The Creation of White People
One of the greatest points of conflict and division in the U.S. today is built upon assumptions that have no basis in reality. Race, as it is generally understood, isn't a thing according to science. Race, as it is practiced, is an idea that we've simply accepted.
I think the DNA Ancestry Tests are scams. Not because DNA isn't a hard science, or even that the tests are wrong.
It's a scam because we are looking for our genetic family tree based on nationality.
What does DNA have to do with nationality? Nothing. No scientist can point to a spot in your DNA and say, "This is your Irish gene."
If he/she could, then why stop at country? Why not have a "Dublin, Ireland" gene? Why not the neighborhood in Dublin?
You can't do that for the same reason your DNA test results will never say "U.S.A."
Nations tend to get overrun with foreigners from time to time. The DNA signature of Ireland, if one ever existed, probably changed since your ancestor left Ireland.
So if our measure of race has nothing to do with science, was is it? It's cultural and subjective. Like art or politics.
Speaking of the Irish, they weren't always "white".
Or sure, their skin color hasn't changed, but that doesn't mean the Irish haven't spent more centuries being considered a non-white race than a white one.
This exact same policy was used against the Irish in the 13th century by the Anglo-Saxon conquest of their land, and the subsequent intellectualized dehumanization of the Irish into a near animal species. They were often described as “white hairy apes.” They were not allowed to own land or property, they could be murdered with impunity, and their women raped without criminal charges, since they were merely considered non-human livestock—property.
...By the late 17th Century, the African kidnapping trade was increasing in magnitude and monetary profitability. The attempt at the moral justification of the alleged “racial superiority” of Northern Europeans in contrast to the “animalistic” and “savage” African peoples had begun. A key component of this approach was the creation of the concept of “race” (and the subsequent hierarchies) and the “black” and “white” categories for humans.
“When the first Africans arrived in Virginia in 1619, there were no ‘white’ people there; nor, according to the colonial records, would there be for another sixty years.”
— Theodore W. Allen
So what changed? How did the Irish "become white" (and later Italians and Jews)?
The moment in question was Bacon's Rebellion in 1676.
The conflict was based on class resentment.
There were clear reasons why the rebellion started. However the overall reason for the event was because of the division of wealth. The poor were held to low status and did not get much representation and say in what happened in the establishment. The taxes that were being put into to place were not benefiting them in any way. The taxes were to protect the wealth of the upper class and provide comfort in what they already had. The poor wanted a system where they received some protection from Indian where their farms were
Bacon's Rebellion demonstrated that poor whites and poor blacks could be united in a cause. This was a great fear of the ruling class.
Something had to be done. Their solution was both brilliant, and as old as time.
The Virginians legislated a new class of people into existence: the whites. They gave the whites certain rights, and took other rights from blacks. White, as a language of race, appears in Virginia around the 1680s, and seems to first appear in Virginia law in 1691. And thus whiteness, and to a degree as well blackness, was born in the mind of America.
As of the 18th century whites could not be permanently enslaved as they sometimes had been before, and black slaves could never work their way to freedom. The whites were told this was because God had made the blacks inferior to the whites, just as the whites were inferior to the superior classes that owned property. It’s worthwhile to remember that they didn’t give whites political rights, they didn’t give whites the vote — that would not happen then nor at the revolution and independence. Whites didn’t get the vote until the presidency of Andrew Jackson. Property owners, both of land and slaves, were the only ones who could vote.
Thus was born "We're screwed, but at least we aren't [group x]."
I doubt the ruling class predicted just how successful their strategy of keeping the working class divided would be. Most likely it took on a life of its own.
It broke all efforts of the majority of people, African or European, to fight for civil and political rights in America against a landed class that ruled everything. It reduced a portion of the people to the status of the negro slave, and gave the poor but now white people a precious and entitled inch to stand above the permanently enslaved on the social ladder. The next thing the politicians did sealed the deal: they paid poor whites a bounty for runaway slaves, and often made them overseers for slaves, turning every poor white in America into a prison guard against the people who had once been their neighbors and allies.
It seems crazy now, but the fact remains that those "racist whites" are operating under a cultural assumption of identity that only exists because everyone believes it. Sort of like religions exist because of faith.
It works in the other direction as well. Liberals who want to shame whites are operating under historical assumptions that simply aren't true. Or are only true in specific ways and under specific circumstances.
Both the people who embrace a white identity and ones that denounce a white identity are missing the Big Picture. They don't ask "Who gains from this conflict?"
