White America Has Lost Its Mind

[antonlavey]

Originally Posted by Daedalus Kalais


Two more things: I'm not typing cliffnotes, and I love all ya'll.

Love you too

  

 

[shaunhillftw49]

^Get that myspace-like comment circa 2002 image outta here

 

[antonlavey]

Originally Posted by ShaunHillFTW49

^Get that myspace-like comment circa 2002 image outta here

Nah, but it doesn't have the 12 year old girl on myspace-esque sparkles and rainbows on it. 

  

 

[wisepharoah]

Never mentioned 2012.................. I don't even believe in the world "ending". My statement about America was based off of the cyclic rise and falls of civilizations. Its clear as day that this country is on the decline and that is socially and economically. Everyone has this believe that America will be the cream of the crop forever which is completely false and that status is deterioating now. I can talk in depth about socio-economics, s.p. automation etc but I don't feel like it because I'm typing on my phone 95% of the time I'm on this site.

 

[antonlavey]

Originally Posted by WISEPHAROAH

Never mentioned 2012.................. I don't even believe in the world "ending". My statement about America was based off of the cyclic rise and falls of civilizations. Its clear as day that this country is on the decline and that is socially and economically. Everyone has this believe that America will be the cream of the crop forever which is completely false and that status is deterioating now. I can talk in depth about socio-economics, s.p. automation etc but I don't feel like it because I'm typing on my phone 95% of the time I'm on this site.

Yep, history repeats itself. The question is who the next a-hole to exert their dominance and imperialism will be. That's if humanity even makes it that far. We don't know the future for sure, but we can make predictions based on the cyclical nature of history. This civilization that the many others that preceded it will fall.
  

 

[teamjordan79]

Originally Posted by AntonLaVey

Originally Posted by WISEPHAROAH

Never mentioned 2012.................. I don't even believe in the world "ending". My statement about America was based off of the cyclic rise and falls of civilizations. Its clear as day that this country is on the decline and that is socially and economically. Everyone has this believe that America will be the cream of the crop forever which is completely false and that status is deterioating now. I can talk in depth about socio-economics, s.p. automation etc but I don't feel like it because I'm typing on my phone 95% of the time I'm on this site.

Yep, history repeats itself. The question is who the next a-hole to exert their dominance and imperialism will be. That's if humanity even makes it that far. We don't know the future for sure, but we can make predictions based on the cyclical nature of history. This civilization that the many others that preceded it will fall.
  

America isn't even the first "democracy" in the western hemisphere for people that want to call it that. However, I think the next "a-hole" in global dominance will be either an international body of organized nations or some type of financial/business corporation with the way things are going. Either way it is indeed cyclical because that's natural law. 

 

[daedalus kalais]

Originally Posted by AntonLaVey

Originally Posted by Daedalus Kalais


Two more things: I'm not typing cliffnotes, and I love all ya'll.

Love you too

  

classic Winnie the Pooh

  

 

[noblekane]

Originally Posted by ooIRON MANoo

I usually don't do this, but I'm going to blow this *#%+ up:

You guys are actually entertaining and responding to what Nat Turner is throwing at you!

If you guys can't see it from his asinine post in this thread, he is a racist bigot and a grade A troll.

Mods should lock this *#%+ up and ban this guy.

you speak the truth!

 

[crobers 78]

SunDOOBIE wrote:

---

The laughing at the end can be perceived childish and at same time you do not know what was mumbled amongst the worker and the others at counter to initiate the laughter to be honest. What Ido know is that this situation or perceived situation is a lot better than a Caucasian either ignoring you(Negro)like you did not even ask a question or laughing directly in your face (not after you have left the store) whichstilloccurs and is highly probable. This is also another reason why other races cannot truly relate to Negroes in this regard because if this happened to the average person, it's not a big deal. It's not like the person who left the store looking for a job can hear the giggling.

 

[noblekane]

^forget to sign out of ur back up name huh?

 

[antonlavey]

Originally Posted by NobleKane

^forget to sign out of ur back up name huh?

