe in and enact this ideology of whiteness, people justify their actions by this ideology of whiteness. Whiteness is a unifying process/set of beliefs rather than something that you can find by - so to speak - dissecting people. Which is why people can "become" white, and why it's difficult to say "white people are characterized by [liking bland food] [prioritizing hard work] [being individualistic] [etc]" because what we always find is that not only white people are characterized by this, and not all white people are, and we get bogged down in a #notallwhitepeople derail.
posted by Frowner at 1:17 PM on January 21, 2016 [3 favorites]
For me it's much more useful to think about the emergence of whiteness as a set of processes and outcomes that are oppressive to various different people in different ways, and that are held together by an imaginary "perfect whiteness". Very, very few people are perfect exemplars of white supremacist capitalist heteropatriarchy - it's not that whiteness is created by a race of ubermenschen and imposed on others. It's that people believe in and enact this ideology of whiteness, people justify their actions by this ideology of whiteness. Whiteness is a unifying process/set of beliefs rather than something that you can find by - so to speak - dissecting people. Which is why people can "become" white, and why it's difficult to say "white people are characterized by [liking bland food] [prioritizing hard work] [being individualistic] [etc]" because what we always find is that not only white people are characterized by this, and not all white people are, and we get bogged down in a #notallwhitepeople derail.
posted by Frowner at 1:17 PM on January 21, 2016 [3 favorites]
(or, for that matter, saying that white people are characterized by being cold-hearted or lazy - coldheartedness and laziness are ways that whiteness perpetuates itself, but they are not definitive or unique.)
posted by Frowner at 1:19 PM on January 21, 2016
posted by Frowner at 1:19 PM on January 21, 2016
I think the framing is wrong; this is an iniative of the PCC Diversity Council which appears to hang out at the PCC Multicultural Center. At least on the campuses I've attended these tend to be insular echo-chambers of fellow travellers and kind of marginal but maybe that's just here. (My first alma matter's multicultural center did publish a kind of cool if predictable zine though...)
posted by Ogre Lawless at 1:39 PM on January 21, 2016 [1 favorite]
posted by Ogre Lawless at 1:39 PM on January 21, 2016 [1 favorite]
it's that the story of the emergence of whiteness includes and relies upon violence against certain groups of white people. It's all one story, not two competing stories.
Then does that story say anything at all useful about "whiteness"? It seems not to, to me. Rather, "whiteness," as you're using it here seems to be merely another word for "winner."
For me it's much more useful to think about the emergence of whiteness as a set of processes and outcomes that are oppressive to various different people in different ways, and that are held together by an imaginary "perfect whiteness."
Aren't you merely turning "whiteness" into a symbol? You are positing something called "whiteness" which you take to be the sign of all of the processes and outcomes that have oppressed "different people in different ways," even those people who might have described themselves as "white." To say the least, this sounds like a totalizing narrative. Why is it preferable to call this sign "whiteness" instead of "capital" or "power" or for that matter, "Satan"?
posted by octobersurprise at 1:49 PM on January 21, 2016 [2 favorites]
Then does that story say anything at all useful about "whiteness"? It seems not to, to me. Rather, "whiteness," as you're using it here seems to be merely another word for "winner."
For me it's much more useful to think about the emergence of whiteness as a set of processes and outcomes that are oppressive to various different people in different ways, and that are held together by an imaginary "perfect whiteness."
Aren't you merely turning "whiteness" into a symbol? You are positing something called "whiteness" which you take to be the sign of all of the processes and outcomes that have oppressed "different people in different ways," even those people who might have described themselves as "white." To say the least, this sounds like a totalizing narrative. Why is it preferable to call this sign "whiteness" instead of "capital" or "power" or for that matter, "Satan"?
posted by octobersurprise at 1:49 PM on January 21, 2016 [2 favorites]
There is a system which does several things, among them constructing "whiteness". Let's call the system white supremacist capitalist heteropatriarchy, or "the system". Under "the system", the more white/straight/male/rich/etc you are the better off you are, and whiteness is marked as one component of being normal and virtuous. Being a poor sick white queer isn't that virtuous, for instance.
In order for the system to emerge, it had to conquer Europe, either first or alongside other colonizations. Hence, the Irish laws, the highland clearances, the enclosure acts; in a proto form, hence the attacks on "heretics", Levellers, etc.
So this is where I actually know stuff (that is, my grad research is specifically on 17th century class divisions, enclosures, etc). And these issues don't all fit with the same model. I mean, you can shoehorn them in by pointing out that they are all examples of the expression of power, but that is much too broad and doesn't give us any explanatory benefit.
Religious conflicts weren't really a part of the growth of capitalism, nor was the English Civil War or even colonisation of Ireland. They were all happening in the same period (c1500-1800), along with the growth of colonialism, but it's better to think if them like a braided river of forces, sometimes coming together (eg religious division and capitalist development in Ireland by colonials Protestants) but ultimately having different origins and not always working together. For instance, you could have one man - Charles I - actively opposing enclosures in one region while championing them in another. He promoted both capitalist development in the fens and championed tenants' rights in the midlands.
We simplify history too much. Things were damned complex then - and things were never as simple as modern accounts suggest.
posted by jb at 2:03 PM on January 21, 2016 [4 favorites]
In order for the system to emerge, it had to conquer Europe, either first or alongside other colonizations. Hence, the Irish laws, the highland clearances, the enclosure acts; in a proto form, hence the attacks on "heretics", Levellers, etc.
So this is where I actually know stuff (that is, my grad research is specifically on 17th century class divisions, enclosures, etc). And these issues don't all fit with the same model. I mean, you can shoehorn them in by pointing out that they are all examples of the expression of power, but that is much too broad and doesn't give us any explanatory benefit.
Religious conflicts weren't really a part of the growth of capitalism, nor was the English Civil War or even colonisation of Ireland. They were all happening in the same period (c1500-1800), along with the growth of colonialism, but it's better to think if them like a braided river of forces, sometimes coming together (eg religious division and capitalist development in Ireland by colonials Protestants) but ultimately having different origins and not always working together. For instance, you could have one man - Charles I - actively opposing enclosures in one region while championing them in another. He promoted both capitalist development in the fens and championed tenants' rights in the midlands.
We simplify history too much. Things were damned complex then - and things were never as simple as modern accounts suggest.
posted by jb at 2:03 PM on January 21, 2016 [4 favorites]
is why people can "become" white, and why it's difficult to say "white people are characterized by [liking bland food] [prioritizing hard work] [being individualistic] [etc]" because what we always find is that not only white people are characterized by this, and not all white people are, and we get bogged down in a #notallwhitepeople derail.
What you are describing is a stereotype of middling sort (eg small shopkeepers) Anglo/Northern European Protestants. Which is interesting: in the American context, they are the Ur "white" (as opposed to many other models of whiteness, like educated and literate aristocratic Europeans, who were higher status in Europe itself).
maybe we need to interrogate our ideas of whiteness.
posted by jb at 2:08 PM on January 21, 2016 [1 favorite]
What you are describing is a stereotype of middling sort (eg small shopkeepers) Anglo/Northern European Protestants. Which is interesting: in the American context, they are the Ur "white" (as opposed to many other models of whiteness, like educated and literate aristocratic Europeans, who were higher status in Europe itself).
maybe we need to interrogate our ideas of whiteness.
posted by jb at 2:08 PM on January 21, 2016 [1 favorite]
Ta-Nehisi Coates has said that white supremacy will disappear only when the concept of whiteness does. I suspect he's right, though I don't know how we get there.
posted by zompist at 2:09 PM on January 21, 2016
posted by zompist at 2:09 PM on January 21, 2016
Well, we could call it Satan, except that people explicitly refer to whiteness as whiteness. White people didn't say "we should get to sit in the front of the bus because Satan says we should*". White people didn't say "the easiest way to understand the difference between Europeans and Africans is that Europeans are given power by Satan*". White people specifically named and pointed to a thing called whiteness. When people post racist garbage on various Black Lives Matter facebook pages, they don't say "my people are imbued with the power of Satan, which is why it's okay if the police kill people of color". Whiteness is an organizing principle.
What I'm getting at is that when you try to say "English white people from Kent [for instance] are the very whitest white people and the font of white supremacy; we know this because they do [these things]" your argument will always fall down, because whiteness is an ideology that determines how bodies are read and understood, not a thing that flows from an indubitably "really" white body. White people are white because of ideology and history, not because of color, so to speak.
Ideology develops material effects, in that anywhere I go in the world, I will be read as white, accorded white privilege and allowed to participate in white supremacy. Someone who is more "ambiguously white looking" might not have the same set of experiences. My dirt-poor, uneducated Prussian peasant ancestors, arriving in the US so they wouldn't be expropriated or conscripted, would have been accorded a different kind of whiteness, and had different kinds of access - their "whiteness" would have existed but would have been more ambivalent.
Whiteness is an organizing principle that people refer to when justifying their actions and dishing out privilege and punishment. It's a way people understand themselves. It operates in different ways at different times**.
*Well, I mean, they did, in that there's been religious arguments for white supremacy.
**To me, I think it is "just" a way of saying "winners", sort of - in that I can imagine a world in which the concept of whiteness would not have come into being and been used as the organizing principle for slavery and genocide, and things would not be so terrible, and thus pale people from Europe would not have "won", if you can call it winning. But the thing is, it's "winning in the name of whiteness", not "winning in the name of Satan".
posted by Frowner at 2:13 PM on January 21, 2016 [4 favorites]
What I'm getting at is that when you try to say "English white people from Kent [for instance] are the very whitest white people and the font of white supremacy; we know this because they do [these things]" your argument will always fall down, because whiteness is an ideology that determines how bodies are read and understood, not a thing that flows from an indubitably "really" white body. White people are white because of ideology and history, not because of color, so to speak.
Ideology develops material effects, in that anywhere I go in the world, I will be read as white, accorded white privilege and allowed to participate in white supremacy. Someone who is more "ambiguously white looking" might not have the same set of experiences. My dirt-poor, uneducated Prussian peasant ancestors, arriving in the US so they wouldn't be expropriated or conscripted, would have been accorded a different kind of whiteness, and had different kinds of access - their "whiteness" would have existed but would have been more ambivalent.
Whiteness is an organizing principle that people refer to when justifying their actions and dishing out privilege and punishment. It's a way people understand themselves. It operates in different ways at different times**.
*Well, I mean, they did, in that there's been religious arguments for white supremacy.
**To me, I think it is "just" a way of saying "winners", sort of - in that I can imagine a world in which the concept of whiteness would not have come into being and been used as the organizing principle for slavery and genocide, and things would not be so terrible, and thus pale people from Europe would not have "won", if you can call it winning. But the thing is, it's "winning in the name of whiteness", not "winning in the name of Satan".
posted by Frowner at 2:13 PM on January 21, 2016 [4 favorites]
We simplify history too much. Things were damned complex then - and things were never as simple as modern accounts suggest.
I agree - but there's also this tension, to me, between the fact that things fall apart if you poke at them and the fact that large historical changes happen.
They were all happening in the same period (c1500-1800), along with the growth of colonialism, but it's better to think if them like a braided river of forces, sometimes coming together (eg religious division and capitalist development in Ireland by colonials Protestants) but ultimately having different origins and not always working together.
And I think that's why whiteness is such a tricky concept - because it's the result of a weird interplay of forces that aren't all organized according to the same principle, and yet it has this strange unified/unifying quality.
(In terms of the religious stuff: I had always assumed that the suppression of, say, the Levellers or Thomas Muntzer's followers was inseparable from the rise of the [I will probably use the wrong term for this] proto bourgeoisie, and that the demands of those groups were basically coming from a dispossessed peasant class and from newly mobile labor. So I had tended to assume that they could be understood as casualties of the process of state consolidation.)
posted by Frowner at 2:22 PM on January 21, 2016 [1 favorite]
I agree - but there's also this tension, to me, between the fact that things fall apart if you poke at them and the fact that large historical changes happen.
They were all happening in the same period (c1500-1800), along with the growth of colonialism, but it's better to think if them like a braided river of forces, sometimes coming together (eg religious division and capitalist development in Ireland by colonials Protestants) but ultimately having different origins and not always working together.
And I think that's why whiteness is such a tricky concept - because it's the result of a weird interplay of forces that aren't all organized according to the same principle, and yet it has this strange unified/unifying quality.
(In terms of the religious stuff: I had always assumed that the suppression of, say, the Levellers or Thomas Muntzer's followers was inseparable from the rise of the [I will probably use the wrong term for this] proto bourgeoisie, and that the demands of those groups were basically coming from a dispossessed peasant class and from newly mobile labor. So I had tended to assume that they could be understood as casualties of the process of state consolidation.)
posted by Frowner at 2:22 PM on January 21, 2016 [1 favorite]
This strikes me as an unnecessarily trolly approach to an important topic. Someone clearly wants to get a jab in at all the, "Why isn't there a WHITE history month?" people more than they want this to be taken seriously as an academic exercise.
posted by Drinky Die at 2:34 PM on January 21, 2016 [1 favorite]
posted by Drinky Die at 2:34 PM on January 21, 2016 [1 favorite]
Well, we could call it Satan, except that people explicitly refer to whiteness as whiteness. White people didn't say "we should get to sit in the front of the bus because Satan says we should*". White people didn't say "the easiest way to understand the difference between Europeans and Africans is that Europeans are given power by Satan*". White people specifically named and pointed to a thing called whiteness.
But you also said that The internal violence against white people has to be concealed, if anything, because whiteness needs a unity myth. If you start saying "well, actually we got to a unified white England by crushing lots of smaller groups of white people", then it makes whiteness seem less inevitable, totalizing and natural. So even when there isn't a reference to whiteness, even when in fact it's explicitly hidden, you identify it as part of "whiteness." So I don't understand how you can make the argument that whiteness is the best name for it because whiteness is explicitly invoked when it's practiced.
posted by layceepee at 2:43 PM on January 21, 2016
But you also said that The internal violence against white people has to be concealed, if anything, because whiteness needs a unity myth. If you start saying "well, actually we got to a unified white England by crushing lots of smaller groups of white people", then it makes whiteness seem less inevitable, totalizing and natural. So even when there isn't a reference to whiteness, even when in fact it's explicitly hidden, you identify it as part of "whiteness." So I don't understand how you can make the argument that whiteness is the best name for it because whiteness is explicitly invoked when it's practiced.
posted by layceepee at 2:43 PM on January 21, 2016
I guess because so often violence against marginalized, ambiguously white groups is materially essential to the success of Big Whiteness? Like, you can't have a narrative which says "English people are the freest people in Europe, John Bull, etc etc" unless you have a process for hiding how you crush certain English people and you have an established English state which is named as a white state (even though there have always been people of color).
