Here’s the subtitle: “Before the 17th century, people did not think of themselves as belonging to something called the white race. But once the idea was invented, it quickly began to reshape the modern world”
That’s right. There was no such thing as the white race until the 1600s. And here’s the relevant excerpt:
[…] the plantation owners initially sought to protect themselves by giving their “Christian” servants legal privileges not available to their enslaved “Negroes”. The idea was to buy off the allegiance of indentured Europeans with a set of entitlements that, however meagre, set them above enslaved Africans. Toward the end of the 17th century, this scheme witnessed a significant shift: many of the laws that regulated slave and servant behaviour – the 1681 Servant Act in Jamaica, for example, which was later copied for use in South Carolina – began to describe the privileged class as “whites” and not as “Christians”.
Whiteness, white supremacy, was invented in the new settler state that became the USA. It was an extension of European supremacy and part of the liberalization process that was occurring throughout Europe as the “age of discovery” began lifting the merchant class into positions of power. This new financial class sought new social forms that would allow them to supplant kings while still maintaining the power structures they needed to continue extending their dominance across the world. Since kings were kings by divine right, they were literally working against a social fiction that required them to attack religion, which was impossible, so they needed new systems that directed power away from religious explanations. They needed to maintain Christianity as a power structure but divorce it from kings. Thus, from the 17th century onward, an entirely new system of racialization was devised and expanded including things like race science, anthropology, cherrypicking from religious and philosophical traditions, eventually incorporating Drawinian theory, and focused entirely on making the imperial project manageable.
In the US you see this pretty damningly with regards to the native population. They were a different race, they were not Christians, they needed to be mass murdered, their lands needed to be blighted and destroyed, their ways of life (plants, animals, and water) needed to be made extinct and poisoned beyond repair. To do this, the US needed to field a military into the frontier. That’s the source of every town named “Fort Something”. Those forts were created to exterminate and oppress native Americans. Those towns never stopped being that. It’s just that they were victorious in their extermination campaigns. The laws are still on the books. The police force is still descended from the institutions of genocide. The roads, ports, prisons, residential neighborhoods, waterways, industrial zones, and agricultural zones around those towns are the living embodiment of the displacement efforts that trace themselves back to the frontier forts and their genocidal program, founded on racism.
And even The Guardian, shite rag that it is, is able to write about it.
This is a lie white people use to justify their systems and make themselves feel better.
Racism, as we understand it, is a historical system that was, in fact, invented soley by white male Europeans and their descendants for the purposes of managing their empire.
Tribalism isn’t racism. Racism uses tribalist tendencies to achieve its aims. Racism is a very specific historical phenomenon.
Why is looking at the root cause of something a “justification” in your mind? If all we do is react to what’s happening now instead of finding out how to prevent it from happening in the future, we’re just fighting a losing war of attrition for the sake of ideology. In order to solve this problem we need to look at more than just the surface, and do more than just point fingers at everyone else.
Why is looking at the root cause of something a “justification” in your mind?
Have you ever heard of a leading question? This is an example of one, because you assume tribalism to be the root cause of racism. What evidence do you have to support this argument? Why does tribalism exist for tens or hundreds of millennia but racism only get constructed as capitalism is in the process of emerging from feudalism? Doesn’t sound at all like tribalism is the root cause of racism.
If all we do is react to what’s happening now instead of finding out how to prevent it from happening in the future, we’re just fighting a losing war of attrition for the sake of ideology
Yeah, that’s what I’m saying. Don’t react to people “being racist” as though it’s just individual behaviors. See it as a historical process. When you see it as a historical process, you see that racism is THE national pattern of the USA, because the USA emerged in the same context that racism was being constructed in. It’s accurate to say that the USA and racism are deeply related because racism was being invented as part of the colonial project and the USA emerged from the colonial project and because racism was being invented as part of the capitalist project and the USA emerged and extended and ultimately maximized the capitalist project.
In order to solve this problem we need to look at more than just the surface, and do more than just point fingers at everyone else.
Do you think that seeing racism as a system that was constructed by Europeans as they entered the 1400s and through to the present day is looking at just the surface or pointing fingers at everyone else? Really? That’s your assessment of that position? Well, blow me down, I don’t really know what to say to that.
