Seeing as HN is supposed to be rational, pro-science, and skeptical, it's pretty strange to see an article on the front page so sympathetic to a religion--especially one that has infant genital mutilation as its core sacrament:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2304793/Two-babies-s...
Write a history of the Irish diaspora, Sweden, the Balkans, or Russia and nobody is going to call you racist. Claim some sort of tribal group that incorporates all of Europe and the Middle East except excludes people of a skin color or specific religious history you don't like, and you'll find that you're racist. Magic.
Identities are formalized based on observation of an Other who doesn't fit into the category, because those observations bring to light unstated assumed commonalities between peoples who didn't think of themselves as a single thing. This is one method of ethnogenesis where groups that didn't think of themselves as a thing gain that consciousness. The idea of "white people" is an example of ethnogenesis that I think had its origins mostly in the American colonial experience, where you had a mixture of European groups differentiating themselves from Africans and American Indian groups. In Europe, an Englishman and a Frenchman (themselves the result of their own ethnogenesis) may not see eye-to-eye, but in a new territory with other peoples with very different cultures, suddenly the English-French thing doesn't seem as big.
These things expand, shift, and contract over time. But at the moment, the consensus-driven model makes me see myself as "white" as one of my categories, invented or not (not that that's my sole identity or anything!). I see myself as white, others who I see as white see me as "white" (though probably if outside the US they see me as "American" more?), and others who aren't white probably think "white" when they see me, so in the end that's the category that we have at the moment, nothing wrong with that in and of itself as long as you treat others with respect.
I hear that "Imagined Communities" is a good read about the rise of different nation-feelings in recent centuries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imagined_Communities I haven't read it yet myself, though.
This is a common narrative now, and it seems malicious (or at least, misguided) to me - it's an attempt to deconstruct the generalized European identity as formed through ethnogenesis on the North American continent as different groups of Europeans intermarried. Can someone who hails from sixteen different European countries really make any claim to "belong" to any one of them? Doesn't it make much more sense for such a person to look at the superset of shared values, history, and beliefs that their ancestors had and make a synthesis of them all?
> There are no historical threads that bind together just the people you think of as "white" that don't include many others that you exclude based solely on a modern historical understanding of "white".
This is like saying there is no such thing as a puddle, pond, or lake because nobody can tell you exactly how many litres of water makes up the dividing line between them. Of course this is a clinal sort of division - it's not just genetics, it's also culture and outlook, behaviour, and whether or not a person has the desire to be identified as such. Expecting there to be some perfect formula that determines on-paper whether someone is white or not is an unreasonable expectation that nobody holds except to deconstruct it and diminish it as an identity. Such an attack would be horribly racist if applied to any other group.
From the article:
> For Schama, Jewishness comprises anything Jews have done, in all the very different places and ways they have lived. The boxer Dan Mendoza was a Jew, and so was Esperanza Malchi, the confidante of a sixteenth-century royal consort in the Ottoman court—just as fully as canonical figures like Moses Maimonides, the medieval Jewish philosopher, or Theodor Herzl. Schama offers an appealingly democratic and humanistic approach to Jewish history.
If this is fair and inoffensive to write (and I think it's fine), then why would a similar paragraph about "Whiteness comprises anything White people have done, in all the very different places and ways they have lived" not be fine? It's not like Jews are a unified racial group - there are a number of different groups within there, as we can see here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_ethnic_divisions
And yet, Jewish is not an "invented category" by any stretch of the imagination. Why would a different set of rule apply here?
> Write a history of the Irish diaspora, Sweden, the Balkans, or Russia and nobody is going to call you racist.
I don't know if that's necessarily true, it's going to depend heavily on the content of the book. I think that it's wise for a critical eye to be applied to any history book, it shouldn't particularly matter what's on the cover.
> Claim some sort of tribal group that incorporates all of Europe and the Middle East except excludes people of a skin color or specific religious history you don't like, and you'll find that you're racist.
Claim that an entire people doesn't exist, and deny their right to self-representation, and you may not find that you're a racist, but you may find that conflict is inevitable. This is not a line of thought that leads towards productive discourse, this is a line of thought that leads towards dividing society into opposing camps of enmity.
Fuzziness not only in the topic here but in the meta discussion of the topic.
Yeah, there's something about white, American Christians to be discussed historically… boiling it down to "white" is probably better done by going with "European" but that's probably my own intellectual biases from my experiences of the language.
The thing about being Jewish is that it simply has been significantly different (even as there are parallels) to most other ethnic discussions. There are genetic similarities (read: inbreeding) within the primary Jewish ethnicities where other groups show more diversity. There's a weird tie between culture/religion and ethnicity.
I often make the analogy to being Cherokee or something. You don't just decide to believe some religious things and it makes you Cherokee, but they do have traditional beliefs and the idea of true adoption as a Cherokee isn't crazy. The Jewish religion is sorta like that where they discourage converts, and conversion is like getting adopted by a different ethnic group. That's quite different from Christianity and Islam that promote conversion.
For this and many other reasons, Jews stayed distinct in their own weird way.
Talking about "whiteness" and "white people" is actually more like "blackness" and "black people" where dark skin can come from a range of cultural and ethnic backgrounds. Lumping all dark-skinned people together makes little sense except for how it's treated (self-fulfilling prophecy somewhat) in our world in reality.