Or hey, wait, here is a timely and local example. Minnesota is a really racist state. It makes me extremely sad to say this because I love so much about Minnesota, but whether it's sundown towns or the murder of Fong Lee or Jamar Clark or casually racist anti-social-services discourse or St. Cloud refusing to celebrate Martin Luther King day or any one of a million other things, we are a really racist state.
When racist white people talk about Minnesota, they often talk as if Minnesota's virtues exist because of white people here (and because of our Nordic heritage in particular) and as if all threats to our state come from Somali Minnesotans, or Black Minnesotans, or Latin@ Minnesotans. Racist white people will often explicitly say that "Black people from Chicago" come here "to get on welfare" and bring crime and moral laxness with them. This is both literally and morally bullshit.
But the point is, racist white people have an origin story about how Minnesota should be a white state, and how our problems come from outsider people of color.
And yet! This does not keep us from treating white immigrants from Eastern Europe and Russia really badly! This does not keep us from aggressively trying to crush majority-white working class social movements! This didn't keep the first white Minnesotans from being bigoted against poor European immigrants - especially those Finns up on the Iron Range, who were practically anarchists and not very clean either.
Racist white people mobilize a rhetoric that says that all us white people in Minnesota are good, and unified, and share values. But racist white people also have no problem at all fucking over poor white people or white people who don't share their values. "Whiteness" as it gets defined in Minnesota, can only be "conservative white people" because other white people are pushed out and delegitimated.
Another example: "Minnesota whiteness" never means "white Minnesotans who sympathize with, donate money to or act in solidarity with Black Lives Matter". "Whiteness" is always defined by its opposition to Blackness, and it's always maintained by the marginalization of any white people who feel differently.
posted by Frowner at 3:05 PM on January 21, 2016 [4 favorites]
Or hey, wait, here is a timely and local example. Minnesota is a really racist state. It makes me extremely sad to say this because I love so much about Minnesota, but whether it's sundown towns or the murder of Fong Lee or Jamar Clark or casually racist anti-social-services discourse or St. Cloud refusing to celebrate Martin Luther King day or any one of a million other things, we are a really racist state.
When racist white people talk about Minnesota, they often talk as if Minnesota's virtues exist because of white people here (and because of our Nordic heritage in particular) and as if all threats to our state come from Somali Minnesotans, or Black Minnesotans, or Latin@ Minnesotans. Racist white people will often explicitly say that "Black people from Chicago" come here "to get on welfare" and bring crime and moral laxness with them. This is both literally and morally bullshit.
But the point is, racist white people have an origin story about how Minnesota should be a white state, and how our problems come from outsider people of color.
And yet! This does not keep us from treating white immigrants from Eastern Europe and Russia really badly! This does not keep us from aggressively trying to crush majority-white working class social movements! This didn't keep the first white Minnesotans from being bigoted against poor European immigrants - especially those Finns up on the Iron Range, who were practically anarchists and not very clean either.
Racist white people mobilize a rhetoric that says that all us white people in Minnesota are good, and unified, and share values. But racist white people also have no problem at all fucking over poor white people or white people who don't share their values. "Whiteness" as it gets defined in Minnesota, can only be "conservative white people" because other white people are pushed out and delegitimated.
Another example: "Minnesota whiteness" never means "white Minnesotans who sympathize with, donate money to or act in solidarity with Black Lives Matter". "Whiteness" is always defined by its opposition to Blackness, and it's always maintained by the marginalization of any white people who feel differently.
posted by Frowner at 3:05 PM on January 21, 2016 [4 favorites]
I find that this weird obsession with and endless attempt at taxonomizing groups of people really, really problematic. You can look all you want but you will never find the 'singularity' in human history from which all social problems stem. To attempt to claim otherwise is intellectually dishonest.
Groups of people, everywhere, have subjugated both those that are genetically similar to them and those that are less so, throughout history and up to the present day. Who the 'winners' are changes over time.
Should we attempt to address current social problems? Of course. This just isn't the way to do it. It's far more likely to alienate people than it is to convince them to change the way they already think.
posted by Klaxon Aoooogah at 4:17 PM on January 21, 2016 [4 favorites]
Groups of people, everywhere, have subjugated both those that are genetically similar to them and those that are less so, throughout history and up to the present day. Who the 'winners' are changes over time.
Should we attempt to address current social problems? Of course. This just isn't the way to do it. It's far more likely to alienate people than it is to convince them to change the way they already think.
posted by Klaxon Aoooogah at 4:17 PM on January 21, 2016 [4 favorites]
That's completely backwards. Trying to address "current social problems" without acknowledging the role that the evolving definition of whiteness had in creating those problems is like trying to stop a cholera outbreak without germ theory. Anybody who feels so "alienated" by an analysis of the history of whiteness as a construct is not somebody who is actually capable of addressing any serious social problems, because by definition they are rejecting the framework within which those problems must be addressed.
posted by tobascodagama at 5:47 PM on January 21, 2016 [7 favorites]
posted by tobascodagama at 5:47 PM on January 21, 2016 [7 favorites]
Well, I think they've chosen "Whiteness" specifically to steer clear of "White History Month" trolling. There is a concept of "whiteness" as well as a bunch of social baggage and history of oppression connected to how we construct the Us and the Them qua "White" and "Colored" which can and should be examined to help us understand why we're still hung up on [White] and [Not White].
As noted above, studying Black history, studying the creation of African-American culture within and in spite of majority American culture, is essential to that understanding, but so is studying the perpetuation of Whiteness.
posted by crush-onastick at 5:50 PM on January 21, 2016 [2 favorites]
As noted above, studying Black history, studying the creation of African-American culture within and in spite of majority American culture, is essential to that understanding, but so is studying the perpetuation of Whiteness.
posted by crush-onastick at 5:50 PM on January 21, 2016 [2 favorites]
"English people are the freest people in Europe, John Bull, etc etc"
So now a claim that English people are superior to other Europeans is also a manifestation of "whiteness"? I can't discern a coherent definition of "whiteness" in your descriptions, which seem to comprise a pretty diverse range of phenomena. Is it possible to say in a single sentence what you think whiteness is?
posted by layceepee at 6:00 PM on January 21, 2016 [2 favorites]
So now a claim that English people are superior to other Europeans is also a manifestation of "whiteness"? I can't discern a coherent definition of "whiteness" in your descriptions, which seem to comprise a pretty diverse range of phenomena. Is it possible to say in a single sentence what you think whiteness is?
posted by layceepee at 6:00 PM on January 21, 2016 [2 favorites]
Whiteness is and has been defined differently in different times and places. Which is precisely why it's Whiteness History Month and not Whiteness Month.
This has been explained to you multiple times, directly and indirectly, across the thread, to the point that I have to wonder if you're being deliberately obtuse now.
posted by tobascodagama at 6:06 PM on January 21, 2016 [1 favorite]
This has been explained to you multiple times, directly and indirectly, across the thread, to the point that I have to wonder if you're being deliberately obtuse now.
posted by tobascodagama at 6:06 PM on January 21, 2016 [1 favorite]
Oh and if you have not read it: Understanding Jim Crow: Using Racist Memorabilia to Teach Tolerance and Promote Social Justice by David Pilgrim (reviewed here and I think previously linked at Metafilter) is about how US culture creates "blackness". Texts on how we similarly create "whiteness" are a necessary accompaniment.
posted by crush-onastick at 6:08 PM on January 21, 2016 [3 favorites]
posted by crush-onastick at 6:08 PM on January 21, 2016 [3 favorites]
Anybody who feels so "alienated" by an analysis of the history of whiteness as a construct is not somebody who is actually capable of addressing any serious social problems, because by definition they are rejecting the framework within which those problems must be addressed.
Well, carry on preaching to the choir and thereby maintaining the status quo. You've just written off the very people who need to to be enlightened. a) why bother, then? and b) good luck with that. Unless, of course, "whiteness history month" exists to proselytize and not to educate.
Trying to address "current social problems" without acknowledging the role that the evolving definition of whiteness had in creating those problems
Tell me how splitting hairs over your hierarchy of "whiteness", specifically, will address current issues? I think your argument begs the question. I, too, would like to see a definition of "whiteness."
posted by Klaxon Aoooogah at 7:17 PM on January 21, 2016 [1 favorite]
Well, carry on preaching to the choir and thereby maintaining the status quo. You've just written off the very people who need to to be enlightened. a) why bother, then? and b) good luck with that. Unless, of course, "whiteness history month" exists to proselytize and not to educate.
Trying to address "current social problems" without acknowledging the role that the evolving definition of whiteness had in creating those problems
Tell me how splitting hairs over your hierarchy of "whiteness", specifically, will address current issues? I think your argument begs the question. I, too, would like to see a definition of "whiteness."
posted by Klaxon Aoooogah at 7:17 PM on January 21, 2016 [1 favorite]
> You've just written off the very people who need to to be enlightened.
Which people are those, exactly? People who use the "race is a social construct" as a way to explicitly not talk about race? People who...what, exactly? Would read a history of or take a course in African Americans in the US, or Native Americans, but would get the vapors over a similar examination of Whiteness in America?
> I find that this weird obsession with and endless attempt at taxonomizing groups of people really, really problematic.
And just making this announcement does not make the reality of that taxonomy, its effects, and its enactments just go away. Would that it did, goddamn.
posted by rtha at 7:30 PM on January 21, 2016 [5 favorites]
Which people are those, exactly? People who use the "race is a social construct" as a way to explicitly not talk about race? People who...what, exactly? Would read a history of or take a course in African Americans in the US, or Native Americans, but would get the vapors over a similar examination of Whiteness in America?
> I find that this weird obsession with and endless attempt at taxonomizing groups of people really, really problematic.
And just making this announcement does not make the reality of that taxonomy, its effects, and its enactments just go away. Would that it did, goddamn.
posted by rtha at 7:30 PM on January 21, 2016 [5 favorites]
This has been explained to you multiple times, directly and indirectly, across the thread, to the point that I have to wonder if you're being deliberately obtuse now.
If this whas directed at me, I didn't mean to say that I thought the concept of "whiteness" was incoherent, merely that Frowner seemed to have a particular definition in mind and I was having trouble understanding, from the range of examples given, what that particular definition was.
posted by layceepee at 7:57 PM on January 21, 2016
If this whas directed at me, I didn't mean to say that I thought the concept of "whiteness" was incoherent, merely that Frowner seemed to have a particular definition in mind and I was having trouble understanding, from the range of examples given, what that particular definition was.
posted by layceepee at 7:57 PM on January 21, 2016
Which people are those, exactly?
Um...white racists? Especially the covert ones? And I didn't write them off, the person who responded to my comment did.
And just making this announcement does not make the reality of that taxonomy, its effects, and its enactments just go away. Would that it did, goddamn.
I think we're going to have to disagree about the usefulness of taxonomizing degrees of whiteness. Can you imagine why this could at all be problematic? Is there any other group of people that you would feel comfortable doing this to?
posted by Klaxon Aoooogah at 8:00 PM on January 21, 2016
Um...white racists? Especially the covert ones? And I didn't write them off, the person who responded to my comment did.
And just making this announcement does not make the reality of that taxonomy, its effects, and its enactments just go away. Would that it did, goddamn.
I think we're going to have to disagree about the usefulness of taxonomizing degrees of whiteness. Can you imagine why this could at all be problematic? Is there any other group of people that you would feel comfortable doing this to?
posted by Klaxon Aoooogah at 8:00 PM on January 21, 2016
(In terms of the religious stuff: I had always assumed that the suppression of, say, the Levellers or Thomas Muntzer's followers was inseparable from the rise of the [I will probably use the wrong term for this] proto bourgeoisie, and that the demands of those groups were basically coming from a dispossessed peasant class and from newly mobile labor. So I had tended to assume that they could be understood as casualties of the process of state consolidation.)
Oh, gosh no!
England has never had a true peasantry, and the Levellers were themselves mostly petty bourgeoisie like John Lilburne. They explicitly distanced themselves from both the aristocracy/rich and from the poor - John Lilburne and other mid-17th writers were the first to start talking about a "middle" class (only they called it "middling sort" and were picturing yeoman farmers and prosperous blacksmiths as opposed to elite merchants, industrialists or bankers).
Maybe you're thinking of the Diggers, who were much more communitarian socialists than the Levellers (who were more like 17th century liberals).
But the religious conflicts of the 16th and 17th centuries weren't driven by economic concerns - they really were matters of conscience.
The emergence of a large, landless labour force - which certainly did happen in England c1500-1800 - also had absolutely nothing to do with state consolidation (which had actually happened in England in 1066, and again in 1485), and everything to do with the end of serfdom and labour duties for tenants, and the demographic explosion of the 1500s, as the population recovered from the Black Death. The English Crown actually spent most of the 16th and 17th centuries fighting against the dispossession of people from land, because that led to social instability and (where arable land was converted to pastoral) a reduction in national food production.
posted by jb at 8:04 PM on January 21, 2016 [1 favorite]
Oh, gosh no!
England has never had a true peasantry, and the Levellers were themselves mostly petty bourgeoisie like John Lilburne. They explicitly distanced themselves from both the aristocracy/rich and from the poor - John Lilburne and other mid-17th writers were the first to start talking about a "middle" class (only they called it "middling sort" and were picturing yeoman farmers and prosperous blacksmiths as opposed to elite merchants, industrialists or bankers).
Maybe you're thinking of the Diggers, who were much more communitarian socialists than the Levellers (who were more like 17th century liberals).
But the religious conflicts of the 16th and 17th centuries weren't driven by economic concerns - they really were matters of conscience.
The emergence of a large, landless labour force - which certainly did happen in England c1500-1800 - also had absolutely nothing to do with state consolidation (which had actually happened in England in 1066, and again in 1485), and everything to do with the end of serfdom and labour duties for tenants, and the demographic explosion of the 1500s, as the population recovered from the Black Death. The English Crown actually spent most of the 16th and 17th centuries fighting against the dispossession of people from land, because that led to social instability and (where arable land was converted to pastoral) a reduction in national food production.
posted by jb at 8:04 PM on January 21, 2016 [1 favorite]
> Can you imagine why this could at all be problematic? Is there any other group of people that you would feel comfortable doing this to?
Yes, and yes, because as an American person of color who is not of African ancestry? WHY YES, I do have experience with [race] being taxonomized in ways both problematic and useful.
posted by rtha at 8:12 PM on January 21, 2016 [2 favorites]
Yes, and yes, because as an American person of color who is not of African ancestry? WHY YES, I do have experience with [race] being taxonomized in ways both problematic and useful.
posted by rtha at 8:12 PM on January 21, 2016 [2 favorites]
also: while modernisation and the transition to capitalism in Europe was very disruptive - it mostly happened without regard to whiteness. In the English context, for example, the non-white population before 1900 was both negligible and primarily urban, whereas the greatest changes were centred on the countryside (still >95% white).
While certainly historical movements that became very bound up in race (like slavery) are a huge part of the modernisation story in Europe, those issues were (literally) externalised to the colonial possessions.
