The history of White people

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1. molsongoldenAug 2022
   Add Jews to the list other commenters have provided here.

   “The History of White People” by Nell Irvin Painter covers this idea in depth.

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2. tomrodMar 2022
   > I don't understand this perspective.

   The first few seconds of the linked video cover this. I encourage you to watch it.

   Effectively, there is not a strong equivalence between the categorization of white vs. black in terms of origin. Whites typically weren't forced to move to North America and have their home cultures stripped from them through generations of slavery. This is why you find things like German Heritage celebrations or St. Patrick's Day, etc. You don't see Yoruba Heritage celebrations, etc. Further, the definition of "white" has grown over time to incorporate Irish, Italian, Slavic, etc. African heritage has persisted as a secondary class of citizens or worse in US history.

   That is what is meant by stripped heritage. It really isn't schizophrenic. A white person could use the census and other tools to trace their roots successfully, further. A black person can and often does hit a dead end much quicker. We all come from somewhere -- knowing one's history can be helpful medically and for personal worldview.

   Should a person be solely where their ancestors originated? I don't think so. But it does matter, in the same way the OP article on caste matters, in hundreds to thousands of small interactions over the course of every day life. I highly recommend Dr. Painter's The History of White People. [0]

   [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_History_of_White_People

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3. barberousseFeb 2019
   Another great text on the historical cultivation of "whiteness" and European racial taxonomies is Neil Irvin Painter's "The History of White People". Michel Foucault's late 70s lectures on the history of race war in European discourse from the Norman Conquest onward are also available in printed form in English though I can't recall the name right now.
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4. bmmayer1May 2014
   Anyone interested in this topic should read "The History of White People" by Nell Irvin Painter, who shows how in America the very definition of "white" has changed to include a widening circle of people. For example, in the 18th century, German Americans weren't considered white. In the 19th century, Irish Americans weren't considered white.
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5. tokenadultOct 2011
   It's not clear without further scientifically designed testing whether there is more "cultural bias" in grouping people by saying "All of them look very Nigerian to my eyes" or by saying that it is easy to see which of the varied individuals grow up in the West and which grew up in Nigeria. (It's an empirical question, first of all, whether observer identifications of that kind can be verified by controlled experiments with unfamiliar individuals in either case.) There are definitely different cultural biases among human beings about whether environment of development matters most or ancestral lineage group matters most in making distinct human individuals more or less alike for the social purpose of grouping them by some commonality. One refreshingly interesting fact I learned from the book The History of White People by Nell Irvin Painter

   http://www.amazon.com/History-White-People-Irvin-Painter/dp/...

   is that the ancient Greek authors were overwhelmingly of the opinion that what made different people groups different from one another was different living environments (climate and topography), with the Greeks of course thinking that their living environment tended to produce superior people.

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6. dukeofdoomJan 2025
   I remember watching some event around CHAD time, where white social justice warriors on stage where making lots of social justice outrage statements, on behalf of Native Americans, in front on this native America elder. Only to have him take the microphone after them, and he was having none of it, he went up to the mic and completely denigrated them. Then it dawned on me, that these white people where literally ruining his cause by trying to take it over. And there's long history of white people doing this, where they subvert and neuter a movement and insert themselves as leaders, but only temper the cause. The end result is a kind of moderation, where no effective change happens because of it. I guess I read a similar sentiment once, where Anarchists where claiming that it was them that changed course of human history, repeatedly, by throwing the wrench in the wheels of society, to cause the change. From that point of view, it would get annoying if there was someone taking the wrench out before the fall.
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