  

 

[manglor]

Originally Posted by AntonLaVey

Originally Posted by NobleKane

^forget to sign out of ur back up name huh?

  

  

 

[crobers 78]

With all this negativity in this thread and so many folks referring to others in simplistic terms as 'colors' black n white will keep you trapped in this Third Density. Realize that Spirits do not have one color such as a 'black' or 'white' but we consist of numerous Colors/Auras. Besides what do you consider a 'black' person...what really is a 'black' person? Is it a struggle, a look, a nose, lips, hair, a walk, an action, choice words, etc etc? If it is any of these (which i can bet 99% will say it is) then it's not a color but an ideology which negates the whole purpose of subjecting a group of people to a 'color'. Line up some dark/brown skinned Polynesians, Somoans, so called 'blacks', Indians, Africans, Cubans, Haitians (you should get my point by now) all together with duck tape on their mouthes so they cannot speak(language/accent/dialect) and tell me how you would identify who is 'black' and who is not? Thisi is the infamous question. Your answer will have NOTHING to do with a color but EVERYTHING to do with a prejudice or ideology which should illustrate to you that referring to someone as a color such as 'black' is erroneous and simpleminded.

All these so called manifested issues/divisions are illusions to keep you from realizing your true selves. At some point we all (Spirits on this physical journey) need to rise up beyond these issues/illusions to our higher selves.

 

[nako xl]

Originally Posted by crobers 78

SunDOOBIE wrote:

---

The laughing at the end can be perceived childish and at same time you do not know what was mumbled�amongst the worker and the others at counter to initiate the laughter to be honest. What I�do know is that this situation or perceived situation is a lot better than a Caucasian either ignoring you�(Negro)�like you did not even ask a question or laughing directly in your face (not after you have left the store) which�still�occurs and is highly probable. This is also another reason why other races cannot truly relate to Negroes in this regard because if this happened to the average person, it's not a big deal. It's not like the person who left the store looking for a job can hear the giggling.
��
So YOU'RE Nat Turner...

 

[manglor]

Nako XL wrote:

---

Originally Posted by crobers 78

SunDOOBIE wrote:

---

The laughing at the end can be perceived childish and at same time you do not know what was mumbled�amongst the worker and the others at counter to initiate the laughter to be honest. What I�do know is that this situation or perceived situation is a lot better than a Caucasian either ignoring you�(Negro)�like you did not even ask a question or laughing directly in your face (not after you have left the store) which�still�occurs and is highly probable. This is also another reason why other races cannot truly relate to Negroes in this regard because if this happened to the average person, it's not a big deal. It's not like the person who left the store looking for a job can hear the giggling.
��
So YOU'RE Nat Turner...



No he's�Coach Hubie.

Wait...

��
If you forum search his backup name you can clearly see it's the same dude but flipping details all multiple personality style.
Uses the same basics i.e. calling people his "cats" same way he has for years.

http://niketalk.yuku.com/reply/9593561#reply-9593561

He even co-signs HIMSELF.

"btw, i hear you Nat"

 

[antonlavey]

^^^SHAMELESS

 

[rashi]

Originally Posted by Manglor

Nako XL wrote:

---

Originally Posted by crobers 78

SunDOOBIE wrote:

---

The laughing at the end can be perceived childish and at same time you do not know what was mumbled�amongst the worker and the others at counter to initiate the laughter to be honest. What I�do know is that this situation or perceived situation is a lot better than a Caucasian either ignoring you�(Negro)�like you did not even ask a question or laughing directly in your face (not after you have left the store) which�still�occurs and is highly probable. This is also another reason why other races cannot truly relate to Negroes in this regard because if this happened to the average person, it's not a big deal. It's not like the person who left the store looking for a job can hear the giggling.
��

So YOU'RE Nat Turner...



No he's�Coach Hubie.

Wait...

��
If you forum search his backup name you can clearly see it's the same dude but flipping details all multiple personality style.
Uses the same basics i.e. calling people his "cats" same way he has for years.

http://niketalk.yuku.com/reply/9593561#reply-9593561

He even co-signs HIMSELF.