When you see the lower classes being talked about as a different "race", this is usually later in the 18th and 19th centuries - and rather than being a blueprint for colonialism, I think it is more a result of colonialism.
posted by jb at 8:16 PM on January 21, 2016 [1 favorite]
While certainly historical movements that became very bound up in race (like slavery) are a huge part of the modernisation story in Europe, those issues were (literally) externalised to the colonial possessions.
When you see the lower classes being talked about as a different "race", this is usually later in the 18th and 19th centuries - and rather than being a blueprint for colonialism, I think it is more a result of colonialism.
posted by jb at 8:16 PM on January 21, 2016 [1 favorite]
(Idly - I do often say Levellers when I mean Diggers, because - you see - there's the band The Levellers and then there's the Diggers' Song, and in my head I turn them around, also I tend to think "aha, how does one level the land? One digs.")
posted by Frowner at 8:17 PM on January 21, 2016
posted by Frowner at 8:17 PM on January 21, 2016
To continue, though - I wasn't thinking of state consolidation being achieved by people pointing to whiteness or to different "races" within, eg, England - just that you can't get to colonizing, imperialist whiteness without state consolidation, without organizing the peripheral parts of the land. It may be that I am using the wrong language so I'm not conveying what I want to say clearly.
What I was trying to say is that England developed as an imperialist power in tandem with building up this formalized exploitation of its own marginalized people, so the comment upthread that the exploitation of white working class people somehow disproves racism isn't correct.
As I understand it, though, if you look at southern and eastern Europe, you actually get full-on racialized language about the European periphery, and then those people "become" white as imperialism/colonialism advances and as the peripheral economies are better integrated into the center. I say this mostly based on people like Franco Moretti (and Nancy Armstrong?) writing about how southern and eastern Europe appear in early novels, admittedly.
Armstrong also has a bunch of stuff about how Scotland was understood in England before/during Sir Walter Scott's career - she seems to think that Scotland appears as this site of wildness and primitiveness (virtuous or not, depending) that is really seen as distinct from England and Englishness. At the same time, though, I know that Glasgow and in particular Edinburgh were emerging as industrial and intellectual powers, and the Edinburgh Review, for instance, was pretty widely read among the type of English people who read that type of thing. So what I had taken from that was that the self-understanding of the UK as a nation with some shared values and goals gets built up through the real and symbolic colonization of Scotland, Ireland and Wales, and at the same time, built up through this understanding of England, Scotland and Wales as primitive/foreign/exotic/"different" but brought together under this banner of Britishness.
posted by Frowner at 8:36 PM on January 21, 2016 [1 favorite]
What I was trying to say is that England developed as an imperialist power in tandem with building up this formalized exploitation of its own marginalized people, so the comment upthread that the exploitation of white working class people somehow disproves racism isn't correct.
As I understand it, though, if you look at southern and eastern Europe, you actually get full-on racialized language about the European periphery, and then those people "become" white as imperialism/colonialism advances and as the peripheral economies are better integrated into the center. I say this mostly based on people like Franco Moretti (and Nancy Armstrong?) writing about how southern and eastern Europe appear in early novels, admittedly.
Armstrong also has a bunch of stuff about how Scotland was understood in England before/during Sir Walter Scott's career - she seems to think that Scotland appears as this site of wildness and primitiveness (virtuous or not, depending) that is really seen as distinct from England and Englishness. At the same time, though, I know that Glasgow and in particular Edinburgh were emerging as industrial and intellectual powers, and the Edinburgh Review, for instance, was pretty widely read among the type of English people who read that type of thing. So what I had taken from that was that the self-understanding of the UK as a nation with some shared values and goals gets built up through the real and symbolic colonization of Scotland, Ireland and Wales, and at the same time, built up through this understanding of England, Scotland and Wales as primitive/foreign/exotic/"different" but brought together under this banner of Britishness.
posted by Frowner at 8:36 PM on January 21, 2016 [1 favorite]
Why do white people always think that my top priority ought to be wagging my tail like a puppy so that racist white people might have a faint possibility of performing the tiniest iota of self-reflection so long as no one dares disturb their fragile, insulated bubble of respectability politics? Quite frankly, I am perfectly happy to let racist dinosaurs get left behind in the dust. If I pander to white people, that's not me doing myself or my fellow PoC a favor; that's me doing white people a favor so that they don't end up becoming tomorrow's version of the racist grandmother who everyone is uncomfortable around during Thanksgiving because she keeps yelling about how much she misses slavery. Unfortunately, my efforts to graciously assist white people by explaining things in kind tones to them rarely bear fruit and are rarely appreciated, so I've decided that the following (not comprehensive) list of things to do to "solve racism" that are a much, much better use of my energy:
posted by Conspire at 8:43 PM on January 21, 2016 [11 favorites]
- Sharing my experiences of racism with other PoC so we can connect, regardless of the screechy protests of white people saying that I'm using language that they can't understand.
- Building communities and safe spaces for PoC, and in particular, PoC that are marginalized in other ways.
- Making fun of racist white people as a release valve from racism while exposing the absurdity of their racism and building rapport with other PoC
- Attending and supporting the events and experiences of other PoC communities that are not my own to build ties between different racial communities
- Occasionally taking a little time out of my day to explain to the white people who "get it" to help broaden their understanding of racism, knowing that they don't have unreasonable mental barriers in talking to me on racism, despite the protests of racist white people who complain I'm "preaching to the choir"
- Working on a political level to enact legislation to protect and uplift PoC
- Working on the community and nonprofit level to support projects that support PoC
posted by Conspire at 8:43 PM on January 21, 2016 [11 favorites]
To continue, though - I wasn't thinking of state consolidation being achieved by people pointing to whiteness or to different "races" within, eg, England - just that you can't get to colonizing, imperialist whiteness without state consolidation, without organizing the peripheral parts of the land. It may be that I am using the wrong language so I'm not conveying what I want to say clearly.
No, I understand what you're saying. But where I think you may be confused on the early history is that in the British case, the first wave of colonisation was a not controlled by a strong, consolidated state, but franchised by a centralised but still very weak state to private companies, and also independent religious groups. Think of it: many of the first colonists in New England were explicitly enemies of the state and the central state (the crown) was pretty powerless against them.
Now, the Spanish colonial efforts were very different, and I would never claim to be an expert on Spanish colonialism. From what little I know, it was a little more ad hoc/ controlled by locals (like Cortez setting out on his own against the Aztecs) than popular history would suggest. But it was a lot more centralised than early English colonialism. The French in Canada certainly were WAY more centrally controlled - and stayed that way right through. But the French crown in the 17th century was a much more powerful (and well financed institution) than the English & Scottish crowns. Charles I couldn't even put down a prayer book rebellion in Scotland without begging his parliament for money, which he never got (thus leading to the Civil Wars).
Imperialist whiteness isn't a part of the early colonisation -- or rather, it was created over the period of colonisation by interactions with indigenous peoples and African slaves. It didn't bloom fully until the late 18-19th centuries - and that's when you get the racialisation of the Welsh and Scot Gaels, the suppression of their languages and cultures. (The Irish are a different story - Nicholas Canny has a good article tracing their racialisation). Even then, I'm not sure how much the Scots were ever racialised as opposed to seen as a different nationality. (And, of course, Scotland has only ever been part Gaelic - parts have been Anglo since the dark ages, other parts Norse well
into the Middle Ages).
posted by jb at 8:55 PM on January 21, 2016 [1 favorite]
No, I understand what you're saying. But where I think you may be confused on the early history is that in the British case, the first wave of colonisation was a not controlled by a strong, consolidated state, but franchised by a centralised but still very weak state to private companies, and also independent religious groups. Think of it: many of the first colonists in New England were explicitly enemies of the state and the central state (the crown) was pretty powerless against them.
Now, the Spanish colonial efforts were very different, and I would never claim to be an expert on Spanish colonialism. From what little I know, it was a little more ad hoc/ controlled by locals (like Cortez setting out on his own against the Aztecs) than popular history would suggest. But it was a lot more centralised than early English colonialism. The French in Canada certainly were WAY more centrally controlled - and stayed that way right through. But the French crown in the 17th century was a much more powerful (and well financed institution) than the English & Scottish crowns. Charles I couldn't even put down a prayer book rebellion in Scotland without begging his parliament for money, which he never got (thus leading to the Civil Wars).
Imperialist whiteness isn't a part of the early colonisation -- or rather, it was created over the period of colonisation by interactions with indigenous peoples and African slaves. It didn't bloom fully until the late 18-19th centuries - and that's when you get the racialisation of the Welsh and Scot Gaels, the suppression of their languages and cultures. (The Irish are a different story - Nicholas Canny has a good article tracing their racialisation). Even then, I'm not sure how much the Scots were ever racialised as opposed to seen as a different nationality. (And, of course, Scotland has only ever been part Gaelic - parts have been Anglo since the dark ages, other parts Norse well
into the Middle Ages).
posted by jb at 8:55 PM on January 21, 2016 [1 favorite]
But to note: ethnic relations between the constituent parts of the UK in the 17th & 18th centuries is a very contentious bit of history - and I am far from an expert.
(I spent my graduate research years counting cows, and finding that English "peasants" were never called peasants and don't seem to have ever acted like peasants but rather like small market-oriented farmers.)
posted by jb at 9:00 PM on January 21, 2016 [1 favorite]
(I spent my graduate research years counting cows, and finding that English "peasants" were never called peasants and don't seem to have ever acted like peasants but rather like small market-oriented farmers.)
posted by jb at 9:00 PM on January 21, 2016 [1 favorite]
As I understand it, though, if you look at southern and eastern Europe, you actually get full-on racialized language about the European periphery, and then those people "become" white as imperialism/colonialism advances and as the peripheral economies are better integrated into the center. I say this mostly based on people like Franco Moretti (and Nancy Armstrong?) writing about how southern and eastern Europe appear in early novels, admittedly.
This made me Google Franco Moretti-- I don't know if this is a representative sample, but this "core and periphery" business seems rather regressive to me. Even within Europe, maybe southern and eastern Europe looked backwards in 1870, but centuries earlier than that, things were quite reversed: England was a petty state, Italy was the incubator of capitalism and high art. And the stuff we're still reeling from— colonialism, slavery, genocide of Native Americans— was developed and perfected by Spain and Portugal. (And arguably these things simply extended to the New World, with papal support, attitudes and ideologies developed in the fight against the Muslims in Iberia)
Moretti talks about "cultures that belong to the periphery of the literary system" as if the novel wasn't invented in East Asia. The Chinese and Japanese were writing novels and enjoying widely diffused printed books at a time when a European noble counted himself lucky to have a few hand-written books bolted to a shelf. What would the Chinese make of being assigned the "periphery of the literary system" and being told that the novel "came first" in Europe?
Whites can undoubtedly learn a lot studying our own history, but for learning a bunch of new things fast, it's hard to beat reading and studying nonwhites.
posted by zompist at 10:52 PM on January 21, 2016 [2 favorites]
This made me Google Franco Moretti-- I don't know if this is a representative sample, but this "core and periphery" business seems rather regressive to me. Even within Europe, maybe southern and eastern Europe looked backwards in 1870, but centuries earlier than that, things were quite reversed: England was a petty state, Italy was the incubator of capitalism and high art. And the stuff we're still reeling from— colonialism, slavery, genocide of Native Americans— was developed and perfected by Spain and Portugal. (And arguably these things simply extended to the New World, with papal support, attitudes and ideologies developed in the fight against the Muslims in Iberia)
Moretti talks about "cultures that belong to the periphery of the literary system" as if the novel wasn't invented in East Asia. The Chinese and Japanese were writing novels and enjoying widely diffused printed books at a time when a European noble counted himself lucky to have a few hand-written books bolted to a shelf. What would the Chinese make of being assigned the "periphery of the literary system" and being told that the novel "came first" in Europe?
Whites can undoubtedly learn a lot studying our own history, but for learning a bunch of new things fast, it's hard to beat reading and studying nonwhites.
posted by zompist at 10:52 PM on January 21, 2016 [2 favorites]
Why do white people always think that my top priority ought to be wagging my tail like a puppy so that racist white people might have a faint possibility of performing the tiniest iota [...]
This feels a bit like a personal attack as I see there's a phrase I used in your comment, though I'm not sure if it's specifically against me? If so...this is the first I've seen your name in this thread and could not possibly have directed any of my statements at you personally and know nothing about you. If not, I apologize for my assumption.
I'm not interested in laying bare the specifics of my family tree here (some white, some PoC), but I will say that I am a woman and so am intimately familiar with sexism and its effects lo, these many years. As such, I do have experience with being talked over, misconstrued, harassed, economically abused and condescended to and do not fucking appreciate it, thanks. Your experiences are yours and mine are mine. Life is messy and rough and we all have our battles and it's completely fucking random where and when we're born in this world and under what conditions.
I stand by my assertion that categorizing 'degrees of whiteness' is a bad, misguided idea for what I think are obvious reasons. What the hell is it for? Really? Who is the intended audience? I mean, what would be the result, do you think, of someone making a fucking chart of 'who is most oppressed'? or, 'degrees of maleness'? Or, jesus god forbid, 'degrees of gender'? Along with disagreement do you not think there would be justifiable outrage? It would be, frankly, juvenile – not to mention a great work of fiction. Human beings are not easily packaged into neat little boxes and history is long, convoluted and complex. These horrible categorizations of people have been done historically and they're awful, wrong and untrue and used to justify bad things. Can we maybe not perpetuate them, for christ's sake?
posted by Klaxon Aoooogah at 12:01 AM on January 22, 2016 [3 favorites]
This feels a bit like a personal attack as I see there's a phrase I used in your comment, though I'm not sure if it's specifically against me? If so...this is the first I've seen your name in this thread and could not possibly have directed any of my statements at you personally and know nothing about you. If not, I apologize for my assumption.
I'm not interested in laying bare the specifics of my family tree here (some white, some PoC), but I will say that I am a woman and so am intimately familiar with sexism and its effects lo, these many years. As such, I do have experience with being talked over, misconstrued, harassed, economically abused and condescended to and do not fucking appreciate it, thanks. Your experiences are yours and mine are mine. Life is messy and rough and we all have our battles and it's completely fucking random where and when we're born in this world and under what conditions.