The great thing about the divide-and-conquer of creating white-skin privilege is that you don’t have to give people thusly bought off anything more, and American power structures didn’t. In places with black slavery, the whites suffered terribly.
There is a simple truth to American history for the majority of people who have ever been American: the worse the black experience, the worse everyone else’s experience, including whites. Driving down (or eliminating) black wages, while always agreeable to whites, drove white pay lower than their European counterparts for most of our history. The labor movement that got its start in America took longer to make progress here, especially in terms of hours and working conditions, largely because employers pitted whites against black or immigrant labor, splitting the movement. Civil and political rights in America only ever had to be better for whites than they were for blacks, preserving that furious inch of superiority that was the defining quality of whites.
You can tell when the ruling establishment is about to steal the working class blind, because suddenly our "racial divide" will be in the news.
Personally I think the solution is for people to stop caring about skin color.
I'm not saying to ignore it. I'm saying that it shouldn't be important.
Liberals will call that naive, but it's obvious that being hyper-sensitive to issues of race, like many liberals want, makes things worse and encourages censorship.
What's more, I think liberals are being played by the ruling elite in the same way the racists are.
Comments
Lot of good points here
But Bacon's Rebellion wasn't straight-up have-nots vs. the haves. The Baconians also wanted to go make war on the Native Americans in order to push them further away, and the Colonial government didn't want more trouble stirred up with the Native Americans. So yeah, once again it's complicated.
There is no justice. There can be no peace.
It was the have's vs the have nots
According to how the sides organized themselves.
The catalyst was the indian raids.
In a very general way, it's sort of like how the working class often opposes immigration, while the upper-class likes lots of immigrants.
ICE crackdowns on immigrants (with the theater of opposing immigration) are also something the ruling class likes, just like throwing lots of poor people in jail advances it's interests.
We all carry the same mitochonrial DNA
In 1987, A world wide survey of human mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) was published by Cann, Stoneking, and Wilson in Nature magazine. Its main point was that "all mitochondrial DNAs stem from one woman" and that she probably lived around 200,000 years ago in Africa.
http://www.mhrc.net/mitochondrialEve.htm
I guess race is such a big deal because we are visual creatures and it is a easy distinction to make groups of people "others". Racism plays into our tribal nature, and helps support institutions we would not otherwise tolerate.
When children are raised to see groups of people as lesser beings, it is difficult to help them see otherwise. The KKK is still alive and well.
“Until justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.”
Just myself, it's not othering it's sorting.
As in Harry Potter, someone/thing else gets to decide. And "whites" were defined in powdered wig time and lead-based facial paint? Most of us "Caucasians" (another loaded term, few came from the Caucuses) are seasonally more toast-color. Pick your doneness.
Hey! my dear friends or soon-to-be's, JtC could use the donations to keep this site functioning for those of us who can still see the life preserver or flotsam in the water.
uh, not exactly.
"we" carry lots of different mitochondrial genomes, because of genetic drift in the eons since that one mother put everything in motion. there's not an enormous difference, but there is a difference -- which was the only way they were able to establish the approximate time and location of "Eve's" existence. and, BTW, that result is hypothetical -- it's the outcome of a statistical analysis that relies on certain kinds of heuristics and guesswork. it is, indeed, a "best guess" result.
the funniest thing about the result is how hard it is for many people to wrap their heads around it -- whereas, any evolutionary biologist understands it as an inevitability. go back far enough, and you will find a root organism in any family tree.
also, BTW, it doesn't mean that we aren't descended from any other females from Eve's generation, or even from generations earlier than Eve who were not Eve's ancestors. What it means is that we are all descended in direct matrilineal ancestry from that one female. Every single female can trace her ancestry back through an unbroken line of females, all the way back to Eve; and similarly, every single male can trace ancestry through his mother and then up through that same line.
The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.
Great Anti-Science Moments on C99.
I'll add this one to the list.
IMAGINE if you woke up the day after a US Presidential Election and headlines around the the world blared, "The Majority of Americans Refused to Vote in US Presidential Election! What Does this Mean?"
You know it's a scam when
The face of the racist and the face of the enemy of the racist are both poor people.
So rich people aren't racist? So only poor minorities are the enemy of the racist?
It's looks like a scam.
anti-science?
Anti-science? How?
"US govt/military = bad. Russian govt/military = bad. Any politician wanting power = bad. Anyone wielding power = bad." --Shahryar
"All power corrupts absolutely!" -- thanatokephaloides
Hmm, your characterization puzzles me.
