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Comment by dragonwriter | Hacker News Reader

> White was also not considered a race in the 20's.

Yes, it was.

> There were Nordics, Jews, Irish, Eastern Europeans, and Southern Europeans.

The existence of those groups, and the fact that then-current concepts of whiteness would exclude some or all of them, doesn't change the fact that “White” was the identity of the dominant racial group, and had been for quite some time by the 1920s.

> I should also mention, this is the deeply disturbing origin of the progressive movement in america.

No, it wasn't. Oh, deeply disturbing it was, but it wasn't the origin of the progressive movement in America. It's true that the eugenics movement occurred within one of many (often overlapping in time) movements that took the name “progressive” in US history, but it wasn't the first, nor one historically strongly connected to any of the modern groups with the name.

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I respect your decision to be completely and utterly wrong. The progressive movement was the movement of eugenics. We were going to improve the human race through science, technology, and industrialization. Rockefeller Foundation funded eugenics research. Carnegie and Stanford created the scientific studies that would help support hundreds of new eugenics laws. UC Berkeley, Harvard, Columbia, etc would teach eugenics to students. We wiped the history clean of all this during WWII, but if you do some keen wikipedia'ing, or go oldschool and read some books, it's all there for you.

And no, there was no group of white people saying white people are all great, stick together, etc. That wouldnt happen until the 60's and 70's, after eugenics was taboo.

> I respect your decision to be completely and utterly wrong

That’s hilarious but...

> The progressive movement was the movement of eugenics.

There, again, have been a number of separate “progressive” movements in US history, eugenics was a minority view within one of them. But, while you are wrong here, it's not nearly so flagrantly wrong as:

> And no, there was no group of white people saying white people are all great, stick together, etc. That wouldnt happen until the 60's and 70's, after eugenics was taboo.

I don't think it ever happened; even white racists don't tend to think white people are all great. But, no, white racists that saw the race they favored as the “white” race did not first show up in the 1960s-1970s, as evidence by the Cornerstone Speech in which Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens laid out his view of the central case for the Confederate cause in 1861: “...Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition. ...”

The progressive era was between the start of the industrial revolution and the start of WWII.

>even white racists don't tend to think white people are all great.

You are so committed to this modern liberal partisan revisionist historiography that you are willing to admit the narrative doesn't make any sense, and yet equally willing to keep at it. That's commitment.

Irish, Italians, russians, and other "inferior" whites were always considered white. "White" has never and will never be the barrier to entry into this country or into the american hierarchy. Looks, charm, stature, sharpness of mind, focus on meaningful pursuits like work, not being too interested in "meaningless pursuits" like art and music. Not being promiscuous, no criminality, no epilepsy, no "feeble-mindedness" or imbecility. This is what race was about. Virginia aristocracy, the Boston Brahmins etc, were spurred on by the leading science and technology of the day, to believe these attributes were genetically inherited and "selected" by nature, which meant they could also be selected with Mendelism. We were not interested in a "white race." Since race was something you could control, we were interested in a "superior american germplasm" a genepool of the best of the best while the rest were sterilized, aborted, deported, or imprisoned in jails, asylums, or reservations. American eugenicists were interested in "building a race." A concept Hitler adopted and was quoted talking about fairly often.

Racism was not white vs black. Its nowhere near that simple

> Racism was not white vs black.

Racism was and is more complex than just white vs. black, but that wasn't your claim upthread that I have been arguing against.

What you claimed previously was that white was not considered a race before the 1920s. It absolutely was, and there are copious prominent invocations of white racial identity in US history prior to that time—as I've shown with the Cornerstone speech—and while racism is more complex than just white vs. black (and ideas of just who is white have evolved), white vs. black has been a key racial divide for the whole history of the country.

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