I stand by my assertion that categorizing 'degrees of whiteness' is a bad, misguided idea for what I think are obvious reasons. What the hell is it for? Really? Who is the intended audience? I mean, what would be the result, do you think, of someone making a fucking chart of 'who is most oppressed'? or, 'degrees of maleness'? Or, jesus god forbid, 'degrees of gender'? Along with disagreement do you not think there would be justifiable outrage? It would be, frankly, juvenile – not to mention a great work of fiction. Human beings are not easily packaged into neat little boxes and history is long, convoluted and complex. These horrible categorizations of people have been done historically and they're awful, wrong and untrue and used to justify bad things. Can we maybe not perpetuate them, for christ's sake?
posted by Klaxon Aoooogah at 12:01 AM on January 22, 2016 [3 favorites]
Moretti talks about "cultures that belong to the periphery of the literary system"
I know we're straying pretty far afield, but Moretti is (at least based on his other work) talking about the evolution of a very particular kind of "novel" - he's making an argument that there's a way of organizing narrative that comes into being with (IIRC) Pamela, proceeds through Goethe and Scott and Austen and eventually collapses/turns into something so different as to be a different thing around WWI. He's also saying (in his writing about world literature, if I understand him correctly) that this particular way of organizing narrative spreads from Western Europe and becomes pervasive. I think he'd probably say, judging by the company he keeps, that this is tied up with the forcible spread of European rule and by the economics of imperialism.
Based on my loose acquaintance with some of the big early modern Chinese and Japanese fiction, although read in translation, I think Moretti's work implies that you don't get from Tale of Genji to Wild Geese or The Makioka Sisters or from Cao Xueqin to Ba Jin, for instance, without interaction with the Western literary system and the styles it privileges, and without Western military and economic power.
The Tale of Genji isn't organized anything like the "novel" form that became hegemonic between, say, 1750 in England and the end of WWI; neither is The Story of the Stone, The Water Margin, etc., and Western European fictional narrative pre-Pamela (and plenty that's written alongside Pamela, eg The Manuscript Found At Saragossa isn't either; if I understand correctly, there's actually a really contentious process of canon-building in Western Europe itself in the early-mid 19th century in which the format of the "novel" gets standardized in a way that advantages the cultural production of white Western European men and the set of ideas that we learn about in English literature, the "modern" versus the "primitive", "Man" verus "Nature", etc.
I think by "core and periphery" he's talking about a very specific process and a very specific thing-called-a-novel, in short. He's not saying "here is where all important literature is written, unlike other places which do not have important literature"; he's saying "here is a kind of thing which becomes hegemonic in England and then diffuses outward, and that is part of an economic and political process".
(When you look at his work on England and Scotland in English novels, which I'm more familiar with, he's talking about a pretty constrained period and type of writing - he's not talking about every piece of fiction to come out of the British Isles, and he's talking about basically 1750 to 1900.)
I'm not sure that the language he uses about "world literature" is very helpful, but I have a lot less trouble with the idea that a certain kind of "novel" becomes a template/hegemonic starting in the mid-18th century in England and then diffusing out from there, and that this "novel" is used as a marker for people's ability to participate in "high culture", and that this is tied up with Western values about development, the "modern", and the individual.
I don't think that by "literary system" Moretti is talking about "the actual production of all literature worldwide which we understand as part of one big system like the system of ocean currents"; I think he's talking indirectly about the process by which The Tale of Genji or The Water Margin came to be understood in the West as amusing proto-novels, or big almost-novels, or somehow veerings-off from the "real" novel. I don't think he's arguing for the "real" novel; I think he's saying that between 1750 and 1917 a certain understanding of the "novel" becomes globally hegemonic, and that this is specifically not a "natural" or "inevitable" process.
I think that "in the West people mostly don't think or value about the long literary history of non-Western places because we have a political narrative of the nature of literature" is absolutely a corollary to Moretti's work, not a contradiction of it.
To me this framing of the "novel" is all very tricky, because the world is made up of exceptions, and yet there still emerges a coherent body of this kind of "novel", and you still start seeing this kind of "novel" outside its places of origin, and you start seeing anthologies and literary reviews and eventually literary studies which consolidate this idea of the "novel". That is a thing that has happened.
posted by Frowner at 3:52 AM on January 22, 2016 [1 favorite]
I know we're straying pretty far afield, but Moretti is (at least based on his other work) talking about the evolution of a very particular kind of "novel" - he's making an argument that there's a way of organizing narrative that comes into being with (IIRC) Pamela, proceeds through Goethe and Scott and Austen and eventually collapses/turns into something so different as to be a different thing around WWI. He's also saying (in his writing about world literature, if I understand him correctly) that this particular way of organizing narrative spreads from Western Europe and becomes pervasive. I think he'd probably say, judging by the company he keeps, that this is tied up with the forcible spread of European rule and by the economics of imperialism.
Based on my loose acquaintance with some of the big early modern Chinese and Japanese fiction, although read in translation, I think Moretti's work implies that you don't get from Tale of Genji to Wild Geese or The Makioka Sisters or from Cao Xueqin to Ba Jin, for instance, without interaction with the Western literary system and the styles it privileges, and without Western military and economic power.
The Tale of Genji isn't organized anything like the "novel" form that became hegemonic between, say, 1750 in England and the end of WWI; neither is The Story of the Stone, The Water Margin, etc., and Western European fictional narrative pre-Pamela (and plenty that's written alongside Pamela, eg The Manuscript Found At Saragossa isn't either; if I understand correctly, there's actually a really contentious process of canon-building in Western Europe itself in the early-mid 19th century in which the format of the "novel" gets standardized in a way that advantages the cultural production of white Western European men and the set of ideas that we learn about in English literature, the "modern" versus the "primitive", "Man" verus "Nature", etc.
I think by "core and periphery" he's talking about a very specific process and a very specific thing-called-a-novel, in short. He's not saying "here is where all important literature is written, unlike other places which do not have important literature"; he's saying "here is a kind of thing which becomes hegemonic in England and then diffuses outward, and that is part of an economic and political process".
(When you look at his work on England and Scotland in English novels, which I'm more familiar with, he's talking about a pretty constrained period and type of writing - he's not talking about every piece of fiction to come out of the British Isles, and he's talking about basically 1750 to 1900.)
I'm not sure that the language he uses about "world literature" is very helpful, but I have a lot less trouble with the idea that a certain kind of "novel" becomes a template/hegemonic starting in the mid-18th century in England and then diffusing out from there, and that this "novel" is used as a marker for people's ability to participate in "high culture", and that this is tied up with Western values about development, the "modern", and the individual.
I don't think that by "literary system" Moretti is talking about "the actual production of all literature worldwide which we understand as part of one big system like the system of ocean currents"; I think he's talking indirectly about the process by which The Tale of Genji or The Water Margin came to be understood in the West as amusing proto-novels, or big almost-novels, or somehow veerings-off from the "real" novel. I don't think he's arguing for the "real" novel; I think he's saying that between 1750 and 1917 a certain understanding of the "novel" becomes globally hegemonic, and that this is specifically not a "natural" or "inevitable" process.
I think that "in the West people mostly don't think or value about the long literary history of non-Western places because we have a political narrative of the nature of literature" is absolutely a corollary to Moretti's work, not a contradiction of it.
To me this framing of the "novel" is all very tricky, because the world is made up of exceptions, and yet there still emerges a coherent body of this kind of "novel", and you still start seeing this kind of "novel" outside its places of origin, and you start seeing anthologies and literary reviews and eventually literary studies which consolidate this idea of the "novel". That is a thing that has happened.
posted by Frowner at 3:52 AM on January 22, 2016 [1 favorite]
Whiteness History Month Project, unlike heritage months, is not a celebratory endeavor, it is an effort to change our campus climate.
This is one aspect that could be problematic and possibly even bigoted about this event. Other "$ETHNICITY Month" or "$ETHNICITY Day" events tend to be aimed at elevation and celebration - "look at all the good things that $ETHNICITY did for the world".
White people, collectively, have done both wonderful things and terrible things. Like every other race or ethnic group. But why is it only "Whiteness" that is under the microscope for interrogation and deconstruction in this manner?
posted by theorique at 5:43 AM on January 22, 2016
This is one aspect that could be problematic and possibly even bigoted about this event. Other "$ETHNICITY Month" or "$ETHNICITY Day" events tend to be aimed at elevation and celebration - "look at all the good things that $ETHNICITY did for the world".
White people, collectively, have done both wonderful things and terrible things. Like every other race or ethnic group. But why is it only "Whiteness" that is under the microscope for interrogation and deconstruction in this manner?
posted by theorique at 5:43 AM on January 22, 2016
> I mean, what would be the result, do you think, of someone making a fucking chart of 'who is most oppressed'? or, 'degrees of maleness'? Or, jesus god forbid, 'degrees of gender'?
But we do do this: we talk about the different ways in which various kinds of maleness/gender (how they are performed, presented, perceived, etc.) are acceptable or not, depending on culture and context. I feel like I'm really missing something in your comments, because it sounds like you're saying that discussing the existence of a thing (e.g., the historical fact that the Irish used to not be considered White in the US) is the same as endorsing that distinction, or creating it, or perpetuating it (or all three). Is that what you mean?
posted by rtha at 6:22 AM on January 22, 2016 [4 favorites]
But we do do this: we talk about the different ways in which various kinds of maleness/gender (how they are performed, presented, perceived, etc.) are acceptable or not, depending on culture and context. I feel like I'm really missing something in your comments, because it sounds like you're saying that discussing the existence of a thing (e.g., the historical fact that the Irish used to not be considered White in the US) is the same as endorsing that distinction, or creating it, or perpetuating it (or all three). Is that what you mean?
posted by rtha at 6:22 AM on January 22, 2016 [4 favorites]
On my way to work I was thinking about something that happened at my high school that seems relevant.
I went to high school outside Chicago in the late eighties/early nineties. My high school was overwhelmingly, overwhelmingly white even for that time and place. (It was only later that I realized how weird my town was.)
At my high school, there was a very explicit discourse about the kids of Italian background - people would literally talk about this. "We" all "knew" that the kids of Italian background listened to loud music, wore tacky clothes, spent a lot of time in Chicago doing dodgy things instead of classy things like other kids might, were promiscuous, got in fights and were not, in general, that academically inclined. This was, of course, not true, but even the richer, more popular Italian kids who hung out with the richer and more popular of the Other White Kids* had some stigma from this.
I actually saw this process, because for part of my miserable adolescent career, I sat at the lunch table with the working class Italian kids, because they were nice to me. At, I have to add, some social risk to themselves. So I was a witness to a variety of instances of exclusion and also heard people telling me things about these kids.
Some of the Italian-American kids had ties to a kind of broader urban social scene that was mostly Italian-American but overlapped with Black social scenes. The Italian-American kids, for instance, were stigmatized during part of this period for listening to house music. (I wonder how many of the rest of us could have, like, identified a house track if one had suddenly started playing.) There was also some distinction between the fashions that the Italian kids who listened to house music and went out dancing wore and what the Other White Kids wore, and this was duly noted. But these very innocent, minor cultural differences were racialized and turned into stigma.
Now, I happen to know that I am not making this up and that I was aware of it at the time, because I used to do little tiny fashion drawings of what my peers wore and because I wrote about all this in a fanzine that I made in my first year of college, when the memories were still fairly fresh.
By the time I graduated, the school was getting less white, and the social stigma that had hitherto been used against the Italian-American kids was now getting turned on the Latin@ and Black kids. That is, I saw a social group "become white". I witnessed this process.
Looking back, I feel like witnessing this situation is one of the reasons that I'm interested in how whiteness is experienced differently by different white people. And one of the reasons that I believe that social violence against marginalized white populations is part of how white supremacy reproduces itself. My school had an intensely racialized system even when we were all white-by-contemporary-standards. That system kept racist ideas alive and preserved the idea of a racial hierarchy, which was then used to harm people of color.
This is why I don't think that "taxonomizing whiteness" operates the same as a racist taxonomy of Blackness, for instance. A racist taxonomy would argue that there was something intrinsic to this racial hierarchy, something real, and that real cultural/hereditary difference is the best explanation for what happened at the school. What I'm saying is that there was a fake, political, ideological taxonomy that made different white people experience different things, and that this taxonomy was actually a supporting part of white supremacy.
*Not all the Other White Kids were of northern european background, but the Other White Kids were not obviously southern european and did not have Italian last names or have ties to the Italian-American community around Chicago.
posted by Frowner at 6:25 AM on January 22, 2016 [7 favorites]
I went to high school outside Chicago in the late eighties/early nineties. My high school was overwhelmingly, overwhelmingly white even for that time and place. (It was only later that I realized how weird my town was.)
At my high school, there was a very explicit discourse about the kids of Italian background - people would literally talk about this. "We" all "knew" that the kids of Italian background listened to loud music, wore tacky clothes, spent a lot of time in Chicago doing dodgy things instead of classy things like other kids might, were promiscuous, got in fights and were not, in general, that academically inclined. This was, of course, not true, but even the richer, more popular Italian kids who hung out with the richer and more popular of the Other White Kids* had some stigma from this.
I actually saw this process, because for part of my miserable adolescent career, I sat at the lunch table with the working class Italian kids, because they were nice to me. At, I have to add, some social risk to themselves. So I was a witness to a variety of instances of exclusion and also heard people telling me things about these kids.
Some of the Italian-American kids had ties to a kind of broader urban social scene that was mostly Italian-American but overlapped with Black social scenes. The Italian-American kids, for instance, were stigmatized during part of this period for listening to house music. (I wonder how many of the rest of us could have, like, identified a house track if one had suddenly started playing.) There was also some distinction between the fashions that the Italian kids who listened to house music and went out dancing wore and what the Other White Kids wore, and this was duly noted. But these very innocent, minor cultural differences were racialized and turned into stigma.
Now, I happen to know that I am not making this up and that I was aware of it at the time, because I used to do little tiny fashion drawings of what my peers wore and because I wrote about all this in a fanzine that I made in my first year of college, when the memories were still fairly fresh.
By the time I graduated, the school was getting less white, and the social stigma that had hitherto been used against the Italian-American kids was now getting turned on the Latin@ and Black kids. That is, I saw a social group "become white". I witnessed this process.
Looking back, I feel like witnessing this situation is one of the reasons that I'm interested in how whiteness is experienced differently by different white people. And one of the reasons that I believe that social violence against marginalized white populations is part of how white supremacy reproduces itself. My school had an intensely racialized system even when we were all white-by-contemporary-standards. That system kept racist ideas alive and preserved the idea of a racial hierarchy, which was then used to harm people of color.
This is why I don't think that "taxonomizing whiteness" operates the same as a racist taxonomy of Blackness, for instance. A racist taxonomy would argue that there was something intrinsic to this racial hierarchy, something real, and that real cultural/hereditary difference is the best explanation for what happened at the school. What I'm saying is that there was a fake, political, ideological taxonomy that made different white people experience different things, and that this taxonomy was actually a supporting part of white supremacy.
*Not all the Other White Kids were of northern european background, but the Other White Kids were not obviously southern european and did not have Italian last names or have ties to the Italian-American community around Chicago.
posted by Frowner at 6:25 AM on January 22, 2016 [7 favorites]
I stand by my assertion that categorizing 'degrees of whiteness' is a bad, misguided idea for what I think are obvious reasons.