The DNA "what's your ancestry %age" tests are pretty scammy -- and they would be even if they gave really accurate results, which they don't.
Something worth keeping in mind is that (assuming, erroneously for most of us, no marriage of miscellaneous cousins) you have 64 great-great-great-great grandparents, and only 46 chromosomes. Thus, you have inherited exactly 0 chromosomes from at at least 18 of your great-great-great-great grandparents (assuming -- probably erroneously -- no marriage of miscellaneous cousins). For that matter, you have 16 great great grandparents, and it's pretty likely that you've inherited no chromosomes at all from at least a couple of them.
However, there will have been a certain amount of recombinant crossover -- alleles being swapped between the two copies of a parent's chromosomes -- so that even though you haven't inherited a full chromosome from a particular ancestor, you may have inherited a handful of alleles specific to that ancestor -- but characterizing that fraction is impossible at the resolution provided by companies like My 23.
The main point being, that DNA test will tell you something about the fraction of your genome that originated from some particular region in the distant past, but it won't tell you nearly as much about the fraction of your ancestors that came from that region. So I guess you can ask yourself what matters more to you, in the hunt for ancestral identity: The fractions of unique genes you happen to have inherited from a minuscule fraction of your ancestors, or the long path of human culture that informs your ancestry.
If it sounds like I "know" the answer to that question, no I don't. I'm not even quite sure which way I'm leaning -- but that's partly because I'm not quite sure why I'm supposed to care. I'm descended from some pretty remarkable and notable people of the last 350 years. My genome probably contains not one single copy of one single allele that can trace its provenance back to any of them. Oh, well.
The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.
Perfect timing for this essay! I’ll see if I can tweet it to
Them.
A truth of the nuclear age/climate change: we can no longer have endless war and survive on this planet. Oh sh*t.
DNA tests
Are valuable from a medical disorder or disease standpoint. Other than that I think their being sold as many other products, as something we have to know because ...
As someone with a chronic autoimmune disorder the tests they sell over the internet are useless because they add no value to what could help me. More sophisticated tests are required, and quite expensive ones at that.
As for race, yes it is a social construct, dependent on many factors including our species tendency to associate with those who we identify as members of our tribe. Economic factors also play a role as well. In any case, it is a destructive way to view members of our species who differ in superficial ways.
"You can't just leave those who created the problem in charge of the solution."---Tyree Scott
frankly, I believe, dna tests are only then of interest
to people, if their results profit monetarily the people who want them done. It's all about money.
https://www.euronews.com/live
@mimi
Lol, can be useful in limited circumstances:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2493491/White-supremacist-Craig-...
The above sorta being a microcosm of what's been happening regarding the take-over of government by TPTB... please note that the guy's wanted in Canada for hate crimes, and is still not being extradited and stopped as of this and the next article, (both ideally read in full at source, if possible) never mind taken in and charged for what he was then doing, despite being in the news as attempting to intimidate and take over a town and threatening people? (And of course women are to be 'handmaidens' here as well, not being real people either.)
However, there is a happy ending - for the moment:
http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-25646954
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.
http://wikiurls.com/?https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craig_Cobb
And I think there may be a lesson in there somewhere...
The following is also very interesting when read in full at source, if possible on whatever device is being used.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/white-supremacists-respond-genetics...
And this part strikes me as extremely important, on a more general basis as well:
The secret is simply re-learning to start looking at people as people, as occurred with the rapid change in societal attitudes toward people who happen to be LGBTQ - something psychopaths lack the capacity for (the empathetic 'human' lack in their brains resulting in their seeing us all more as useful/not useful machines) and are, in the case of The Psychopaths That Be and their lackeys in the corporate media and elsewhere, trying to kill off in us in great part by propaganda-'othering' each group they wish to separate us from, using continual emotional chain-jerking, fear/hate stimulation to trigger the victim's amygdala and shut down reasoning centres in exchange for unthinking knee-jerk reactions as they desire, to keep us from uniting in self-preservation.
Manipulative false propaganda/slander/libel for purposes of causing harm to those innocents in an unjustly targeted population group perceived as vulnerable cannot be considered to be covered by the mantle of 'free speech'; broader and more basic human rights supersede all others claimed for abuse of these.
We are all individuals, not categories, and we must remember this, to cherish, or at least accept that we will have, our differences in opinion and personal choices, albeit not to be used toward any inequality of rights, to both survive and to keep our humanity.