It seems to me that saying “racism is just tribalism and everyone engaged in tribalism” is quite literally a surface level analysis that quite literally points the fingers at everyone else. Your assessment is pretty on the nose for exactly the position you hold. But I’ve come to expect projection from white liberals at this point. You seem incapable of seeing the irony of accusing me of the very thing you are doing.
I’ll make this one easy for you. The Guardian is a garbage white supremacist liberal rag that does the bidding of North Atlantic imperialists. But here’s a shit article they wrote that explains this particular thing: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2021/apr/20/the-invention-of-whiteness-long-history-dangerous-idea
Here’s the subtitle: “Before the 17th century, people did not think of themselves as belonging to something called the white race. But once the idea was invented, it quickly began to reshape the modern world”
That’s right. There was no such thing as the white race until the 1600s. And here’s the relevant excerpt:
Whiteness, white supremacy, was invented in the new settler state that became the USA. It was an extension of European supremacy and part of the liberalization process that was occurring throughout Europe as the “age of discovery” began lifting the merchant class into positions of power. This new financial class sought new social forms that would allow them to supplant kings while still maintaining the power structures they needed to continue extending their dominance across the world. Since kings were kings by divine right, they were literally working against a social fiction that required them to attack religion, which was impossible, so they needed new systems that directed power away from religious explanations. They needed to maintain Christianity as a power structure but divorce it from kings. Thus, from the 17th century onward, an entirely new system of racialization was devised and expanded including things like race science, anthropology, cherrypicking from religious and philosophical traditions, eventually incorporating Drawinian theory, and focused entirely on making the imperial project manageable.
In the US you see this pretty damningly with regards to the native population. They were a different race, they were not Christians, they needed to be mass murdered, their lands needed to be blighted and destroyed, their ways of life (plants, animals, and water) needed to be made extinct and poisoned beyond repair. To do this, the US needed to field a military into the frontier. That’s the source of every town named “Fort Something”. Those forts were created to exterminate and oppress native Americans. Those towns never stopped being that. It’s just that they were victorious in their extermination campaigns. The laws are still on the books. The police force is still descended from the institutions of genocide. The roads, ports, prisons, residential neighborhoods, waterways, industrial zones, and agricultural zones around those towns are the living embodiment of the displacement efforts that trace themselves back to the frontier forts and their genocidal program, founded on racism.
And even The Guardian, shite rag that it is, is able to write about it.
Racism also wasn’t invented solely by “white” people. That kind of myopic thinking is a big factor in why we can’t get over that shit.
Tribalism has been a way of life since life began on this rock.
This is a lie white people use to justify their systems and make themselves feel better.
Racism, as we understand it, is a historical system that was, in fact, invented soley by white male Europeans and their descendants for the purposes of managing their empire.
Tribalism isn’t racism. Racism uses tribalist tendencies to achieve its aims. Racism is a very specific historical phenomenon.
Why is looking at the root cause of something a “justification” in your mind? If all we do is react to what’s happening now instead of finding out how to prevent it from happening in the future, we’re just fighting a losing war of attrition for the sake of ideology. In order to solve this problem we need to look at more than just the surface, and do more than just point fingers at everyone else.
Have you ever heard of a leading question? This is an example of one, because you assume tribalism to be the root cause of racism. What evidence do you have to support this argument? Why does tribalism exist for tens or hundreds of millennia but racism only get constructed as capitalism is in the process of emerging from feudalism? Doesn’t sound at all like tribalism is the root cause of racism.
Yeah, that’s what I’m saying. Don’t react to people “being racist” as though it’s just individual behaviors. See it as a historical process. When you see it as a historical process, you see that racism is THE national pattern of the USA, because the USA emerged in the same context that racism was being constructed in. It’s accurate to say that the USA and racism are deeply related because racism was being invented as part of the colonial project and the USA emerged from the colonial project and because racism was being invented as part of the capitalist project and the USA emerged and extended and ultimately maximized the capitalist project.
Do you think that seeing racism as a system that was constructed by Europeans as they entered the 1400s and through to the present day is looking at just the surface or pointing fingers at everyone else? Really? That’s your assessment of that position? Well, blow me down, I don’t really know what to say to that.
It seems to me that saying “racism is just tribalism and everyone engaged in tribalism” is quite literally a surface level analysis that quite literally points the fingers at everyone else. Your assessment is pretty on the nose for exactly the position you hold. But I’ve come to expect projection from white liberals at this point. You seem incapable of seeing the irony of accusing me of the very thing you are doing.