I think you've moved the goal-posts here. Your first comment in this thread was that we shouldn't be taxonomizing "groups of people". Excuse me, if I, as a PoC, decide to interpret that such that I am included under "people". I don't think it's wrong that I and other people reacted to your statement as a tired, old cry to colorblindness, and I think it's fair that we interpreted your subsequent statement that "it's far more likely to alienate people than it is to convince them to change the way they already think" as a demand for PoC to stop talking about the racial divisions that we experience.
So when folks react against that, you suddenly gotcha them by saying that you're really pointing out how people are categorizing "degrees of whiteness" when that was not at all present in your original claim. At all. And even then, I don't see anyone really doing this. People are talking about the tenuous way whiteness is constructed, its fluid categories, and how white people can still be subject to race-based oppression (e.g. some Jewish people).
I'm sorry, but it's impossible not to read your behavior here as a tremendous dogwhistle against PoC.
posted by Conspire at 6:26 AM on January 22, 2016 [5 favorites]
I think you've moved the goal-posts here. Your first comment in this thread was that we shouldn't be taxonomizing "groups of people". Excuse me, if I, as a PoC, decide to interpret that such that I am included under "people". I don't think it's wrong that I and other people reacted to your statement as a tired, old cry to colorblindness, and I think it's fair that we interpreted your subsequent statement that "it's far more likely to alienate people than it is to convince them to change the way they already think" as a demand for PoC to stop talking about the racial divisions that we experience.
So when folks react against that, you suddenly gotcha them by saying that you're really pointing out how people are categorizing "degrees of whiteness" when that was not at all present in your original claim. At all. And even then, I don't see anyone really doing this. People are talking about the tenuous way whiteness is constructed, its fluid categories, and how white people can still be subject to race-based oppression (e.g. some Jewish people).
I'm sorry, but it's impossible not to read your behavior here as a tremendous dogwhistle against PoC.
posted by Conspire at 6:26 AM on January 22, 2016 [5 favorites]
(Something I meant to include - in my high school, no number of Italian kids on the honor role, Italian kids in the art classes, Italian kids who were rich and preppy, etc changed "our" knowledge of what Italian kids "were like". "Italianness" was a fiction, but a fiction that had material consequences.
And I stress that this happened in, like, 1991.)
posted by Frowner at 6:26 AM on January 22, 2016 [1 favorite]
And I stress that this happened in, like, 1991.)
posted by Frowner at 6:26 AM on January 22, 2016 [1 favorite]
But why is it only "Whiteness" that is under the microscope for interrogation and deconstruction in this manner?
A truly spectacular case of point-missing.
posted by tobascodagama at 8:36 AM on January 22, 2016
A truly spectacular case of point-missing.
posted by tobascodagama at 8:36 AM on January 22, 2016
A truly spectacular case of point-missing.
Very useful drive-by ad-hominem. Given that you're approaching this issue from an enlightened perspective that the rest of us must be lacking, what would you say the point is that I've missed here? For our edification, education, etc.
posted by theorique at 11:20 AM on January 22, 2016
Very useful drive-by ad-hominem. Given that you're approaching this issue from an enlightened perspective that the rest of us must be lacking, what would you say the point is that I've missed here? For our edification, education, etc.
posted by theorique at 11:20 AM on January 22, 2016
I'm not gonna do your fucking 101 work for you. And this really is 101 shit. Remedial, even. If you seriously need someone to answer that question, you're not even participating in the conversation, you're actively hindering it.
posted by tobascodagama at 11:22 AM on January 22, 2016 [4 favorites]
posted by tobascodagama at 11:22 AM on January 22, 2016 [4 favorites]
But why is it only "Whiteness" that is under the microscope for interrogation and deconstruction in this manner?
I doubt it is. In fact, it's impossible to discuss the invention of whiteness without discussing the invention of race, and that "white," in American, is a status of privilege in opposition to people of color, who are denied that privilege.
In fact the website says this (with my bolding the relevant few words): Whiteness History Month: Context, Consequences and Change is a multidisciplinary, district-wide, educational project examining race and racism through an exploration of the construction of whiteness, its origins and heritage.
So whiteness is just the jumping off point.
posted by maxsparber at 11:31 AM on January 22, 2016 [2 favorites]
I doubt it is. In fact, it's impossible to discuss the invention of whiteness without discussing the invention of race, and that "white," in American, is a status of privilege in opposition to people of color, who are denied that privilege.
In fact the website says this (with my bolding the relevant few words): Whiteness History Month: Context, Consequences and Change is a multidisciplinary, district-wide, educational project examining race and racism through an exploration of the construction of whiteness, its origins and heritage.
So whiteness is just the jumping off point.
posted by maxsparber at 11:31 AM on January 22, 2016 [2 favorites]
I'm not gonna do your fucking 101 work for you. And this really is 101 shit. Remedial, even. If you seriously need someone to answer that question, you're not even participating in the conversation, you're actively hindering it.
I see this will be fruitful. Good day, sir.
posted by theorique at 11:32 AM on January 22, 2016
I see this will be fruitful. Good day, sir.
posted by theorique at 11:32 AM on January 22, 2016
I think you've moved the goal-posts here. Your first comment in this thread was that we shouldn't be taxonomizing "groups of people". Excuse me, if I, as a PoC, decide to interpret that such that I am included under "people". I don't think it's wrong that I and other people reacted to your statement as a tired, old cry to colorblindness
No. I was referring to 19th and early 20th century texts (with pics and drawings!) of Europeans classifying and sub-classifying human beings and I think we can agree that this was a bad, bad idea. Since we're not in each others heads to confirm, you'll either believe me or you won't.
I think it's fair that we interpreted your subsequent statement that "it's far more likely to alienate people than it is to convince them to change the way they already think"
Well, on the eve of an American election and with right-wing media picking up this story...I'd prefer to not see more people running to right, which some may do as they could interpret this as racism against whites and we all know the right doesn't do nuance well. I'd strongly prefer not to see Donald Trump as president, even though I'm indirectly affected as a Canadian. If the aim is a more progressive society, stirring up the right even more, if that's possible, in an election year ain't the way to do it. In other words, it isn't just about the Portland students.
So when folks react against that, you suddenly gotcha them by saying that you're really pointing out how people are categorizing "degrees of whiteness
How does this in any way contradict my first statement? Don't taxonomize groups of people - not PoC, not white people, not mixed-race people, not differently-abled people...nobody. Since the PCC program is about 'whiteness', classifying white people is part of the program and I was reasserting my original point, but more specifically.
I'm sorry, but it's impossible not to read your behavior here as a tremendous dogwhistle against PoC.
No. Again, believe me or don't. You will choose to see things the way you choose to see them. And the whole framing of my "behavior" as a personal attack against you is frankly bizarre considering you didn't exist in this thread until your personal attack against me.
posted by Klaxon Aoooogah at 7:35 PM on January 22, 2016
No. I was referring to 19th and early 20th century texts (with pics and drawings!) of Europeans classifying and sub-classifying human beings and I think we can agree that this was a bad, bad idea. Since we're not in each others heads to confirm, you'll either believe me or you won't.
I think it's fair that we interpreted your subsequent statement that "it's far more likely to alienate people than it is to convince them to change the way they already think"
Well, on the eve of an American election and with right-wing media picking up this story...I'd prefer to not see more people running to right, which some may do as they could interpret this as racism against whites and we all know the right doesn't do nuance well. I'd strongly prefer not to see Donald Trump as president, even though I'm indirectly affected as a Canadian. If the aim is a more progressive society, stirring up the right even more, if that's possible, in an election year ain't the way to do it. In other words, it isn't just about the Portland students.
So when folks react against that, you suddenly gotcha them by saying that you're really pointing out how people are categorizing "degrees of whiteness
How does this in any way contradict my first statement? Don't taxonomize groups of people - not PoC, not white people, not mixed-race people, not differently-abled people...nobody. Since the PCC program is about 'whiteness', classifying white people is part of the program and I was reasserting my original point, but more specifically.
I'm sorry, but it's impossible not to read your behavior here as a tremendous dogwhistle against PoC.
No. Again, believe me or don't. You will choose to see things the way you choose to see them. And the whole framing of my "behavior" as a personal attack against you is frankly bizarre considering you didn't exist in this thread until your personal attack against me.
posted by Klaxon Aoooogah at 7:35 PM on January 22, 2016
I know we're straying pretty far afield, but Moretti is (at least based on his other work) talking about the evolution of a very particular kind of "novel" [...] I think he'd probably say, judging by the company he keeps, that this is tied up with the forcible spread of European rule and by the economics of imperialism
Thanks for the clarifications! There's no doubt that Western novels influenced Chinese ones (with little influence back... but the story would be different with poetry). I'm just extremely out of sympathy with any approach that doesn't recognize that Chinese literature is a very sophisticated thing in its own right, not a mirror that's held up to the West.
Also, it seems weird to talk about the Western novel as something that came out of Britain. Surely a good case can be made that the height of the Western novel belongs to the Russians? And in the case of China, both because of the strength of the examples and political affinities, I think much of the influence came from Russia.
The Tale of Genji isn't organized anything like the "novel" form that became hegemonic between, say, 1750 in England and the end of WWI; neither is The Story of the Stone, The Water Margin, etc.
Maybe not, though, well, why should it? The classic Chinese novels are sprawling and episodic... well, so is George R.R. Martin. On the other hand, Golden Lotus is a novel of manners that doesn't seem too far removed from the 19th century classic novels, and the gong'an mysteries (e.g. Judge Dee) are short, focused detective novels. I'd be hesitant to judge what the West had to teach the Chinese without reading a heck of a lot more Chinese literature.
amusing proto-novels, or big almost-novels, or somehow veerings-off from the "real" novel.
I hope no one who's read them describes them that way.
posted by zompist at 7:52 PM on January 22, 2016 [1 favorite]
Thanks for the clarifications! There's no doubt that Western novels influenced Chinese ones (with little influence back... but the story would be different with poetry). I'm just extremely out of sympathy with any approach that doesn't recognize that Chinese literature is a very sophisticated thing in its own right, not a mirror that's held up to the West.
Also, it seems weird to talk about the Western novel as something that came out of Britain. Surely a good case can be made that the height of the Western novel belongs to the Russians? And in the case of China, both because of the strength of the examples and political affinities, I think much of the influence came from Russia.
The Tale of Genji isn't organized anything like the "novel" form that became hegemonic between, say, 1750 in England and the end of WWI; neither is The Story of the Stone, The Water Margin, etc.
Maybe not, though, well, why should it? The classic Chinese novels are sprawling and episodic... well, so is George R.R. Martin. On the other hand, Golden Lotus is a novel of manners that doesn't seem too far removed from the 19th century classic novels, and the gong'an mysteries (e.g. Judge Dee) are short, focused detective novels. I'd be hesitant to judge what the West had to teach the Chinese without reading a heck of a lot more Chinese literature.
amusing proto-novels, or big almost-novels, or somehow veerings-off from the "real" novel.
I hope no one who's read them describes them that way.
posted by zompist at 7:52 PM on January 22, 2016 [1 favorite]
t sounds like you're saying that discussing the existence of a thing (e.g., the historical fact that the Irish used to not be considered White in the US)
Is this a historical fact? I know that anti-Irish discrimination is a historical fact, but who didn't consider them White, at what period of U.S. history, and how did this failure to consider them White manifest itself. As I noted earlier, at a time when the law made naturalization as a U.S. citizen contingent on being White, as far as I know, this didn't prove a bar to Irish naturalization.
posted by layceepee at 8:41 PM on January 22, 2016
Is this a historical fact? I know that anti-Irish discrimination is a historical fact, but who didn't consider them White, at what period of U.S. history, and how did this failure to consider them White manifest itself. As I noted earlier, at a time when the law made naturalization as a U.S. citizen contingent on being White, as far as I know, this didn't prove a bar to Irish naturalization.
posted by layceepee at 8:41 PM on January 22, 2016
Last time I mentioned the Irish thing somebody who appeared to know what they were talking about said that the Irish thing was mostly brought into the public consciousness via Noel Ignatiev's book "How the Irish Became White" and that Ignatiev was full of shit. So, yeah, I wouldn't say it is a "historical fact".
I don't know where that comment is, though.
posted by Justinian at 10:09 PM on January 22, 2016
I don't know where that comment is, though.
posted by Justinian at 10:09 PM on January 22, 2016
Now that I think about it maybe they only said that the "became white" thing was metaphorical rather than Ignatiev being completely out to lunch. In any case the idea was that the Irish were always seen as white but discriminated against anyway.
posted by Justinian at 10:12 PM on January 22, 2016 [1 favorite]
posted by Justinian at 10:12 PM on January 22, 2016 [1 favorite]
From my reading of the era, the Irish were certainly seen as a different race than the English, and this put them into contested land in the US. They seem to have been seen as more like white people when compared with black people, but more like black people when compared with white people, which is likely why phrases like "Irish nigger" were common enough for there to have been a stage play of that name.
It's complicated, because it's not like there was any national committee deciding which ethnicity was white and which wasn't. But Nativist and Know-Nothing writing from the era definitely uses racial language, and identifies the Irish as another, and lesser, race, comparable to black people.
posted by maxsparber at 7:26 AM on January 23, 2016 [1 favorite]
It's complicated, because it's not like there was any national committee deciding which ethnicity was white and which wasn't. But Nativist and Know-Nothing writing from the era definitely uses racial language, and identifies the Irish as another, and lesser, race, comparable to black people.
posted by maxsparber at 7:26 AM on January 23, 2016 [1 favorite]
It's complicated, because it's not like there was any national committee deciding which ethnicity was white and which wasn't.
There wasn't a national committee, but there was the Supreme Court, which in Ozawa v. United States upheld a lower court finding that "white" people were members of the Caucasian race. Was it ever argued that Irish were not members of the Caucasian race? And there were later cases that held, first, that Asian Indians were not white, according to statute, and that, later, Syrians were white.
There was also of course, the Dred Scott decision, which infamously declared that " "beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations, and so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect." Is there any similar record of a legal distinction between Irish and whites?
Were the anti-miscegenation laws that prevailed until Loving v. Virginia ever applied to marriages between Irish and whites?
I understand the use of "the Irish became white" as a metaphor for the shifting pattern of discrimination in America, but I think to label in a historical fact obscures important ways in which race-based discrimination is different, especially in the historical sense, from other phenomena.
posted by layceepee at 7:44 AM on January 23, 2016 [1 favorite]
There wasn't a national committee, but there was the Supreme Court, which in Ozawa v. United States upheld a lower court finding that "white" people were members of the Caucasian race. Was it ever argued that Irish were not members of the Caucasian race? And there were later cases that held, first, that Asian Indians were not white, according to statute, and that, later, Syrians were white.
There was also of course, the Dred Scott decision, which infamously declared that " "beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations, and so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect." Is there any similar record of a legal distinction between Irish and whites?