Psychopathy is not a political position, whether labeled 'conservatism', 'centrism' or 'left'.
A tin labeled 'coffee' may be a can of worms or pathology identified by a lack of empathy/willingness to harm others to achieve personal desires.
So true
I just saw this comment - and hadn't the time to read it yet
so wait for me ... til I have bumped my head against it and my nose in it. Sounds like ... OMG...
Thanks in advance. I'll come back to it, if I survive...
https://www.euronews.com/live
Less expensive than in the past.
We can, in fact, crank out about half your genome (or more) for under a thousand dollars -- though anybody in the business would probably charge you 2 thousand to provide the sequencing and any kind of useful (or not) analysis.
The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.
oh contrair!
Ancestry dot con... er com - chief proprietor of all things genealogy - will tell you everything you want to know for a paltry $79!!! "With 5x more ethnic regions than the next leading test! Give Ancestry your DNA and open a world of possibilities!"
Maybe I'm paranoid, but it's that opening a world of possibilities part that makes my eyes go all slitty.
So you send them your swab and a check/credit card #. They send you a bunch of info that may or may not tell you anything useful. But when all is said and done, they still have your name, address, phone number, bank account/credit card info, and a reasonable amount of knowledge on your freaking DNA. Think of the world of possibilities someone could do with all that.
I believe I'll pass on the DNA testing and stick to good old fashioned genie sleuthing. There are enough surprises in that method. For instance learning a few years ago that my great great grandmother was black. Well, she was from a family of mixed race people that goes back to a black slave and an Irish indentured servant in 1600s Colonial Virginia. Since then, I've discovered a whole branch of my mother's family that nobody ever mentioned... for some reason. Too bad all Mom's people are gone now or I could turn the next family reunion into one for the record books (or police blotter).
Meddle not in the affairs of Dragons - For thou art crunchy and good with ketchup
@Pariah Dog
Good choice!
I was actually looking for some examples I'd seen before of those warning that your genetic testing was cheaper in places actually collecting it for patenting/research purposes, expecting to make money off it that way, but came across this:
http://thefreethoughtproject.com/ancestry-com-caught-sharing-dna-informa...
https://dna-explained.com/2015/12/30/23andme-ancestry-and-selling-your-d...
So, that's why it's cheaper there... at the time of purchase, anyway.
Edited for two letter typos - in the same word - in defense of my Undisputed Typo Queen title, since others apparently
fearthink they've been attempting to catch up with me. Hah!Psychopathy is not a political position, whether labeled 'conservatism', 'centrism' or 'left'.
A tin labeled 'coffee' may be a can of worms or pathology identified by a lack of empathy/willingness to harm others to achieve personal desires.
WOW!
Thanks for that info! I've mentioned my theories to several people who were thinking of, or already had, submitting their samples to Ancestry and they all pooh-poohed it as paranoia. It's Ancestry dot com! They're Mormons! They wouldn't do anything underhanded!
That place is a con from the word go. Aside from the awesome amount of digitized records collected by young Mormons fulfilling their missionary work, that YUGE database they have they mostly stole. There used to be regional sites manned by volunteers where people would post their family trees and photos. Then some of them started seeing their stuff posted on Ancestry - word for word - and bitched about it. Ancestry would then simply make the owner of the domain an offer they couldn't refuse... and some people think these owners were shills for this very purpose. ZOT, all the sudden the site and all its info belonged to Ancestry, who put it behind their paywall.
Naturally, after reading the TOS, which the volunteers apparently hadn't done before, they found that posting anything there gave the site a degree of copyright. After a load of bad publicity, Ancestry finally took all that from behind the paywall and the info from those places are now called The GenWeb Project.
Another example is a place called Find A Grave, which, if you're not familiar, is a site to post memorials for your friends and relatives. There were also all sorts of options for linking them to family members, writing biographies, etc., and it became a hell of a genealogy tool. Guess whose interest that sparked?
Several years ago, the owner, claiming the place had become "too much to handle," sold it to you-know-who. The deal was it was to remain free and we still held copyrights to anything we put on there. No one was permitted to "share" (translation - steal) anything for other sites, yada, yada. I removed my bios and pictures immediately after hearing of the impending sale, but apparently not soon enough. Last year I stumbled across three people who had appropriated pictures of my grandparents that I had created from larger shots, my bios, and everything else I had, and posted them on their Ancestry "free pages." And that's just the stuff I know about. Contrary to the old owners assertions, Ancestry does claim the right to make everything on there available across their spectrum of Ancestry owned sites. So demanding these people remove my property from their pages did no good at all.
