In USA, is "white" just codeword for anyone of European ancestry? Because I thought..

In My Humble Opinion
61

I dunno. I know a person who seems to only have negative thoughts about Jews and isn’t really shy about sharing these thoughts behind closed doors. I can very easily imagine this person treating my coworker in a different way than he treats someone else. But I suspect that most people, not being that bigoted, would treat him the same as anyone else.

As someone who pings as “some kind of Hispanic” under a certain light, I sometimes worry about getting “Hispanic treatment” or “immigrant treatment”. I don’t know what these kind of “treatments” entail, but I know they are different than “white treatment” and even “African American treatment”. I don’t have to know what the treatment entails to know that the treatment is sometimes really awful.

62

OK, I think this is a distinction without substance regarding the comment I was posting a response to. It goes beyond just being a protected class when you get into affirmitive action, government hiring, federal funding for higher education etc.

The point is is that to say someone is somehow a nazi for thinking about someone’s race is a little odd given the context of American society. I think other places in the world might be different though.

63

I apologize if anyone took offence at my comment, excepting racists/Nazis of course. The concept of a Protected Class in the link above is quite clear that this means it is illegal to discriminate against employees on the basis of any of a number of attributes, including sex, age, religion, color, national origin, race [NB this term is deliberately not defined], and physical or mental handicaps; this is a positive thing.

Yet, as everyone knows, an explicitly Nazi conceit (though not unique or original to them) was a pseudo-scientific and pseudo-philosophical division of humans into a Master Race and, you know, everybody else. Not that racism, anti-Semitism, xenophobia and the like were new ideas, but the key is that you were literally classified as “German” or not, as in on real, official documents.

So think what it would sound like if American employment law or federal funding attempted to formalize racial categories, if some computer database had a list of who was “white” and/or had some kind of European ancestry. This is the polar opposite of the actual law, which states that every American is a member of a protected class and is entitled to an equal opportunity. We should all hope that the official in charge of reviewing our grant proposal or job application is not casually “thinking about race”.

64

A classic and frequently-cited example of the subjectivity and mutability of the racial classification “white” is Benjamin Franklin’s “Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind, Peopling of Countries, Etc.”, which lumps not only southern Europeans but Russians and Swedes into the “non-white” category:

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My wife’s family is of Lebanese descent.

My MIL in particular looks “ethnic”, as people say, and often gets asked about her heritage.

They all pretty much identify as white though.

66

As people here have said, race is a matter of politics.

If Israeli Jews are white, that means they’re European. If they’re European, that means they’re colonialists. If they’re colonialists, that means they don’t belong in the Middle East. If they don’t belong in Middle East, then Israel has no right to exist.

Hence, Israeli Jews are Middle Eastern*. Not for nothing do Israelis commonly refer to Arabs as “the cousins” - sure, it’s often sarcastic, but it still acknowledges that they’re like us, and we’re like them.

  • Plus, of course, the Europeans are the people who spend 2000 years trying to kill us. There’s a reason why Israelis will say “Moroccan Jew” or American Jew", but never “German Jew.”
67

“White” is no more identical to European ancestry than “short” is to Bolivian ancestry or “swarthy” to Swedish ancestry. As for people who use these as special codewords, who no doubt exist, I still maintain they represent the racist camp.

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I lost a friend once when she said something about gypsies being dirty thieving liars and I said I was approximately 1/8th Roma. She really couldn’t handle it (she was Irish - as in born and raised). But I’m a pretty darn white person - I’m just a tiny bit non-white around the edges :slight_smile:

69

This is me, I look white and have a white last name. Once certain people find out that I am half Mexican they make a point of telling other white people that right away when I’m introduced. They want them to know that a non-white person is part of the conversation. One guy even attempted to tag me with a racist nickname.

70

To add to this.

Technically “White” is only applicable to race realism discussions or their ongoing impacts.

As you noted it is arbitrary and changes based on context.

The US actually lost a court case denying citizenship to Finnish people in 1908, and the Nordisists of the early 1900’s in the US and Germany had a far more fine definition of what was required to be the “master race”.