Were the anti-miscegenation laws that prevailed until Loving v. Virginia ever applied to marriages between Irish and whites?
I understand the use of "the Irish became white" as a metaphor for the shifting pattern of discrimination in America, but I think to label in a historical fact obscures important ways in which race-based discrimination is different, especially in the historical sense, from other phenomena.
posted by layceepee at 7:44 AM on January 23, 2016 [1 favorite]
Maybe not, though, well, why should it? The classic Chinese novels are sprawling and episodic... well, so is George R.R. Martin. On the other hand, Golden Lotus is a novel of manners that doesn't seem too far removed from the 19th century classic novels, and the gong'an mysteries (e.g. Judge Dee) are short, focused detective novels. I'd be hesitant to judge what the West had to teach the Chinese without reading a heck of a lot more Chinese literature.
Oh, no, it's not "what the West had to teach the Chinese", at all - it's "we can see the evidence of imperialist modernization in the changes that Chinese literature undergoes". For instance, I just now learned that Ba Jin corresponded with Sacco and Vanzetti before their executions - this wasn't widely known back when I was reading modern Chinese literature! The point isn't "oh, Ba Jin was a mere puppet of Western concerns" - it's "Ba Jin was engaged with the big questions of modernization and imperialism and you can see this in his writing, both stylistically and content-wise".
I think that when you look at late Victorian Orientalist engagement with China and Chinese literature you do see a lot of "oh, look at the amusing quaint stories" - there's serious scholarship too, but if you look at how "China" appears in children's stories or you look at some of the editions of excerpts of Chinese literature, you can see that there's definitely a lot of condescension there. (Just look at the names in translation even up through the sixties - there's a relatively late edition of SotS where the servants all have twee, semi-but-not-really-literal translations as names ("Pink Cloud" or whatever) and the aristocrats all have names in pinyin - and god knows there's an awful lot of cutesy stories, fairytales, etc where it's all "In far away Peking, Princess Floating Pearl woke up and said to her maid Green Nightengale....", where there's no attempt to capture tone and meaning in Mandarin, just exoticization.
This is not at all a contemporary attitude, scholarly or otherwise - it's certainly not where Moretti would go.
I think the key part is that Moretti is not, here, trying to value literature, or say that Pamela -for instance - is better than Story of the Stone (I'd infinitely rather read even the early, meh translations of SotS than slog through Pamela, personally - not that it isn't a great accomplishment as a novel, but SotS is to me so much more engaging.) I think he's trying to talk about how a particular understanding of "the novel" becomes hegemonic, not which novel-length works of fiction are best.
Here I draw from, like, not a good enough reading of Nancy Armstrong's How Novels Think: There's a point in England in the early 19th century where there's a lot of debate over what a novel is, what the "masterworks" are, etc, and a narrative emerges (through the production of anthologies and literary reviews) that certain books, plot structures, etc are the "real" novels, and that this excludes a great deal of work.
My assumption, which may or may not be talking through my hat - is that the English understanding of what the novel should be had a great deal of traction through export all over the British empire - the literal export of books, teaching English as a business language, bringing members of the colonized to Britain to study. If memory serves, Karl Marx was a big fan of Dickens and sort of the "classic" trajectory of the English novel, so I would assume that many marxists, globally speaking, ended up reading those novels in translation.
Obviously, there's lots of other important literary stuff happening while all this is going on - the point isn't to produce a theory that explains how literature works everywhere all the time; the point is to describe a particular process that happens in part of the world but that is important and pervasive.
All of this sort of happens only in retrospect, in a way. If you were reading English novels in 1870, you could read a whole huge range of stuff from the schlocky to the sublime, much of which has been largely forgotten now. But there is still this consolidation of an idea of "English literature" and "the novel", which becomes powerful and influential and which operates to exclude a lot of things.
I can't help but feel that this is a natural pairing with the idea of "whiteness". When you actually sit down and look for the thing itself, it's nowhere to be found - Vilette is unquestionably part of the 19th century British canon now, but it was marginalized and not always available until the 1970s, when feminist scholars took it up again (per Joanna Russ); there are writers who were hugely influential in the mid-19th century who are largely unread now; there are whole genres that don't fit neatly into this narrative. And yet "British literature" and "The Novel" have been used as sticks to beat marginalized people with, have been debated as legitimating factors, have formed whole disciplines and created an entire literary-industrial complex. "The novel" as a field of study has been used by the right and by radicals as a lever to achieve their aims.
And similarly, when you look closely at "whiteness" it doesn't hold up at all - it comes apart into a mess of arguments, experiences, regions, particularities. And yet - the question of who is white has shaped so much and with so much violence. "Whites only" has meant a lot of different things over time, but it's always meant "we can establish who is white so that we can dole out privileges and punishments". It's always been a system of power, and it's not enough to say "where is the genetic/cultural font of origin of whiteness? if you can't point to that then obviously whiteness doesn't exist".
(Now watch, Armstrong and Moretti show up, paying $5 each, to say that I am totally wrong. Well, that would be $10 that metafilter didn't have before.)
I guess I should stress that I am an amateur, and I brought Moretti into this only because I really like Signs Taken For Wonders and The Way of the World. I've read some of his other stuff, but I wouldn't actually say I know it really well.
posted by Frowner at 7:54 AM on January 23, 2016 [1 favorite]
> Don't taxonomize groups of people - not PoC, not white people, not mixed-race people, not differently-abled people...nobody.
Then how do we talk about race, the history of race, the effects of racism, all of that? It sounds like you're saying "Don't."
posted by rtha at 8:22 AM on January 23, 2016 [1 favorite]
Then how do we talk about race, the history of race, the effects of racism, all of that? It sounds like you're saying "Don't."
posted by rtha at 8:22 AM on January 23, 2016 [1 favorite]
(Also, George RR Martin is very much a contemporary product. I think there's some risk in this conversation of falling into "Chinese novels are like this, and Western novels are like that", when we both know that Chinese literature is diverse and changes over time, and that there is no unified "Western" novel form at all. I think you can say "there's this idea of "the novel" that emerges at this time in this place and that is very influential; you can describe the processes by which this idea comes into being" and you can say, for example, in Japan in the early 20th century you see writers very consciously either trying out or avoiding Western literary tropes and dealing with questions of modernization and imperialism - you can also see the idea-of-the-novel as influential here".
Of course, then there's also really neat stuff like when authors who aren't that big in the US or Britain are wildly influential elsewhere.
I think a peril of this is the simple fact that talking about 19th century English novels has for so long been shorthand for talking about 'real novels that are the best' (certainly up through the eighties and early nineties in sort of pop-scholarly circles) that it is very difficult to have a conversation about genre formation and stuff that isn't sort of flavored by "but we're really talking about the bestest novels, right?"
And yet I just find it so interesting to think about the way that genre exists and doesn't exist - that it's very powerful as an idea and has real material results, and yet it falls apart if you poke it. And how there are these specific moments where a big statement (an important critical work, an important literary work, an important anthology, etc) is made about what's good or what's foundational and that shifts the field totally, for good or for ill. it's this sort of strange intersection between how people seem to need organizing strategies to understand the world and the way those strategies are always myth.
posted by Frowner at 8:28 AM on January 23, 2016 [1 favorite]
Of course, then there's also really neat stuff like when authors who aren't that big in the US or Britain are wildly influential elsewhere.
I think a peril of this is the simple fact that talking about 19th century English novels has for so long been shorthand for talking about 'real novels that are the best' (certainly up through the eighties and early nineties in sort of pop-scholarly circles) that it is very difficult to have a conversation about genre formation and stuff that isn't sort of flavored by "but we're really talking about the bestest novels, right?"
And yet I just find it so interesting to think about the way that genre exists and doesn't exist - that it's very powerful as an idea and has real material results, and yet it falls apart if you poke it. And how there are these specific moments where a big statement (an important critical work, an important literary work, an important anthology, etc) is made about what's good or what's foundational and that shifts the field totally, for good or for ill. it's this sort of strange intersection between how people seem to need organizing strategies to understand the world and the way those strategies are always myth.
posted by Frowner at 8:28 AM on January 23, 2016 [1 favorite]
(Writers from the US or Britain who are wildly influential elsewhere but not as sucessful where they live, I mean.)
posted by Frowner at 9:10 AM on January 23, 2016
posted by Frowner at 9:10 AM on January 23, 2016
There wasn't a national committee, but there was the Supreme Court, which in Ozawa v. United States
In 1922. If we are to talk about the construction of whiteness in America, we are going to be discussing things that happened in the hundreds of years before that, and if we are to base whiteness in whether or not the Supreme Court decided a group was white, we cannot discuss almost anybody but Asians and Blacks. It's useful to know that race was once determined by America's high court, but it's just one way in which whiteness was evaluated in America, and a pretty late one.
posted by maxsparber at 10:00 AM on January 23, 2016 [1 favorite]
In 1922. If we are to talk about the construction of whiteness in America, we are going to be discussing things that happened in the hundreds of years before that, and if we are to base whiteness in whether or not the Supreme Court decided a group was white, we cannot discuss almost anybody but Asians and Blacks. It's useful to know that race was once determined by America's high court, but it's just one way in which whiteness was evaluated in America, and a pretty late one.
posted by maxsparber at 10:00 AM on January 23, 2016 [1 favorite]
In 1922.
But whiteness had been a specific legal requirement for naturalization as a U.S. citizen since 1790. What was the historical period in which Irish immigrants were not allowed to become naturalized citizens because they weren't considered white? I've mentioned this several times, but no one who is reporting "the Irish weren't considered white" as a historical fact rather than a metaphoric description of discrimination has addressed it, unless I've missed the response.
posted by layceepee at 11:50 AM on January 23, 2016
But whiteness had been a specific legal requirement for naturalization as a U.S. citizen since 1790. What was the historical period in which Irish immigrants were not allowed to become naturalized citizens because they weren't considered white? I've mentioned this several times, but no one who is reporting "the Irish weren't considered white" as a historical fact rather than a metaphoric description of discrimination has addressed it, unless I've missed the response.
posted by layceepee at 11:50 AM on January 23, 2016
Then how do we talk about race, the history of race, the effects of racism, all of that? It sounds like you're saying "Don't."
What I see is an overwhelmingly white college trying to look 'me too' and progressive while being regressive. It attempts to reduce and simplify a complex issue using just one yardstick, 'whiteness' (whatever the hell that is) per the very title of their program.
It would be more intellectually honest to call the program 'the history of oppression in America by people of European descent'. Why don't they call it what it is instead of making up some bullshit metric that nobody will be able to agree on and which is a dogwhistle to the right?
Tell me how nitpicking that the Irish, in America, were 26.72% 'white' in 1906 and 83.264% 'white' in 1939 while Polish-Americans didn't achieve even 82% status until 1970* will add further knowledge to what we already know: privileged groups and subgroups change over time, often for complex reasons (hey, why don't we examine those?) and that society is always, always undergoing change.
I am 1000% behind historical and anthropological/ethnographic studies based on real scholarship and not some bullshit course that's invoking the racial purity tropes of yore.
*completely bullshit numbers based on bullshit, if it's not obvious.
posted by Klaxon Aoooogah at 12:48 PM on January 23, 2016
What I see is an overwhelmingly white college trying to look 'me too' and progressive while being regressive. It attempts to reduce and simplify a complex issue using just one yardstick, 'whiteness' (whatever the hell that is) per the very title of their program.
It would be more intellectually honest to call the program 'the history of oppression in America by people of European descent'. Why don't they call it what it is instead of making up some bullshit metric that nobody will be able to agree on and which is a dogwhistle to the right?
Tell me how nitpicking that the Irish, in America, were 26.72% 'white' in 1906 and 83.264% 'white' in 1939 while Polish-Americans didn't achieve even 82% status until 1970* will add further knowledge to what we already know: privileged groups and subgroups change over time, often for complex reasons (hey, why don't we examine those?) and that society is always, always undergoing change.
I am 1000% behind historical and anthropological/ethnographic studies based on real scholarship and not some bullshit course that's invoking the racial purity tropes of yore.
*completely bullshit numbers based on bullshit, if it's not obvious.
posted by Klaxon Aoooogah at 12:48 PM on January 23, 2016
'the history of oppression in America by people of European descent'
Believe me, I know from experience you get just the same response, only it's #notallEuropeans and a lot of stuff about how it's reductionist, etc. Any kind of suggestion that there's any kind of systematic oppression of people of color that has any kind of ideology behind it gets the same reaction of absolute refusal. Of course, you also get the "but how can you insult the people who wrote Shakespeare and produced the Mona Lisa?" instead of a very vague "white people invented airplanes so they must be terrific" stuff that you get now.
It doesn't matter - whether you talk about whiteness or you talk about European descent, you get the same kind of response.
My thinking is that "whiteness" is preferable precisely because you don't get into the weeds of "but let's spend a lot of time distinguishing between French racism and Spanish racism and deciding which is worse" and "but you're just saying that Europeans are bad because of genetics and that's racist". An identity that is enacted unevenly over time and in different ways on different people is, to my mind, infinitely preferable to "let's debate whether the Irish have a genetic predisposition to racism", which is where this goes a lot of the time.
posted by Frowner at 1:00 PM on January 23, 2016 [4 favorites]
Believe me, I know from experience you get just the same response, only it's #notallEuropeans and a lot of stuff about how it's reductionist, etc. Any kind of suggestion that there's any kind of systematic oppression of people of color that has any kind of ideology behind it gets the same reaction of absolute refusal. Of course, you also get the "but how can you insult the people who wrote Shakespeare and produced the Mona Lisa?" instead of a very vague "white people invented airplanes so they must be terrific" stuff that you get now.
It doesn't matter - whether you talk about whiteness or you talk about European descent, you get the same kind of response.
My thinking is that "whiteness" is preferable precisely because you don't get into the weeds of "but let's spend a lot of time distinguishing between French racism and Spanish racism and deciding which is worse" and "but you're just saying that Europeans are bad because of genetics and that's racist". An identity that is enacted unevenly over time and in different ways on different people is, to my mind, infinitely preferable to "let's debate whether the Irish have a genetic predisposition to racism", which is where this goes a lot of the time.
posted by Frowner at 1:00 PM on January 23, 2016 [4 favorites]
What was the historical period in which Irish immigrants were not allowed to become naturalized citizens because they weren't considered white?
To the best of my knowledge, no such period existed. But that's just one example of the codifying of whiteness, and I'm not clear on your point, unless you're trying to make the case that the Irish were always considered white. But that isn't the case -- there were undeniably times in American history when significant portions of the population did not consider the Irish white, and this is easy to verify just by doing a little research.
posted by maxsparber at 1:33 PM on January 23, 2016 [1 favorite]
To the best of my knowledge, no such period existed. But that's just one example of the codifying of whiteness, and I'm not clear on your point, unless you're trying to make the case that the Irish were always considered white. But that isn't the case -- there were undeniably times in American history when significant portions of the population did not consider the Irish white, and this is easy to verify just by doing a little research.
posted by maxsparber at 1:33 PM on January 23, 2016 [1 favorite]
But that isn't the case -- there were undeniably times in American history when significant portions of the population did not consider the Irish white, and this is easy to verify just by doing a little research.
