The nine nations of North America
North America is really Nine Nations. Each has its capital and its distinctive web of power and influence. A few are allies, but many are adversaries. Several have readily acknowledged national poets, and many have characteristic dialects and mannerisms. Some are close to being raw frontiers; others have four centuries of history. Each has a peculiar economy; each commands a certain emotional allegiance from its citizens. These nations look different, feel different, and sound different from each other, and few of their boundaries match the political lines drawn on current maps. Some are clearly divided topographically by mountains, deserts, and rivers. Others are separated by architecture, music, language, and ways of making a living. Each nation has its own list of desires. Each nation knows how it plans to get what it needs from whoever’s got it. Most important, each nation has a distinct prism through which it views the world.
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- If you are interested in this, there are two related books -- American Nations [1] which was inspired by The Nine Nations of North America [2] as well as the data presented in the link above -- that explore geographic variation in American subcultures. There is also some recent work in personality psychology that aims to get at regional variation in culture (see [3], for example.)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Nations
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nine_Nations_of_North_Amer...
[3] Geographical Psychology, Peter J. Rentfrow. Current Opinion in Psychology. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352250X1...
- Edit: downvoting this without a response is pretty much against the guidelines, I am hardly distracting from the conversation here, and the downvote is not a "disagree" button. I put in a lot of effort to showing you why you have a shallow understanding of the topic; I'm open to being wrong.
Xenophobia and racism are completely separate concepts, although xenophobia does underly racism. It's entirely possible to construct a form of race that relies on other qualitative factors than skin color—just look at colourism, which ironically explicitly lays out non-color qualitative identifiers of "dark and light skinned"—hair type, body shape, hyperpigmentation, prevalence of certain genetic disease, whatever. These terms arose from feedback loops where racist capital dictate societal beauty standards and cultural norms. You certainly can't explain phenomena like skin bleaching or the long history of hair straitening with simple xenophobia. But, colourism is just one effect globalized racist capital has produced.
When academics talk about how racism is a problem, they definitely aren't discussing a general form of qualitative, personal discrimination. These racial structures underly our communities, our politics, our identities, here in America our state's use of slave labor in prisons, how our wealth is divided among our citizens, how we construct and discuss trade deals and foreign "charities" such as the Gates foundation, etc. simply put, you cannot discuss racism without discussing how race is embedded in the structures and processes all around us. These dynamics are easier to ignore in ethnically homogenous societies... unless of course you are a minority or immigrant.
Whiteness and blackness as we know it here in America were invented to formalize the structures of slavery here between the 15th and 18th centuries—this took centuries to move from the enslavement and sale of both Africans and indigenous Americans to a codified racial hierarchy, driven by European capital and nearly complete genocide of the indigenous people. I am sure there are similar narratives in the Congo, in Rhodesia, in South Africa, in Brazil, in European involvement in Southeast Asia, in virtually every part of the carribean and West Indies—it's colonialism, baby!
Every single aspect of the development of racism was ultimately driven by European capital. When countries "decolonialized" the west simply replaced formal state oppression with oppression through trade deals and proxy wars, which could not take course without European capital and violence. Make no mistake, European wealth is racist blood money.
This attitude of "oh the form of racism I learned about on Mister Roger's Neighborhood is just xenophobia with a different name" is just completely ignorant of the past 150-200 years of analysis of race and racism. I recommend these books if you have any serious inclination of discussing race:
* "Black Reconstruction" and "the souls of black folk", by WEB du Bois.
* "Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat from Mayflower to Modern" by J. Sakai
* Toni Morrison's "the origin of others" directly addresses your attitude towards racism—after all, though racism is distinct from xenophobia, xenophobia is necessary for racism.
* "Color Stories: Black Woman and Colorism in the 21st century (intersections of race, ethnicity, and culture)" by JeffriAnne Wilder.
* "redefining race: Asian american panethnicity and shifting ethnic boundaries" by Dina Okamato.
* "Marxism and the National and Colonial Question" by Joseph Stalin. Note, I am not a Stalin fan, but he's a decent essayist and laid out an excellent argument for separating the concepts of state sovereignty and nationhood, which is basically a collective recognition of being part of a shared people. You see this in the "union" part of the soviet union and the 56 nations of China, though this is frequently disingenuously translated as "ethnic groups".
* building off the above book, "The Nine Nations of North America" is a must read. This was written by Joel Garreau.
* "Racial ideas and the impact of imperialism in Europe": https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1084877980857986...
* "the color complex: the politics of skin color in a new millennium." by Kathy Russell
This is also neglecting vast swathes of racial dynamics across central and South America, Asia, Australia and Polynesia—you really can fill up entire libraries with how racism is distinct (materially, culturally, subjectively) from xenophobia and manifests through labor exploitation and capital transfer.
- Don't forget to include Joel Garreau's "The Nine Nations of North America". The theme is similar, but the outcome is slightly different.
- Go back to "The Nine Nations Of North America" by Joel Garreau in 1981.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nine_Nations_of_North_Amer...
- In "The Nine Nations of North America", Joel Garreau put it like this (from memory, not verbatim):
"This is all discombobulated in terms of traditional Democratic and Republican positions.
"The Democrats tend to be quality-of-life people. They also tend to be in favor of the little guy. Well, here those two conflict. If you look at the long-term implications of letting Mexico move up here unrestricted... goodbye Zero Population Growth.
"The Republicans tend to be law-and-order people. They also tend to be in favor of big business, who finds immigrants to be useful for low-wage labor.
"This creates a very difficult environment."
- I wonder if this could be connected to Colin Woodard's argument in his book American Nations (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0670022969/) that there are eleven basic regional cultures in North America. According to his map (https://amp.businessinsider.com/images/55b273a2371d2211008b9...), North Carolina sits right at the intersection of three of them -- Tidewater in the north, Deep South in the south, and Greater Appalachia in the west. You'd expect to see lots of linguistic diversity in a place where different cultures are rubbing up against each other.
Interestingly, Woodard's book echoes an earlier work, Joel Garreau's 1981 The Nine Nations of North America (https://www.amazon.com/Nine-Nations-North-America/dp/0380578...). Garreau, however, put all of NC inside his "Dixie" nation, the analogue to Woodard's "Deep South." I wonder how much of this can be chalked up to differences in methodology, and how much to demographic shifts in the three decades separating Woodard's work from Garreau's.
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