I think it’s hard for a non-American, such as the OP, who mentions their home country is 95% homogenous, to understand that most of the people who are in the USA today (either voluntarily, or by force) have largely supplanted their former heritage for that which has been created here in the last 100-200 years. Sure, we still celebrate ethnic days and events occasionally, and people research their family history as a hobby, but many people just think of themselves as “American” every day, without putting much more thought into it. AIUI many immigrants to the US wanted to become more American to fit-in, so worked hard to shed outward vestiges of where they were from.
Where things start to get dirty is that some Americans think they are “more/better” American than someone else. Race is easier to estimate than ethnicity, just by appearances (which in many cases, I would think, people are guessing wrong), and since most people whose families have been here a while have either lost or given-up their ethnicity, race becomes the baseline lens thru which Americans see each other, sadly.
Very few African-Americans are those ethnicities. I know this because their primary language is one of the American English dialects, and not Hausa, Yoruba or Igbo, and they are mostly not able to distinguish which African nation they primarily descend from, but even if they do, they certainly don’t have cultural continuity with them.
White supremacy is a real thing, and is about so much more than just slavery.
…would be slaveholding Americans, who were not all English.
…and yet you don’t get called a “wetback” like some Americans whose ancestors were there before the English even landed…
Again, Whiteness is so much more than just slaveholding, and those 3rd generation Bulgarians (hell, fresh-off-the-plane Bulgarians) happily, or unthinkingly, partake in its privileges (such as being able to get off that plane in the first place). Seems fair they should also have to partake in its reputation as well.
Not just African, of course. There’s a substantial European component, as well as a very small Native American component, to the African-American genepool.
That lets an awful lot of French and Spanish off the hook…
Not really. South African Blacks were never enslaved, and have always had cultural continuity. It’s a very big difference.
The closest analogue to the African-American experience in South Africa is actually my pan-ethnic group, the Coloureds. But Coloureds generally didn’t suffer quite as much under Apartheid as Blacks did.
It’s just not a parallel experience. Caribbean experiences are much, much closer, I’m sure.
That doesn’t make it any better. Call it anything you want and it’s a means of judging people by association with others. Speaking the same language, wearing the same clothes, dancing the same dance are all fine ways to categorize people until you think it makes them fundamentally different which is always what results.
True, but some groups of people have been benefited overall by the legacy of those actions while others have been harmed by it. That’s a distinction worth noting, and LSLGuy is right that the hereditary beneficiaries of the US slavery system and the white-supremacist culture associated with it are by no means limited to white descendants of Anglo-American enslavers.
You can make general distinctions regarding arbitrary groups as much as you like but basing your treatment or view of individuals on those distinctions is a singularly bad idea.
That’s a pathway to asserting the primacy of identity politics in human affairs and I don’t think that has ever worked out well.
And I’m not suggesting anyone has but we should be on the look out for it. The concept of group generational guilt is a dreadful place to start and leads nowhere good.
I’ll assume LSLGuy didn’t actually quite mean what they said.
Well, I cannot speak for LSLGuy, but I for one didn’t interpret his remark as meaning that anybody actually should be trying to make anybody else experience feelings of guilt over long-ago injustices committed by either their own ancestors, or people who were lumped into the same general racial category as their ancestors.
As individuals, though, it behooves us all to pay some attention to the question of which long-ago injustices we have benefited from, although nobody’s required to feel personally guilty about it.
is me asserting that the OP believes that garbage and the OP wants to assign blame to current humans by group, and to provide exoneration to other current groups by group. IMO he just doesn’t much like which default groupings Americans use now. Mostly because IMO his group gets lumped in with the baddies and he doesn’t think he should be so labeled.
Which I went on to say was pure nonsense unsupported by facts.
Broadly speaking I see two approaches to race / ethnicity / racism.
One approach, advanced here by @TriPolar as an exemplar, is that the slope to racism is so extremely slippery that we must put on blinders and force ourselves to believe there are no groups whatsoever. The world is simply 9 billion individuals. The instant you put two individuals into a group, you’re inevitably doomed to label them inferior or superior. Which, as @MrDibble says, is the wrong part.