1) What, specifically, were those times
2) What, specifically, do you mean by "consider white," in opposition to a legal definition in which they were considered white (e.g., allowed to become naturalized citizens, not subject to anti-miscegenation laws)
3) what's an easily researched source that verifies that Irish were literally, rather than metaphorically, not considered white at certian points in American history
posted by layceepee at 4:09 PM on January 23, 2016
1) What, specifically, were those times
2) What, specifically, do you mean by "consider white," in opposition to a legal definition in which they were considered white (e.g., allowed to become naturalized citizens, not subject to anti-miscegenation laws)
3) what's an easily researched source that verifies that Irish were literally, rather than metaphorically, not considered white at certian points in American history
posted by layceepee at 4:09 PM on January 23, 2016
To the best of my knowledge, no such period existed. But that's just one example of the codifying of whiteness, and I'm not clear on your point, unless you're trying to make the case that the Irish were always considered white. But that isn't the case -- there were undeniably times in American history when significant portions of the population did not consider the Irish white, and this is easy to verify just by doing a little research.
There was never a time when the Irish were not considered white. There are no miscegenation laws re the Irish. The British upper classes happily intermarried with the Gaelic nobility. The States gave Irish immigrants citizenship, because they were white.
However, one mustn't assume that all whites were equal. After all, for most of the 19th century, race was synonymous with ethnicity: thus the French race, the German race, the Irish race. And these were all on a hierarchy. The Irish were certainly discriminated against, just as French Canadians were.
Nor should we discount the power of religious discrimination. Think about what ethnicities were quickly accepted into Anglo-American society: English, Scots, Scotch-Irish, Germans, Swedes, Norwegians. Who were not as quickly accepted? The Irish and the Italians - and, in Canada and the north-east US, the French Canadians. Where is the split between these two groups? Not language nor perceived cultural development (while the English might claim the Irish were less culturally developed, they would never dare suggest that of the Italians aka the descendants of the Romans), but religion: Roman Catholic versus Protestant.
posted by jb at 9:14 PM on January 23, 2016 [1 favorite]
There was never a time when the Irish were not considered white. There are no miscegenation laws re the Irish. The British upper classes happily intermarried with the Gaelic nobility. The States gave Irish immigrants citizenship, because they were white.
However, one mustn't assume that all whites were equal. After all, for most of the 19th century, race was synonymous with ethnicity: thus the French race, the German race, the Irish race. And these were all on a hierarchy. The Irish were certainly discriminated against, just as French Canadians were.
Nor should we discount the power of religious discrimination. Think about what ethnicities were quickly accepted into Anglo-American society: English, Scots, Scotch-Irish, Germans, Swedes, Norwegians. Who were not as quickly accepted? The Irish and the Italians - and, in Canada and the north-east US, the French Canadians. Where is the split between these two groups? Not language nor perceived cultural development (while the English might claim the Irish were less culturally developed, they would never dare suggest that of the Italians aka the descendants of the Romans), but religion: Roman Catholic versus Protestant.
posted by jb at 9:14 PM on January 23, 2016 [1 favorite]
/What, specifically, were those times
Look, do your own research. This is starting to trip into a weird area where a formerly despised minority group is being asked to prove that their despised status ever existed, and since I'm part of that group, I really don't want to be called to the carpet to prove something easily researched -- that whiteness in America is an act of privileging groups, and that certain European ethnic groups were granted access later. I'm also Jewish and have no real desire to prove that Jews weren't seen as white for a long time, despite the absence of misegenation laws or supreme court decisions or whatever arbitrary historical markers you have chosen to be the absolute definition of whiteness in American history.
If you want a thread specifically about the whiteness of the Irish, go ahead and start one, but I'm bowing out of this one and flagging the mods to let them know I think this is getting into shitty territory.
posted by maxsparber at 9:28 PM on January 23, 2016 [1 favorite]
Look, do your own research. This is starting to trip into a weird area where a formerly despised minority group is being asked to prove that their despised status ever existed, and since I'm part of that group, I really don't want to be called to the carpet to prove something easily researched -- that whiteness in America is an act of privileging groups, and that certain European ethnic groups were granted access later. I'm also Jewish and have no real desire to prove that Jews weren't seen as white for a long time, despite the absence of misegenation laws or supreme court decisions or whatever arbitrary historical markers you have chosen to be the absolute definition of whiteness in American history.
If you want a thread specifically about the whiteness of the Irish, go ahead and start one, but I'm bowing out of this one and flagging the mods to let them know I think this is getting into shitty territory.
posted by maxsparber at 9:28 PM on January 23, 2016 [1 favorite]
I'm also Jewish, and also a historian.
The discrimination against both Jews and the Irish was first, and foremost, based in religion. They were later racialised, in response to new racial hierarchies created by colonialism. The Irish were seen as a kind of degenerate European/white (a lesser white, but still above non-whites), while Jews were (of course) eventually categorised as "Semetic" (and yet, still legally "white" in the US).
Jews, of course, faced extreme prejudice in Europe throughout the Middle Ages and early modern periods. This discrimination, however, did not usually follow them through conversion*. Benjamin Disraeli could be elected Prime Minister of Britain, despite being of very recent Jewish heritage, because he was religiously Christian. Irish who converted to Protestanism were granted full citizenship rights.
None of this follows a racial model. Irish weren't "backwards" because of blood, but because of religion and culture. Similarly, Jews who converted could move into mainstream society.
Contrast this to black, native or East Asian experiences in the early modern: none, even when Protestant Christians, were accepted as citizens in the United States; Jews and Irish were, even despite their despised religions.
*An exception are the conversos of Spain, who were suspected of continuing Jewish practices (some were); purity of blood also became an issue in this context.
As for flagging for the mods: I find it pretty shitty to start threatening people because you don't like the fact that you've been sold a false history.
And if we want to get back to the history of whiteness: it's pretty shitty that some white Americans want to redefine themselves out of the very "whiteness" that they were bestowed with, when they were allowed to be citizens and to own slaves, rather than be slaves.
posted by jb at 10:33 PM on January 23, 2016 [5 favorites]
The discrimination against both Jews and the Irish was first, and foremost, based in religion. They were later racialised, in response to new racial hierarchies created by colonialism. The Irish were seen as a kind of degenerate European/white (a lesser white, but still above non-whites), while Jews were (of course) eventually categorised as "Semetic" (and yet, still legally "white" in the US).
Jews, of course, faced extreme prejudice in Europe throughout the Middle Ages and early modern periods. This discrimination, however, did not usually follow them through conversion*. Benjamin Disraeli could be elected Prime Minister of Britain, despite being of very recent Jewish heritage, because he was religiously Christian. Irish who converted to Protestanism were granted full citizenship rights.
None of this follows a racial model. Irish weren't "backwards" because of blood, but because of religion and culture. Similarly, Jews who converted could move into mainstream society.
Contrast this to black, native or East Asian experiences in the early modern: none, even when Protestant Christians, were accepted as citizens in the United States; Jews and Irish were, even despite their despised religions.
*An exception are the conversos of Spain, who were suspected of continuing Jewish practices (some were); purity of blood also became an issue in this context.
As for flagging for the mods: I find it pretty shitty to start threatening people because you don't like the fact that you've been sold a false history.
And if we want to get back to the history of whiteness: it's pretty shitty that some white Americans want to redefine themselves out of the very "whiteness" that they were bestowed with, when they were allowed to be citizens and to own slaves, rather than be slaves.
posted by jb at 10:33 PM on January 23, 2016 [5 favorites]
Frowner— I do like the analogy between looking at genres and races, both cultural constructs that have real-world consequences yet don't stand up as philosophical categories.
One more attempt to get my reservations about Moretti across: if you mainly study the English novel, perhaps you just see the English novel everywhere. As a thought experiment, try this: what would be different if Lu Xun had never read any translated fiction? Obviously some things would— e.g. perhaps he wouldn't have written "Diary of a Madman" which owes a large debt to Gogol. But I see no reason he wouldn't have written "The Story of Ah Q". He didn't need the English novel in order to write about his own life and those of people he knew, about the failures of the Xinhai revolution, about the predicament he saw China in.
For that matter, if the English novel was an attempt by the British Empire to perpetuate the ideology of imperialism... it was a failure then, wasn't it? In fact Lu Xun was very interested in Western literature not because he bought into Western hegemony, but precisely because he wanted to escape it. He was reading Nietzsche and Ibsen for the same reason Europeans were, to challenge old ideas and create an intellectual structure for revolt.
(And I dunno, maybe studying "whiteness", it's possible that one would only see "whiteness". To use another bit of Chinese literature— there's a striking instance of Orientalism in Three Kingdoms. Zhuge Liang goes south to fight the Mán barbarians, and you get all the tropes of Orientalism: they are fierce soldiers; they are freer sexually; they are magical; they have exotic customs; they resist valiantly but succumb to the imperial power. Such views are not just "white", they're common in any imperial situation.)
posted by zompist at 12:38 PM on January 24, 2016 [3 favorites]
One more attempt to get my reservations about Moretti across: if you mainly study the English novel, perhaps you just see the English novel everywhere. As a thought experiment, try this: what would be different if Lu Xun had never read any translated fiction? Obviously some things would— e.g. perhaps he wouldn't have written "Diary of a Madman" which owes a large debt to Gogol. But I see no reason he wouldn't have written "The Story of Ah Q". He didn't need the English novel in order to write about his own life and those of people he knew, about the failures of the Xinhai revolution, about the predicament he saw China in.
For that matter, if the English novel was an attempt by the British Empire to perpetuate the ideology of imperialism... it was a failure then, wasn't it? In fact Lu Xun was very interested in Western literature not because he bought into Western hegemony, but precisely because he wanted to escape it. He was reading Nietzsche and Ibsen for the same reason Europeans were, to challenge old ideas and create an intellectual structure for revolt.
(And I dunno, maybe studying "whiteness", it's possible that one would only see "whiteness". To use another bit of Chinese literature— there's a striking instance of Orientalism in Three Kingdoms. Zhuge Liang goes south to fight the Mán barbarians, and you get all the tropes of Orientalism: they are fierce soldiers; they are freer sexually; they are magical; they have exotic customs; they resist valiantly but succumb to the imperial power. Such views are not just "white", they're common in any imperial situation.)
posted by zompist at 12:38 PM on January 24, 2016 [3 favorites]
I feel like we're still talking past each other a bit - I'm not trying to make a qualitative argument that would imply that what's good in modern Chinese fiction wouldn't exist without the influence of the kind of novel we're talking about, or to argue that the best way to understand Chinese literature is to look at it through the lens of 19th century British writing. (And I don't think that's at all where Moretti would go.)
I feel like what you're getting out of my comment may be "if someone says that a particular model of the Western novel was influential [outside the West], then they are also saying that non-Western writing was pretty weak sauce and was easily absorbed by Western tendencies", which is not at all where I'm going with this.
I don't think you could possibly say that this particular idea-of-the-novel was an attempt to perpetrate imperialism; how could it be? Even if we imagined some kind of CIA-like bureau instructing authors to write certain ways, that would still leave out explicitly radical novels like Middlemarch, and it would leave us puzzled as to why Marx and Engels were such big novel readers*. What I'm saying is that this particular idea of what makes a "worthwhile" "literary" novel gets spread in part through processes associated with imperialism - English as a language for education and trade, British education as a model, British literary reviews in global circulation, etc. I do think that some people had the idea that British culture - and its classics - were "civilizing" and should be taught as a way of transmitting right values, but that isn't the same thing. (Although it seems like when you read Edward Said on Austen, for instance, there is some of that same thing.)
Maybe a helpful (and less contentious) analogy would be to punk rock? Punk rock as a self-describing genre is this crystallization of a lot of musical stuff that was going around in the mid seventies; it originates in the UK (and, sort of, in the US) and quickly spreads to parts of Western Europe and the US, taking on regional characteristics each time. (Early French punk tended to be really politically conservative...or actually sort of fascist.... and creepy, for instance.) And after that, you quite soon get punk bands through much of the industrialized world - a slower spread into the communist countries, and a very slow spread into, say, Malaysia and Palestine. Sometimes you get carbon-copy Sex Pistols imitators; sometimes you get a lot of weird experimental stuff; sometimes you get punk mixed with local interests/genres; sometimes you get what appears to be carbon copy Sex Pistols at first glance but is actually really weird. And then there's all the stuff with reggae and Jamaica that comes to the fore pretty quickly, but doesn't always get incorporated into the "global" narrative of punk.
Punk was diffused through the industrialized world because of Western cultural power - lots of fascinating popular music elsewhere in the world stayed local, or circulated through Asia or South America but did not go global. At the same time, no one would say that punk music itself was about fostering imperialism, or that it was spread with the goal of creating Western hegemony. And no one would say that He Yong or Cui Jian are best explained as mere imitators of a Western tradition, even though they draw heavily on a form that doesn't have much to do with Chinese musical tradition - they're a lot like Lu Xun, tremendously culturally engaged and political people who are incorporating elements of another tradition in order to achieve their own aims. (Honestly, "Garbage heap" is probably the single punkest song I have ever heard, and I have heard a lot of punk in my time. I have seldom heard anything so painfully sad and angry; and then you pair it with Bell and Drum Towers, which is so lovely.) Compared to Cui Jian and He Yong and a lot of nineties Chinese rock/punk musicians, even the Clash or Bikini Kill or whoever are the ones who are weak sauce.
I mean, saying "punk as a genre originates in the West" is basically a neutral descriptor. "He Yong would never have written 'Garbage dump" without exposure to Western music" is a pretty neutral statement of fact, just like saying "He Yong would not have written 'Garbage dump" without the musical education and political experiences he had."
. I think that very often that kind of statement that is meant to convey "there is something better and more original about Western music", but when people mean that, it's stupid and offensive. What's fascinating about punk is how it sort of ping pongs around, and here you have the Clash and there you have He Yong and over there you have Plebe Rude and over there you have Teengenerate - and the music and the culture gets richer and more complicated and more interesting than most of the "original" 1977 stuff. (At least in my vinyl-collecting opinion when I was younger.)
(I find it hard to imagine Lu Xun writing Ah Q without having read some novels in translation, though, because how would he have had the political history that he did without having the education and social life that he did? It's not so much that British novels are essential to Ah Q, but that they are ported along with the history that makes Lu Xun into Lu Xun, because he's anti-imperialist. Lu Xun is just so good, though, so admirable as a writer and a person. This is really taking me back - my life has taken me away from reading a lot of Chinese history and literature, but at one time I was super interested in the late 19th/early 20th century radicals and reformers, and in the weird cast of Westerners who were around post-WWI. So many really good people. I often wonder what would have happened if more of those people had survived and fewer of the communist hard liners. Actually, I should go back to that, there must be far more scholarship available in translation now.)