"btw, i hear you Nat"

 

[young br3ad]

Originally Posted by Nat Turner

AntonLaVey wrote:

---

Originally Posted by Nat Turner

AntonLaVey wrote:

---

Oh so a white guy, who hangs out with black people....and listens to rap music, and acts "stereotypically black" deserves to get beat up? Hmm


What about the average white people ("non-poser"), who enjoy white culture as much as black culture/music etc. Do they deserve to get beat up as well?

 

I know plenty of asians who embrace hip hop culture, do they deserve the same fate?



  

Are you saying that you don't find people who behave in a stereotypical behaviour to be insulting? Depending on the level of sophistication, people will only respond to being insulted, in the manner they best know how.

For some, a buffoon will get stomped. For others, perhaps, another route will be taken. I don't take one side over the other, I respect the rules of where I am.

As far as someone simply appreciating a certain culture, that is all good. Just as long as you respect where it comes from, not acting as if you know what it is really about, suddenly becoming an expert.

If I study Asian martial arts, then going to Asia, I am not going to walk around like I am Bruce Lee.  



  

An expert? Many black people themselves in the younger and some in the older generation know nothing about hip hop/black music either That's your opinion. My hip hop and blues professors in college were white and he was very "experts" in their fields.

So a bufoon, imitating another bufoon needs to get stomped. And the original bufoon gets a pass? So acting like and listening to gucci mane is ok for the black youth but not for white people. Come on son. If our black youth are going to take that L, I have no problems with white kids joining in as an equalizer.
First off, I do not speak this way. The "son" thing is exactly the stereotypical behaviour that we are addressing.

That said, Black people are NOT monolithic. This makes the hip hop archetype even more insulting to those who do not identify with it. We as black people have different authenticity's. For the brother who only knows the 'hood, what he listens to, reads, and then socializes with, makes him authentic to his environment.

This does not make him a buffoon, as people only do, what they know how to do. The person who'll imitate him, then thinking that he is being "real", is the buffoon.

I am not going to address what you've said about your "white" hip hop and blues professors...as I've never had to learn about who I am, and what my culture has produced, from anyone who is "white", nor could they ever attempt to tell me about it either.
 

  
So what about a white person that only knows the hood? Who was raised around black people. Is he not "authentic"? Or is he just a "poser" who "acts black"?

  

 

[nat turner]

I am quite sure that the mods are paying attention to this thread, especially with the sensitive nature of the thread. For someone to suggest that I am using multiple names, really is pathetic. Manglor isn't a mod, and Noblekane is simply an idiot. Then to suggest that the proof is in slang terminology, a term that has been around since the 1920's, really shows how far some will actually reach here on Niketalk, to maintain their sense of security.

That said, Black people cannot be racists.

We can be prejudiced, but this racist system is built to support White supremacy. There is no system to support the thought of Black supremacy, nor was there anything used to prove a black supreme being, as was done for whites. So a reverse racist system, one that keeps non blacks down, does not exist.
The Bible was used to solidify this theory of white supremacy, 

http:// [h1]Curse of Ham[/h1]
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jump to: navigation, search

[img]http://upload.wikimedia.org/wi...ov_noah.jpg/200px-Ksenophontov_noah.jpg[/img]
[img]http://bits.wikimedia.org/skins-1.5/common/images/magnify-clip.png[/img]
Noah damning Ham, 19th century painting by Ivan Stepanovitch Ksenofontov

The Curse of Ham (also called the curse of Canaan) refers to a story in the Book of Genesis 9:20-27 in which Ham's father Noah places a curse upon Ham's son Canaan, after Ham "saw his father's nakedness" because of drunkenness in Noah's tent.