The other approach, as advanced by @Novelty_Bobble as an exemplar, is that groups are real, but are very fuzzy-bordered and overlapping. And treatment of any human by group is inherently wrong and must simply be avoided. Which is readily doable given the will to do so. Which will many people evidently lack.
At least I think that’s what they’re saying. And I mean to imply no criticism of either position.
Two very different approaches to avoiding the agreed-upon bad results we see in the world.
I appreciate the clarification but I confess I didn’t get from the OP that they were seeking to actually apportion blame to the correct modern-day ethnic group. They did seem to be critical of the clumsy apportioning of blame to the very broad groupings typically used but the latter position doesn’t necessarily mean they are in favour of the former. I could be wrong and I’m sure they can clarify.
That’s a pretty fair approximation and I appreciate you stating it like this, but I’d also stress that treating people as an individual first and foremost is absolutely the right way to navigate the world.
My own views are similar to yours in that treatment of individuals as individuals is the only right way to do things.
Where we may part company is in how much we believe that the widespread failure of our fellow humans to actually do that is an addressable problem for government. Or for other social power centers like large businesses, media, celebrities, etc.
Can we educate our way out of this? Can we legislate our way out of this? Where there is informal emergent group-based discrimination occurring bottom up, can we address it top down? Or are those efforts all doomed to failure and side effects worse than the problem itself?
Through regulation, Governments can certainly lay the foundations for an equal society and so limit to what extent those failures can be expressed. I don’t think they can force attitudinal change though and they are only going to be given the mandate to pass such laws if society is already bending in that way.
Oh good god no. Save us from that.
That, combined with the passage of time and natural wastage of outdated views is probably the only way to get lasting change. It isn’t quick.
Ethnicities or any grouping may be based on fundamental differences in behavior or genetics, but that doesn’t make them fundamentally different types of people. It’s not simply a matter of inferiority or superiority, the emphasis on those differences combined with the racist oriented mentality of the world leaves people believing those are fundamental differences in the people at a very deep level. Almost everybody believes their are significant genetic differences between many groupings of people when there really are not. Even the people who say they understand that can’t help the way racism has infected culture in language, in laws, tradition, the arts, and every aspect of life.
The answer to this is education and awareness. People need to learn that the only actual commonality of groupings relates to behavior which is not fundamentally tied to claimed ethnicity. French speaking people have a language in common. Perhaps also some similarity in cultural and educational background but not across all French speaking people. Anyone could learn to speak French in theory so anyone could be culturally French speaking, so it can’t be based on fundamental differences in the people. Anyone could be raised in northern Europe but that doesn’t make them automatically a member of the Caucasian ethnicity, which means very little considering the huge group of people it includes, and still nothing significant if narrowed to a smaller group.
Not exactly what I said. See above. Yes it is a problem, but blinders are the cause of the problem, not the solution. We have to recognize that behavior is an individual attribute not an inherent quality of artificially defined groups.
I didn’t say they were different types of people. But they are different. Different in some combination of language, ancestry, history and culture. These aren’t necessarily fundamental, but they are significant. They are meaningful to the members of an ethnicity.
Ethnicity doesn’t have to have anything to do with genetic differences. My ethnicity encompasses everything from pure Khoekhoen African indigenes to pure Indonesian-originated Asians, with many kinds of combinations thrown in between - White+Black, Indian+White+Black, Black+East Asian - there is admitedly a paucity of Native Americans and Polynesians in there, but that’s purely for lack of opportunity, I’m sure.
Ethnicities can be nothing but groupings of behaviour. They frequently aren’t, but that’s a failing of those groupings, not the concept itself.
I know this - my mother was of purely “White” European descent, but was completely assimilated into Coloured ethnicity.
I’ve never come across Caucasian (as a synonym for European) referred to as an ethnicity. It’s a race classification.