The thing many people don't understand is that Ancestry does not belong to the Mormon Church. Never did. Two guys who attended Brigham Young University started it, but it never belonged to the church itself. Shortly after the FaG purchase, Ancestry itself was sold to a European-owned hedge fund called Permira.
So now, any and all the information people ever put on that database - both accurate and pure horseshit - now belongs to a mega-corporation in Europe. So does anything anyone ever posted on any of the "vast spectrum" of sites Ancestry has sucked up over the years. And they can do anything they want with it.
Meddle not in the affairs of Dragons - For thou art crunchy and good with ketchup
Books of a century
or so ago, commonly had phrases like "the race of farmers" "the race of sailors" "the race of Yorkshiremen" etc.
Clearly at some point the term meant "people with a commonality" and didn't carry this implication of some kind of scientific objectivity imposed by nature.
Orwell: Where's the omelette?
DNA tests like Ancestry use SNPs and statistics
to come up with the regional origins. Works for me, boring Britain gets Viking spiking. I am aware of people who take these tests too seriously. It's another $$$ extraction method.
Hey! my dear friends or soon-to-be's, JtC could use the donations to keep this site functioning for those of us who can still see the life preserver or flotsam in the water.
Jason W. Moore has plenty of good stuff on this topic.
With the growth of capitalism into the Americas also came the labeling of groups of people as "nature," as the Conquistadores labeled the natives of "New Spain" as "naturales." Since "nature" was to be exploited for profit according to the newly-triumphant capitalist culture, to be labeled "nature" was not to be part of society, but rather to be raw material for exploitation. Thus racism was invented as an economic pretext. Moore's discussion of the history of capitalism expands on this.
“The Democrats and Republicans want you to believe they are mortal enemies engaged in a desperate struggle when all the time, they are partners with a power-sharing agreement.” - Richard Moser
Jesus and King Arthur
were both un-white, according to DNA (Arthur) and regional historical knowledge (Jesus). White man tends to redefine history in his own likeness. Does that make santa clause Nunavut (descendent of Mongolians)?
I'm a bit surprised to learn that we have analyzed Arthur's DNA
given that we aren't even sure who he was or where he lived -- or even whether he indeed lived at all.
The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.
Ohh well then
must have come from a fiction story. Thanks for checking.
@UntimelyRippd
Lol, don't forget Merlin!
Psychopathy is not a political position, whether labeled 'conservatism', 'centrism' or 'left'.
A tin labeled 'coffee' may be a can of worms or pathology identified by a lack of empathy/willingness to harm others to achieve personal desires.
It’s a big reason for favoring Hawaiian independence
The circumstance that Hawaii is part of the United States has the most detestable roots imaginable.
https://muse.jhu.edu/chapter/179880
Hawaii is only part of the U.S. because of people whose motives and machinations make the present inhabitant of the White House look like a well-intentioned amateur.
To accept U.S. subjugation of Hawaii as inevitable is to endorse such people and their evil schemes as wise and far-sighted.
Real “Resistance” (not the phony Hillbot-Russiagate kind) looks more like this:
http://hawaii-nation.org/
ha, I learned something I didn't know, thank you,
reading the essay and this comment, I feel getting paler and paler.
Referring to the essay, race is what pigments you can see and able to sell as a race. The one nice thing about Hawaii is that aside of caucasian and asian markers, you can't attribute Hawaiian markers to a visible race. And I like it that way.
https://www.euronews.com/live
@#
@#
(Edit: divineorder, meant this for your Poor People's March post. No idea how I again, having done this once yesterday, managed to somehow remove the the ID positioning part of comment target identifiers to again have the first bit show twice again instead, after posting, but the mystery skillz are still strong either within me or my computer, which has continued to do some unusual things with pages on this site. Couldn't rec on the first page I came in on today, and the area pertaining to that was typed out, although I could comment, and the next page was fine... sigh...)
Thanks! That's what I'd call an actual movement, one moving somewhere on a perpetual and pacific basis until humanity's goals are achieved.
And I'll bet it makes TPTB's bowels move, too.
Psychopathy is not a political position, whether labeled 'conservatism', 'centrism' or 'left'.
A tin labeled 'coffee' may be a can of worms or pathology identified by a lack of empathy/willingness to harm others to achieve personal desires.