You may recall people remarking that our first "black" president was not only mixed-race but his African father was really African and not a descendant of American slaves. But obviously he still lived his life in a way that had him be a part of the American (slave ancestry) cultural reality.
So, yeah, fuzziness. But Jews really have had ties going back generations that the various conglomerations of "white" Americans have not… even as you can draw some analogies and questions.
I agree with this - but it's also very clear that Black people, especially in North America, have some amount of shared history that crosses their ethnic lines, and absolutely have shared interests. Can one really pretend Black people don't exist? Can one say that it should be deconstructed, and that we should talk about Ethiopians and Nigerians, etc - and if so, which sort, because within country borders there are still many different groups? How do we label an African American who can trace their history back to sixteen different countries? What do they identify as? I can tell you, it's an easy answer if you actually ask them...
Not only is this clinal (fuzzy), labels are also applied at different levels of granularity. There's still value in speaking about finer levels of granularity, and the shared history/values/goals/problems that apply at one level of granularity may not apply when you move up to the superset, but some still do.
It's those shared issues that highly coarse groupings are concerned with. Let's not miss the forest for the trees.
Beyond that, the question is whether labels reflect real meaning or value? For instance, does the label assist in predicting anything else?
We do not live in a post-racial society because people who get labeled "black" are also predictably statistically more likely to be found to suffer various consequences of racism (police harassment, systemic poverty…). Can we predict things about anyone labeled "white"? Probably, but maybe less so. So, if the predictive value of a "white" label is less statistically strong than that of a "black" label, then the former is a less valuable label to discuss (I don't know about the truth of the stats).
So, everything is fuzzy, but those correlations that are real statistically powerful ones are the places where labels are most useful and reflective of insights into the world.
The danger is that the self-fulfilling part interacts with the other-correlation part. So, if "black" people are statistically poorer and everything correlated with that, then applying the label could reinforce that stereotype etc. etc. tough situation… and lots of dynamics for any particular label and consideration.
I'm aware that various groups may not have been afforded every accomodation in the past by the dominant cultural groups in Europe and North America. This is an unfortunate legacy that is slowly being healed. I don't think individual white people alive today need to take on personal culpability for such (in a "sins of the father" sense), nor does it follow that White does not exist as a category merely because it has shifted in definition over time.
About all you can really say is that the definition is subject to further change in the future. Fair enough, but this doesn't mean the group doesn't exist.
> "White"? No.
You're very close to practicing "cultural erasure" by implying that people who identify as white (and there are hundreds of millions of such) don't exist, or are somehow mistaken in their own views about what they identify as. If this same tactic is used on literally any other group (whether it's racial, religious, ethnic, national i.e. Tibet, sexual i.e. LGBT groups, etc) it's viewed as a tremendously offensive act.
Why, then, is it okay to do against White people? Pray tell me why this group is the only one which you are not only permitted, but encouraged to deconstruct and deny the existence of?
What about generalizing "western" history? There are significant trends in history like the Enlightenment, Renaissance, early Industrial Revolution, the rise of Protestant Catholics, the collection of countries who worked together in the Crusades, etc, etc that crossed regional boundaries like England, France, Sweden, German, etc but were still very much a homogeneous definable group among a wider Western population. Whose societies were very similar and evolved on a similar and distinct trajectory.
Even extending across continents from Europe into North America and South America, where simply using countries is to ignore plenty of higher-level context and wider cultural trends.
Not to mention the mixed European heritage of early North Americans, which developed an identifiable wider culture (even if much of it was built on top of slavery). Or the fact even England was largely a mix of Celtic, Scandinavian, Roman, etc which can be distinguished by going back in history but merged into one culture over time, much like America did.
I get the flaws, risks, and hostility to lumping them all into "white" though, so I'm in agreement there. All analysis requires context and race is a very poor category to work with. Even the neo-nazis and Hitler seem to struggle to define what "white" means and invent categories like Aryans, to exclude obviously white people like Slavs.
But still the human brain largely works via patterns and lumping groups into categories, whether that's socially acceptable or not. So even if it's not ethically "right" I can still see why it's such a common phenomenon, despite being a poor categorization.
We should all be using cultures rather than race, ethnic group, OR country/geographic area.
"Albion's Seed" or "American Nations" should be required reading for anyone obsessed with race to really understand the flaws of racial categorization:
https://www.amazon.com/Albions-Seed-British-Folkways-cultura...
https://www.amazon.com/American-Nations-History-Regional-Cul...
It should even be in high school history education IMO.
It's almost like you registered to talk trash about Jews. What are you adding to the conversation?
Jewishness is not just about race, religion, or ethnicity, it may encompass those things but it's more about shared identity and history, so getting into racism and then trying to bring up religious practices is just throwing darts at the wall.
Do you think the US Supreme Court circumvents the Constitution and laws?
I sometimes wonder too- but then i meet the language lawyers, talking with the drm-legal team about, undefined behaviour in todays society- and suddenly.
Or if you sit with actual lawyers, and all they talk about is how you could get away with a crime, in a theoretical sense of course, if you used that trapdoor and lousy wording, and you realize, that is just exactly what you talked about the other day, with the database team over lunch.
You are right though, that the word hacker-culture does not capture it- its a mindset bend on edge cases, always looking for ways to circumvent.