Some Biblical scholars see the "curse of Canaan" story as an early Hebrew rationalization for Israel's conquest and enslavement of the Canaanites, who were presumed to descend from Canaan.[sup][1][/sup]

The "curse of Ham" had been used by some members of Abrahamic religions to justify racism and the enslavement of people of Black African ancestry, who were believed to be descendants of Ham.[sup][2][/sup][sup][3][/sup] They were often called Hamites and were believed to have descended through Canaan or his older brothers. Proponents of slavery in the US increasingly invoked the 'curse of Ham' in the US during the 19th century, as a response to the growing abolitionist movement.[sup][4][/sup]
_____

so since this is a christian nation, how is it that Black people, as supposedly ordained by "god" the ones afflicted with power over whites?
  
Black people cannot be racists, but those of you who denounce what you have in common with Black people, namingly the color of your skin, your hue, then siding with those who represent White racist theory, can indeed be racists. You then feel entitled, duue to NOT being Black.

If you are Christian, it's even easier.

What the responses toward me proves, is that the village voice article is very much on point. 

 

[b smooth 202]

It's a beautiful morning....our time is comin

 

[im not you]

Nat Turner 

 

[nat turner]

Let's add a bit more for those who sit comfortably in denial,

Monday, Mar 22, 2010 20:20 ET [h1]"The History of White People": What it means to be white[/h1]
[h2]How bad science and American culture shaped a racial identity -- and why America can't stop obsessing over it [/h2]
By Thomas Rogers

In 2000, the Human Genome Project finally answered one of the most fundamental questions about race: What, if anything, is the genetic difference between people of different skin colors -- black, white, Hispanic, Asian? The answer: nearly nothing. As it turns out, we all share 99.99 percent of the same genetic code -- no matter our race -- a fact that, geneticist J. Craig Venter claimed, proves that race is a "social concept, not a scientific one."

But as Nell Irvin Painter explains in "The History of White People,"

her exhaustive and fascinating new look at the history of the idea of the white race, it's a social construct that goes back much further and is much more complicated than many people think. In the book, Painter, a professor of American history at Princeton, chronicles the evolution of the concept of whiteness from ancient Rome -- where, she points out, the slaves were largely white -- to the 21st century America and explains how, in the era of Obama, our once-narrow concept of whiteness has become at once far broader and less important than ever before.

The elevation of some ethnic groups -- Germans and Scandinavians -- as "whiter" than others can largely be tied to a small number of scientists who shared an obsession with both measuring people's skulls and pinpointing the world's "most beautiful" people. As Painter writes, a number of social and demographic upheavals (which she dubs "enlargements of whiteness") over the last two centuries have gradually thrown many of those assumptions into question.

Salon spoke to Painter over the phone, about the meaning of "Caucasian," America's obsession with racial difference, and the real meaning of Stuff White People Like.

Why write a history of whiteness?

We've spent so much time in this country on various racial issues. It's our national sport, in a way, and it's always as if there is only one side: nonwhite. But this is one of those binaries where you need both sides to make sense of it.

I want to point out that this book is not about white nationalism. It's not about how bad white people are. It's about how we have thought about people now considered white. I used to encounter reservations about the project, and people would ask, "Why are you doing this as a black person?" People hear it's a book called "The History of White People" and that it's by a black author, and make assumptions.

We've all seen the word "Caucasian," usually when we're filling out forms, but most of us have no idea where it came from. What is a Caucasian, exactly?

It comes from Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, who applied it to a large swatch of humanity on the 11th of April, 1795, with the publications of the third edition of his dissertation, in Latin, about the varieties of mankind. He used the word "Caucasian" because he wanted to underscore the beauty of white-skinned people. He thought they were the most beautiful. He located these people in Europe, east into Russia, south into India and southwest into North Africa. The Caucasus is a border area between Europe and Asia and it's an area freighted with mythological baggage -- Jason and the Argonauts, Mount Ararat.

The Human Genome Project found that there's no genetic basis for racial difference. Is this the end of race?

This is nothing new. As long as there's been a discussion about race, there's been a disagreement about how many there were and how to make the distinction -- shade, color, height, where the hole in your skull is for your spine to go in, shape of the hand. There have been all these different criteria and nobody ever agreed. Even somebody like Blumenbach called them varieties. Varieties shade imperceptibly into one another. Different experts differed on how many varieties there are. Some people said two -- beautiful and ugly. Blumenbach said six.

