How Italians Became 'White' | Hacker News Reader

How Italians Became 'White'

nytimes.com

29 pointspseudolus3 comments

It's funny how people, especially Americans, talk about race as if it were an unchanging construct. You see swathes of scientific literature classifying people into races even though the classifications are inconsistent. So you get whites and blacks and asians and... native Americans I guess? Sometimes Hispanics count as separate, sometimes they don't. Arabs were white until 9/11. As for Pacific Islanders, well they're probably too far away to matter. But even the classification, the very concept of 'whiteness' changes across time - as the article suggests - and space - you may be considered white in the US but not in Europe, white in Brazil but not in the US, etc. It's almost as if one's racial identity only made sense insofar as it was percieved by contemporary society. It's almost as if - and this should be the 'aha' moment - race was a...social...construct.

>It's almost as if one's racial identity only made sense insofar as it was percieved by contemporary society. It's almost as if - and this should be the 'aha' moment - race was a...social...construct

It's basically a stand-in for origin/culture of origin.

"White" mostly meant "of origin/culture acceptable and familiar to anglo-saxon/germanic WASPs who came first and dominated the US".

That's also why it changed over time - as different immigrant groups like Italians were integrated more into US society.

With blacks however, it was harder. It was not just the different color, differentiating them, but also the rage fueled by the humiliation of whites that used to own them, to have to accept them as free.

If they started considering them as equals and not inferior in some way, then they'd have to feel the accompanying shame/guilt for having enslaved them and kept them down (them or afterwards, their parents and grandparents). For psychological reasons then, it was easier to keep considering them inferior.

And the fact that those blacks have been kept down for so long, made it easy for whites to find "objective" facts to prove they indeed were inferior: poverty, lack of education, lack of "white" manners, language, crime, etc. Didn't matter (and seldom occurred) that those were results and not causes...

“Seeing White” the podcast is maybe the best starting point to get to the heart of what race is. https://www.sceneonradio.org/seeing-white/

The big takeaway: it’s invented recently (historically) and has no objective/natural basis. Otherwise and xenophobia, of course, are more fundamental to our nature, but not “race”. It was invented, and now we have to contend with it.

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