The concept of “white” as a race dates back to WW2, at most.
It goes back farther than that, but it is a social and legal category people have sued in attempt to be considered as.
Comment on Mona: Court rules women’s-only exhibit must allow male visitors
EldritchFeminity@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 weeks agoThe concept of “white” as a race dates back to WW2, at most. Before then, being from France was as ethnically important a distinction as being from England, Spain, Germany, Ireland, or China. Due to the long history of conflict amongst European nations, there was no unified sense of race due to something as simple as skin color.
When the Irish immigrated to the US, they were considered equivalent to black people by Americans and competed for the same jobs.
The British, inspired by the American ethnic cleansings of the Native American tribes, attempted to ethnically cleanse the Irish from Ireland for their land. That’s what the famine in Ireland actually was. There was a scarcity of potatoes, but otherwise there was plenty of food - so long as you were British. In fact, there’s a statue of a Native American in northern Ireland commemorating the Native tribes’ aid during the famine, because they recognized what the British were doing and were one of the few groups to send supplies to the Irish. Nobody else cared, because they were Irish, not (insert country here).
FfaerieOxide@kbin.social 5 weeks ago
EldritchFeminity@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 weeks ago
Appreciate the correction, the first time I could think of as “white” being a unified thing was the white supremacists of the “Aryan master race” era.
norbert@kbin.social 5 weeks ago
Wow I'll make sure to tell all my black friends, I'm sure that'll endear me to them.
Well, this is just completely false, you're completely disconnected from reality. Irish were never blocked from whites-only schools were they? Irish people were never subject to interracial marriage laws afaik. Were any Irish ever entirely excluded from being able to immigrate to the U.S.? I know it's popular among certain groups to pretend certain Europeans faced the same disadvantages as formerly enslaved African-Americans but frankly it's incredibly insulting and tone deaf as fuck.
Theory is fine you guys but you need to actually go out into the world and interact with people sometimes.
FfaerieOxide@kbin.social 5 weeks ago
I was wondering when—not if—you were going to pull "I have Black friends".
EldritchFeminity@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 weeks ago
I am…unclear on what you’re actually arguing about. You went from arguing that white people are oppressed for being white and/or that white as a unified race wasn’t the invention of racism to separate the white European ethnicities from black people, to straw-manning me to argue that white people were never oppressed the same way black people have been (and continue to be).
Both me and the OP are saying that the idea of a single “white” race was the invention of racists. To separate white Europeans from other people. Before the white supremacists coined the term white as a race, your race was French, Swedish, Irish, British, Russian, etc. White is just a label to lump all these Europeans from disparate cultural backgrounds who hated each other’s guts together to form a unified front against “the savage black man” and “the Asian menace.”
And nobody has ever been oppressed for being white. When was the last time you heard of somebody being passed over for a job because they were too white, or the cops going around arresting all the white people off the streets. White people probably suffer the same treatment as other foreigners in xenophobic countries, but they’re not singled out for being white.