But just as there's been the discovery that race is a concept with no scientific meaning, there's also been a cultural movement to rerace knowledge. When the genome was completed in 2000, the headlines were, "Race is meaningless," "We're all the same," and then three to four years later there came, "I am a race-profiling doctor." There was heart medicine marketed to black people. What's really interesting about finding race in the genome in terms of diseases is that diseases that have been discovered so far with a strong genomic cause are among white people, not black people.

Why do Americans have this persistent desire to create racial difference out of nothing?

Our culture was founded in 1789 right about the same moment that Blumenbach was inventing Caucasians -- this moment of racialization. Some people say race is in our national DNA so that we just can't get away from it. I don't know if we ever will.

As you write in the book, there were four great expansions of what America considers whiteness. What were they?

The first three are expansions of whiteness, because the assumption was that to be American you first had to be white. The first occurred in the Jacksonian era, in the first half of the 19th century, when citizenship criteria were changed from wealth to race. That's when adult males of any income were allowed to vote, as long as they were considered white. Things changed in the 20th century, when different groups came in as immigrants and people of Irish background were incorporated into the notion of American whiteness. The third great enlargement took place in the mid-20th century, starting with the New Deal in the 1930s and WWII. Politics and the mobilization of Americans to fight the Great Depression and to fight the Second World War opened up American-ness to people who had been considered alien races and their children and grandchildren.

We're currently in the midst of the fourth great expansion, which is an expansion of the idea of the American -- that an American doesn't necessarily need to be white to be considered American. "American" now includes Hispanics, for example, and people who identify themselves as multiracial. Because of this sort of great enlargement, we can no longer sum up the American as one person or the white man as one person.

What do you think is behind this latest change -- "American" no longer meaning "white"?

The two big reasons are immigration and the opening of the American economy after the Civil Rights Act. A huge proportion of Americans are now immigrants, and immigrants don't necessarily think in black-and-white terms. Less than half of immigrants identified themselves as white in the 2000. Now sometimes people who are white are identified by race. And in writing about the tea parties, for example, journalists will now often note that the crowd is mostly white, whereas before I don't think that would have been pointed out; [it would have been assumed].

How do you think the election of Barack Obama plays into this?

Whenever you tinker with one part of the equation, it affects the rest of it. I think to the extent that we realize that Obama has a white mother and a white family,  this alerted us to the existence of people with parents from different backgrounds. People have been migrating and fornicating forever, so there's no such thing as a pure person, and I think Obama's background just puts that front and center in our attention.

It's conspicuous that many of the scientists who were trying to determine the "most superior" white race were obsessed with figuring out which race was best-looking.

Physical beauty and race were thought to be something physical and permanent that can be passed down generation to generation, but if you look at magazines from the 1960s or the 1920s, you see that ideas of beauty change. What I find so fascinating is that if you look carefully at the faces of many models today, they would not have passed as beautiful in the middle of the 20th century. Now we look more at bodies. We like bodies to be very thin -- like thinness is beauty.

Every few years there also seems to be a new fashionable ethnicity for runway models -- one year it'll be Russians, the next it's Brazilians.

It's called fashion for a reason. Popular culture is a many-splendored thing. I was in New York recently, where I saw a great big billboard of Kimora Lee Simmons, who is a brown person who is an embodiment of beauty. Then if you look at a fashion magazine, you'll see a parade of white people selling things. You can find it all.

In the 1960s you couldn't find that kind of array [of people], partly because there weren't so many outlets, but also because these markets were not seen as big. As brown-skinned people got more money to buy things, what they wanted to see began appearing in advertising. It's all bound up with advertising and marketing and purchasing.

One of the biggest whiteness-themed pop culture sensations of the past few years was the blog Stuff White People Like. Many people thought it was racist. What did you think?

