The straight dope message board is the last place i would try to amass street cred. I’m just trying to make a point in that in the black culture there exists a counterculture of self segregation and ethnic pride where a premium is placed on being black. Thus lighter skinned people can and are being treated as “bad” relative to darker skinned people. The examples i’ve given are 1 - having “high” and “yellow” and “house nigger” as derogatory terms, 2 - stressing intra-race marriages, and 3 - self segregation that can be found most public in the club scene, but can also be found in any other predominantly black areas.
I can see how saying hotlanta makes me sound desperate for validation that i am in fact knowledgeable of black culture but it doesn’t discredit what i’ve said. Some Black people do say “high” and yellow" in describing light skinned black people, and others are biased against blacks taking white girlfriends/wives. I was just trying to share that with the people on this board who think that it doesn’t exist.
Quote:
Originally Posted by SuaSponte
In the U.S., perhaps, but not elsewhere. In the Philippines, for example, darker skin due to the sun is a symbol of lower status - it means that you have to work outside.
In Western countries, it was much the same until about the 1920’s - a tan meant manual labor, and thus lower class. This changed as Western countries urbanized, and the lower class started to spend their time indoors, in factories and the like. A tan then became a symbol of higher status because only those who didn’t have to work inside and/or had leisure time to spend outdoors got tans.
Sua
Brilliantly argued. But your lack of belief is in error. Just a few Google hits:
The Bantu pastoralists / farmers of southern Africa certainly had higher status than the light-skinned Khoisan natives of the area. Any number of isolated, dark-skinned hunter-gatherer societies would fit the OP, too. “The others” are lower status, no matter their skin tone.
I think you’ve nailed it in one. The Bantu expansion through central/southern Africa swept aside and relegated to lower status any number of other racial/ethnic groups, many of whom were/are lighter skinned.
But at the time, that wasn’t really what I’d call a society, as such - more like 2 interacting societies. So it was intersocietal status, not intrasocietal, which is what I assume the OP was going for.
Also, I’ve been told (anecdotally) that, historically, Xhosa men preferred Khoekhoen wives when they could get them (we can only speculate as to why), which they presumably would not do if they were perceived as socially inferior.
SuaSponte You misunderstand me. I believe it was true that a tan used to be a sign of lower status. I don’t believe that today, a tan is a sign of higher status. At least not in the United States.
Very good point, which makes me think of another set of quasi-examples. Eighteenth century (and earlier) Asian societies (especially Japan and China) considered themselves to be the pinnacle of civilization, and considered others, including lighter-skinned Europeans, to be barbarians.
OK, I agree that, in the U.S., a tan has lost its role as an indicator of social status.
It does, however, retain that role in other parts of the world. I know, from personal experience, it retains that role in the Philippines.
The American indians thought red was the correct color to be. They ,like any oyher society, thought they were better. They did provide arrow shirts for the whiteys though.
They must be decendants of the devil which is probably why they were killed, I mean if your skin is red without bleeding you must be related to the devil.
This is totally relative to your current surroundings, even in the US. The college I attend is overwhelmingly African-American, so as a white male, I am the outsider and treated with caution. A college is not a society, I suppose, but it could be seen as a model for a society, complete with social networks that I do not fit into and bureaucrats that like to make my life hell.
I would think primarily by appearance and accent. Despite the fact that these days we don’t pay very close attention in the US to how Irish people differ from English people appearance-wise, it seems that people did back then. Granted, it was probably easier for an Irish person to “pass” than, for example, an African-American, but I believe that people could probably pick out the Irish people reasonably often.
If you’ve ever seen British and American caricatures of Irish people of the late 19th and early 20th century, you’ll probably have observed how they were perceived as different; animalistic, ape-like, by turns comical and menacing. WASPs thought they could tell the difference (even if I suspect they weren’t as good at it as they imagined).
Bear in mind as well that Irish people were (and of course are) culturally and religiously different from the English. The point here is that an Irish person would have to give up or hide their religion and culture in order to even have a chance of being accepted as “white like us” and not “a dirty Irishman”.