The current most reliable historical information we have seems to relate the definition to a post Bacon’s Rebellion world where associating poor working class individuals to the land owning classes was meant as a method to fracture a unified group of poor folk from attempting to rise up against the land owners.

Basically throw the other groups under the bus by getting poor “whites” to associate with the land owners rather than with the slaves to prevent those groups from joining together in rebellion while still paying lip service to equality seems to have been the goal. Basically fracturing the potential power base of the working class.

Obviously through the years the definition changes based on political will, including and excluding groups based on goals, needs, and/or fears of the day.

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In this context, Middle Eastern seemed to be used as a tag for ethnicity, not location, in the way Europeans coming to the US soon became Americans.

72

Very often in the US, “white” doesn’t refer to “caucasian” or “European” ancestry, or to having certain looks, but to “socially acceptable as what used to be called ‘WASP’”. That leaves out Jews, a lot of Southern Europeans (traditionally Catholic or Orthodox), and many other people who would be considered “white” in other countries.

There’s Americans who consider Cameron Diaz not-white once they discover that Díaz is a Spanish patronymic inherited from her Cuban Dad (I’ve met a few).

73

The expression is older than that and originally referred to Hispanics. It’s a twist on the American notion that Hispanic = mestizo.

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Very often? I don’t know about that.

WASP (which I view as being largely a term from my parents’ generation - I rarely hear this term from thirties or millennials) has connotations of meaning “very white without a trace of any exoticism” and also usually carries an implication of being stuffy and boring. But other than some Neo-Nazis (and some Jews too) who claim that Jews aren’t white, and other than the occasional crack about Sicilians along the lines of Dennis Hopper’s scene in True Romance, I have never heard it said or implied that “White” exclusively means “WASP”.

I’ve never heard anyone claim that Greeks aren’t white. Never encountered anyone or even read about anyone in present day America who thought that Slavic peoples aren’t white. The Irish and their American descendants are considered white - there may have been a time when they weren’t, like 130 years ago, but they certainly are now. The French aren’t Anglo or Saxon and most of them aren’t Protestant, I’ve never heard anyone say they aren’t white.

I think you’re misinformed about the commonly accepted meaning of the word WASP. It’s basically just shorthand for “person with predominantly English ancestry.”

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Look, I personally think the whole concept of “whiteness” is absurd, but anyone who would say that about Cameron Diaz is equally absurd.

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Nava:

I won’t claim that no one ever used it as such, but in my experience, they were generally referred to as Hispanics, not “brown people.” When referred to in the context of minority voting blocs, people would (most commonly) say “blacks and Hispanics”, not “black and brown people.” The phrase may well have existed in minor usage before 9/11 and Gulf War II, but it took a huge jump in usage at that point, when opponents of the Bush administration applied the definition to Arabs.

77

Perhaps adjust the dog whistle to include “brown race”,

Here is an example for 1885:

In general after eugenics and racist theories were discredited those groups just replaced “race” with “people” or culture.

“Brown” has been used in several contexts as a racist classification by several in the past and skin color was considered degenerate even by the nordicists, like Grant’s explanation on how the modern italians were lazy and used that as justification to avoid “white genocide” by Catholics and Finns etc…

Really saying “coloreds” and other terms just became less acceptable and the right would have been using the term “sand n*gger” in person around 9/11 and Gulf War so others changed that to “brown people”

78

Well, this Greek man has some news for you:

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The concept of United States as a Judeo-Christian nation based upon Judeo-Christian ethics first became a political program after World War 2 in response to the growth of anti-Semitism in America. As most on this site are younger than that it is easy to forget that Ku Klux Klan was quite big on anti-Catholic rhetoric.

Nordic theory, which was even partially anUS export to Nazi Germany, viewed Greeks and others as “degenerate races” as documented in this map.

Note how “Alpine” and “Mediterranean” races are in greece in his “modern times” map. And if you look at the other maps you will see where he made “Alpine” dots to claim the great works of the Greeks and Romans.

Pretty much boiler plate typical racism of the time until the “evil immigrants” had a couple of generations to assimilate. But really “Nordic Theory” was a way to claim the anglo-saxons were a master race.

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That is an interesting historical account but my point is that in the present day, in America, I have never heard, nor read, a currently living person claim that Greeks are not white.