I was a professor at Princeton for a long time -- and I did my Ph.D. at Harvard -- and I circulated among wealthy people. So much of what is considered "what white people like" is what middle-class people like. I live in New Jersey and we have middle-class people of every background and we all like those same things. It's very common, particularly in the 20th century, to make the equation that white means middle-class. It's a lazy equation, and as time goes by it becomes lazier and lazier

• Thomas Rogers is Salon's Deputy Arts Editor. More Thomas Rogers

____

Read.

 

[scarsorscabs]

Originally Posted by ScarsOrScabs

Originally Posted by Nat Turner


On the contrary, you can, and here is how,

You can denounce what you have in common with Black people, then embracing the theory that is presented by Whites, as stated by Tim Wise in the video. This means that you have embraced a racist belief in a racist system, in order to get ahead of those who are intentionally being left behind.

You'd feel entitled, due to not being "Black".

How's that?
 

So, if someone who is in a minority group in the US, I'll just use Asians or Hispanics as an example, feel that they are better than black people and hate them with every fiber of their being, does that make them racist?  If a black person in the US feels the same way about Hispanics, are they racist?  I'm not sure how else to refer to them according to your strict guidelines, since I don't feel particularly comfortable actually calling someone brown (I'd like to know what groups "brown" includes and if you'd actually refer to them as that) or yellow, red, etc.

I asked once earlier, where does your definition of racism come from? 

Originally Posted by ScarsOrScabs

Originally Posted by Nat Turner

Originally Posted by AntonLaVey

Nat Turner if the races in that story were reversed how would you feel? Simple question, I want a simple straightfoward answer.  

If I'd try to dress like and then join the Klan, I'd be a fool.

There is a reason that one should avoid stereotypical behaviours, as it is insulting to those who know better.

I may be reading that wrong and if so, I'll admit it....but did you just equate a white man dressing in a "stereotypical" manner (I assume you mean black or hip-hop, but that might be my racism showing through...SARCASM) to you, as a black man dressing like and joining the Klan?  Really?  How warped is your thought process in regards to race?  That's mostly a rhetorical question since the majority (see what I did there?) of the people in this thread already have a good idea of the answer to that.

And anyway, where in the article does it state the guy that got beat up was either dressing or acting stereotypically, aside from blaring a rap song on his boombox?

Since you're apparently awake and seem to conveniently be avoiding certain questions, I've re-posted them.

 

[nat turner]

ScarsOrScabs wrote:

---

ScarsOrScabs wrote:

---

Originally Posted by Nat Turner


On the contrary, you can, and here is how,

You can denounce what you have in common with Black people, then embracing the theory that is presented by Whites, as stated by Tim Wise in the video. This means that you have embraced a racist belief in a racist system, in order to get ahead of those who are intentionally being left behind.

You'd feel entitled, due to not being "Black".

How's that?
 

So, if someone who is in a minority group in the US, I'll just use Asians or Hispanics as an example, feel that they are better than black people and hate them with every fiber of their being, does that make them racist?  If a black person in the US feels the same way about Hispanics, are they racist?  I'm not sure how else to refer to them according to your strict guidelines, since I don't feel particularly comfortable actually calling someone brown (I'd like to know what groups "brown" includes and if you'd actually refer to them as that) or yellow, red, etc.

I asked once earlier, where does your definition of racism come from? 

ScarsOrScabs wrote:

---

Originally Posted by Nat Turner

AntonLaVey wrote:

---

Nat Turner if the races in that story were reversed how would you feel? Simple question, I want a simple straightfoward answer.  

If I'd try to dress like and then join the Klan, I'd be a fool.

There is a reason that one should avoid stereotypical behaviours, as it is insulting to those who know better.

I may be reading that wrong and if so, I'll admit it....but did you just equate a white man dressing in a "stereotypical" manner (I assume you mean black or hip-hop, but that might be my racism showing through...SARCASM) to you, as a black man dressing like and joining the Klan?  Really?  How warped is your thought process in regards to race?  That's mostly a rhetorical question since the majority (see what I did there?) of the people in this thread already have a good idea of the answer to that.

And anyway, where in the article does it state the guy that got beat up was either dressing or acting stereotypically, aside from blaring a rap song on his boombox?