*I actually read the most 19th century British novels of my entire life while working in Shanghai in the nineties, because I quickly ran through the books I'd brought and those novels were widely available and Party-approved, presumably because they were Marx-approved or early-Chinese-revolutionary-approved. I mean, I also read a bunch of the Russians, and as many Chinese novels in translation as I could get (and some kids' books in Mandarin, of course, but honestly my Mandarin never got past kids' books). I also read what became a lifelong favorite, Robert Graves's Goodbye To All That, and I still have my now almost-disintegrated Chinese edition. Those were wonderful times - I met so many fascinating people and I read so many fascinating books.
posted by Frowner at 3:28 PM on January 24, 2016 [1 favorite]
I feel like what you're getting out of my comment may be "if someone says that a particular model of the Western novel was influential [outside the West], then they are also saying that non-Western writing was pretty weak sauce and was easily absorbed by Western tendencies", which is not at all where I'm going with this.
I don't think you could possibly say that this particular idea-of-the-novel was an attempt to perpetrate imperialism; how could it be? Even if we imagined some kind of CIA-like bureau instructing authors to write certain ways, that would still leave out explicitly radical novels like Middlemarch, and it would leave us puzzled as to why Marx and Engels were such big novel readers*. What I'm saying is that this particular idea of what makes a "worthwhile" "literary" novel gets spread in part through processes associated with imperialism - English as a language for education and trade, British education as a model, British literary reviews in global circulation, etc. I do think that some people had the idea that British culture - and its classics - were "civilizing" and should be taught as a way of transmitting right values, but that isn't the same thing. (Although it seems like when you read Edward Said on Austen, for instance, there is some of that same thing.)
Maybe a helpful (and less contentious) analogy would be to punk rock? Punk rock as a self-describing genre is this crystallization of a lot of musical stuff that was going around in the mid seventies; it originates in the UK (and, sort of, in the US) and quickly spreads to parts of Western Europe and the US, taking on regional characteristics each time. (Early French punk tended to be really politically conservative...or actually sort of fascist.... and creepy, for instance.) And after that, you quite soon get punk bands through much of the industrialized world - a slower spread into the communist countries, and a very slow spread into, say, Malaysia and Palestine. Sometimes you get carbon-copy Sex Pistols imitators; sometimes you get a lot of weird experimental stuff; sometimes you get punk mixed with local interests/genres; sometimes you get what appears to be carbon copy Sex Pistols at first glance but is actually really weird. And then there's all the stuff with reggae and Jamaica that comes to the fore pretty quickly, but doesn't always get incorporated into the "global" narrative of punk.
Punk was diffused through the industrialized world because of Western cultural power - lots of fascinating popular music elsewhere in the world stayed local, or circulated through Asia or South America but did not go global. At the same time, no one would say that punk music itself was about fostering imperialism, or that it was spread with the goal of creating Western hegemony. And no one would say that He Yong or Cui Jian are best explained as mere imitators of a Western tradition, even though they draw heavily on a form that doesn't have much to do with Chinese musical tradition - they're a lot like Lu Xun, tremendously culturally engaged and political people who are incorporating elements of another tradition in order to achieve their own aims. (Honestly, "Garbage heap" is probably the single punkest song I have ever heard, and I have heard a lot of punk in my time. I have seldom heard anything so painfully sad and angry; and then you pair it with Bell and Drum Towers, which is so lovely.) Compared to Cui Jian and He Yong and a lot of nineties Chinese rock/punk musicians, even the Clash or Bikini Kill or whoever are the ones who are weak sauce.
I mean, saying "punk as a genre originates in the West" is basically a neutral descriptor. "He Yong would never have written 'Garbage dump" without exposure to Western music" is a pretty neutral statement of fact, just like saying "He Yong would not have written 'Garbage dump" without the musical education and political experiences he had."
. I think that very often that kind of statement that is meant to convey "there is something better and more original about Western music", but when people mean that, it's stupid and offensive. What's fascinating about punk is how it sort of ping pongs around, and here you have the Clash and there you have He Yong and over there you have Plebe Rude and over there you have Teengenerate - and the music and the culture gets richer and more complicated and more interesting than most of the "original" 1977 stuff. (At least in my vinyl-collecting opinion when I was younger.)
(I find it hard to imagine Lu Xun writing Ah Q without having read some novels in translation, though, because how would he have had the political history that he did without having the education and social life that he did? It's not so much that British novels are essential to Ah Q, but that they are ported along with the history that makes Lu Xun into Lu Xun, because he's anti-imperialist. Lu Xun is just so good, though, so admirable as a writer and a person. This is really taking me back - my life has taken me away from reading a lot of Chinese history and literature, but at one time I was super interested in the late 19th/early 20th century radicals and reformers, and in the weird cast of Westerners who were around post-WWI. So many really good people. I often wonder what would have happened if more of those people had survived and fewer of the communist hard liners. Actually, I should go back to that, there must be far more scholarship available in translation now.)
*I actually read the most 19th century British novels of my entire life while working in Shanghai in the nineties, because I quickly ran through the books I'd brought and those novels were widely available and Party-approved, presumably because they were Marx-approved or early-Chinese-revolutionary-approved. I mean, I also read a bunch of the Russians, and as many Chinese novels in translation as I could get (and some kids' books in Mandarin, of course, but honestly my Mandarin never got past kids' books). I also read what became a lifelong favorite, Robert Graves's Goodbye To All That, and I still have my now almost-disintegrated Chinese edition. Those were wonderful times - I met so many fascinating people and I read so many fascinating books.
posted by Frowner at 3:28 PM on January 24, 2016 [1 favorite]
My thinking is that "whiteness" is preferable precisely because you don't get into the weeds of "but let's spend a lot of time distinguishing between French racism and Spanish racism and deciding which is worse [...]
I get what you're saying, but I still think the term 'whiteness' is too fraught. We can see some evidence of that here already in this thread, trying to define what 'whiteness' is and who qualified or didn't. So, those are slightly different weeds but weeds nonetheless. The same or similar social/political/economic processes happen in all other parts of the world - group A subjugates group B - so what do we call it then? Why are we trying to shoehorn in a really problematic term - again, that nobody will absolutely agree on - when another word or phrase will do?
The term, for me, conjures up the extremely distasteful texts of the bad old days (see 'scientific racism' but be warned it's offensive stuff with pics and descriptions), eugenics and people that are obsessed with racial purity. Since it's a college course, it has the appearance of the weight of authority behind it - as did those 'scientific' texts at one time - as if it can be reduced scientifically when it absolutely cannot.
I am all for studying and discussing oppression from the first Europeans coming to the New World and onward and up to the present day. But to talk about something openly and honestly, there has to be some agreement of the basic terminology. I think PCC could have chosen their title more carefully and used a less bait-y, problematic one.
posted by Klaxon Aoooogah at 1:07 AM on January 25, 2016
I get what you're saying, but I still think the term 'whiteness' is too fraught. We can see some evidence of that here already in this thread, trying to define what 'whiteness' is and who qualified or didn't. So, those are slightly different weeds but weeds nonetheless. The same or similar social/political/economic processes happen in all other parts of the world - group A subjugates group B - so what do we call it then? Why are we trying to shoehorn in a really problematic term - again, that nobody will absolutely agree on - when another word or phrase will do?
The term, for me, conjures up the extremely distasteful texts of the bad old days (see 'scientific racism' but be warned it's offensive stuff with pics and descriptions), eugenics and people that are obsessed with racial purity. Since it's a college course, it has the appearance of the weight of authority behind it - as did those 'scientific' texts at one time - as if it can be reduced scientifically when it absolutely cannot.
I am all for studying and discussing oppression from the first Europeans coming to the New World and onward and up to the present day. But to talk about something openly and honestly, there has to be some agreement of the basic terminology. I think PCC could have chosen their title more carefully and used a less bait-y, problematic one.
posted by Klaxon Aoooogah at 1:07 AM on January 25, 2016
The term, for me, conjures up the extremely distasteful texts of the bad old days (see 'scientific racism' but be warned it's offensive stuff with pics and descriptions), eugenics and people that are obsessed with racial purity. Since it's a college course, it has the appearance of the weight of authority behind it - as did those 'scientific' texts at one time - as if it can be reduced scientifically when it absolutely cannot.
I'm going to stand by the idea that talking about whiteness is, on balance, politically productive - and by the idea that any kind of talk that suggests that racism is real and systemic, and that there's (for example) pervasive anti-Blackness in the US, is going to get the same kind of pushback.
However, I do see your point, because I know that white people can take this kind of discourse and go terrible places with it - not so much, IME, "standard" racist places, but sort of....reifying stereotypes because we talk in sloppy ways and think it's progressive, or if not progressive then at least acceptable. For example, I used to see some white discourse about science fiction fans and writers which was all "science fiction is a white thing, look how white it is, being a nerd is such a white thing" etc. (That's fallen away under the pressure of reality now, but I saw it regularly in the nineties/2000s up through about 2008.) Which not only obscures the actual, complicated history of race and science fiction but either insults or renders invisible writers and fans of color. (And while science fiction has definitely been a racist and exclusionary field, it's also always been a contested field, and shaped in incredibly important ways by writers of color - some of whom have been almost totally forgotten.) And of course, so many white people figured that they were being good progressives by denouncing something for being "so white"* because we tend to assume that the way to deal with racism is to "master" this new field of "knowledge" and deploy it.
*And then there's the whole terrible dynamic of white people thinking that we can successfully analyze racism on our own, from a distance, and that this makes us authorities who are entitled to "call out" others from a position of superiority rather than a position of humility.
posted by Frowner at 5:58 AM on January 25, 2016 [2 favorites]
I'm going to stand by the idea that talking about whiteness is, on balance, politically productive - and by the idea that any kind of talk that suggests that racism is real and systemic, and that there's (for example) pervasive anti-Blackness in the US, is going to get the same kind of pushback.
However, I do see your point, because I know that white people can take this kind of discourse and go terrible places with it - not so much, IME, "standard" racist places, but sort of....reifying stereotypes because we talk in sloppy ways and think it's progressive, or if not progressive then at least acceptable. For example, I used to see some white discourse about science fiction fans and writers which was all "science fiction is a white thing, look how white it is, being a nerd is such a white thing" etc. (That's fallen away under the pressure of reality now, but I saw it regularly in the nineties/2000s up through about 2008.) Which not only obscures the actual, complicated history of race and science fiction but either insults or renders invisible writers and fans of color. (And while science fiction has definitely been a racist and exclusionary field, it's also always been a contested field, and shaped in incredibly important ways by writers of color - some of whom have been almost totally forgotten.) And of course, so many white people figured that they were being good progressives by denouncing something for being "so white"* because we tend to assume that the way to deal with racism is to "master" this new field of "knowledge" and deploy it.
*And then there's the whole terrible dynamic of white people thinking that we can successfully analyze racism on our own, from a distance, and that this makes us authorities who are entitled to "call out" others from a position of superiority rather than a position of humility.
posted by Frowner at 5:58 AM on January 25, 2016 [2 favorites]
. The same or similar social/political/economic processes happen in all other parts of the world - group A subjugates group B - so what do we call it then? Why are we trying to shoehorn in a really problematic term - again, that nobody will absolutely agree on - when another word or phrase will do?
One word is hierarchy (not totally satisfied) - but "whiteness" is a very important concept, but it's not universal. "Whiteness" was invented, and is bound in time and space (largely 18th century forward, particularly important in the USA).
What we need to remember is that the way that heirarchies work change over time and space. What is true about racial relations in the US are mostly but not completely true in Canada, and are certainly not at all the way things work in China.
So "whiteness" history month totally makes sense: whiteness has a history. When did it emerge as a concept? what forces were involved? what are the details over time (Eg the Irish were white, but a lower white)? how did it differ over space?
But what we can't think is that "Whiteness" is the organising principle of heirarchies throughout time and space. It's our current fashion, if you will. But in Christian Europe in the Middle Ages, a brown Christian had was well above a pale Jew in social standing and rights. A Chinese Christian was introduced to the King of France (cool story - Marco Polo has his counterpart in Rabban Bar Sauma). And the pale skinned Cathars (heretics) were utterly annihilated. Even after the start of colonialism (which totally did contribute to the increasing importance of race in heirarchy), Shakespeare could write about Othello as a dark-skinned man who was intelligent and brave - not exactly part of the stereotype of Africans later. Othello, the dark-skinned Christian, is the hero of his own tragedy; Shylock, the pale-skinned Jew, is the laughable villain of a comedy.
But these plays would never have been written this way in c1800, and certainly not in the States at that time. Jews were (slowly) being granted civil rights even as non-whites were being barred from them. It's not that Jews became "white", it's that a racial heirarchy was emerging just as a religious one was fading.
posted by jb at 6:51 AM on January 25, 2016 [2 favorites]
One word is hierarchy (not totally satisfied) - but "whiteness" is a very important concept, but it's not universal. "Whiteness" was invented, and is bound in time and space (largely 18th century forward, particularly important in the USA).
What we need to remember is that the way that heirarchies work change over time and space. What is true about racial relations in the US are mostly but not completely true in Canada, and are certainly not at all the way things work in China.
So "whiteness" history month totally makes sense: whiteness has a history. When did it emerge as a concept? what forces were involved? what are the details over time (Eg the Irish were white, but a lower white)? how did it differ over space?
But what we can't think is that "Whiteness" is the organising principle of heirarchies throughout time and space. It's our current fashion, if you will. But in Christian Europe in the Middle Ages, a brown Christian had was well above a pale Jew in social standing and rights. A Chinese Christian was introduced to the King of France (cool story - Marco Polo has his counterpart in Rabban Bar Sauma). And the pale skinned Cathars (heretics) were utterly annihilated. Even after the start of colonialism (which totally did contribute to the increasing importance of race in heirarchy), Shakespeare could write about Othello as a dark-skinned man who was intelligent and brave - not exactly part of the stereotype of Africans later. Othello, the dark-skinned Christian, is the hero of his own tragedy; Shylock, the pale-skinned Jew, is the laughable villain of a comedy.
But these plays would never have been written this way in c1800, and certainly not in the States at that time. Jews were (slowly) being granted civil rights even as non-whites were being barred from them. It's not that Jews became "white", it's that a racial heirarchy was emerging just as a religious one was fading.
posted by jb at 6:51 AM on January 25, 2016 [2 favorites]
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As a working class white English guy, I can only say, "what a crock." Seriously, do they even know about the history of oppression of working class white people through the centuries here in the UK?
posted by marienbad at 8:21 AM on January 21, 2016 [11 favorites]