Since you're apparently awake and seem to conveniently be avoiding certain questions, I've re-posted them.



  I haven't avoided anything. As I have answered before, behaving in a stereotypical fashion, can be insulting to the culture that you are imitating.

Are all white people a part of that Klan? No. However, acting as if they are, is believing in that stereotype. It is that same thing as someone coming to me, then speaking like Stepin Fetchit, as if this is how I communicate.

In regard to the article, I was giving an example on perception and how his "act" may have been perceived.

What part of that is so hard for you to comprehend, along with what being a racist actually means? 

I'll post this again for you,

[h1]Curse of Ham[/h1]
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jump to: navigation, search

[img]http://upload.wikimedia.org/wi...ov_noah.jpg/200px-Ksenophontov_noah.jpg[/img]
[img]http://bits.wikimedia.org/skins-1.5/common/images/magnify-clip.png[/img]
Noah damning Ham, 19th century painting by Ivan Stepanovitch Ksenofontov

The Curse of Ham (also called the curse of Canaan) refers to a story in the Book of Genesis 9:20-27 in which Ham's father Noah places a curse upon Ham's son Canaan, after Ham "saw his father's nakedness" because of drunkenness in Noah's tent.

Some Biblical scholars see the "curse of Canaan" story as an early Hebrew rationalization for Israel's conquest and enslavement of the Canaanites, who were presumed to descend from Canaan.[sup][1][/sup]

The "curse of Ham" had been used by some members of Abrahamic religions to justify racism and the enslavement of people of Black African ancestry, who were believed to be descendants of Ham.[sup][2][/sup][sup][3][/sup] They were often called Hamites and were believed to have descended through Canaan or his older brothers. Proponents of slavery in the US increasingly invoked the 'curse of Ham' in the US during the 19th century, as a response to the growing abolitionist movement.[sup][4]

______
[/sup]
Where does it suggest that Black people are the ones who are superior, due to the color of their skin?

Do you read, or do you just respond?



 

 

[nat turner]

Nat Turner wrote:

---

Monday, Mar 22, 2010 20:20 ET [h1]"The History of White People": What it means to be white[/h1]
[h2]How bad science and American culture shaped a racial identity -- and why America can't stop obsessing over it [/h2]
By Thomas Rogers

In 2000, the Human Genome Project finally answered one of the most fundamental questions about race: What, if anything, is the genetic difference between people of different skin colors -- black, white, Hispanic, Asian? The answer: nearly nothing. As it turns out, we all share 99.99 percent of the same genetic code -- no matter our race -- a fact that, geneticist J. Craig Venter claimed, proves that race is a "social concept, not a scientific one."

But as Nell Irvin Painter explains in "The History of White People,"

her exhaustive and fascinating new look at the history of the idea of the white race, it's a social construct that goes back much further and is much more complicated than many people think. In the book, Painter, a professor of American history at Princeton, chronicles the evolution of the concept of whiteness from ancient Rome -- where, she points out, the slaves were largely white -- to the 21st century America and explains how, in the era of Obama, our once-narrow concept of whiteness has become at once far broader and less important than ever before.

The elevation of some ethnic groups -- Germans and Scandinavians -- as "whiter" than others can largely be tied to a small number of scientists who shared an obsession with both measuring people's skulls and pinpointing the world's "most beautiful" people. As Painter writes, a number of social and demographic upheavals (which she dubs "enlargements of whiteness") over the last two centuries have gradually thrown many of those assumptions into question.

Salon spoke to Painter over the phone, about the meaning of "Caucasian," America's obsession with racial difference, and the real meaning of Stuff White People Like.

Why write a history of whiteness?

We've spent so much time in this country on various racial issues. It's our national sport, in a way, and it's always as if there is only one side: nonwhite. But this is one of those binaries where you need both sides to make sense of it.

I want to point out that this book is not about white nationalism. It's not about how bad white people are. It's about how we have thought about people now considered white. I used to encounter reservations about the project, and people would ask, "Why are you doing this as a black person?" People hear it's a book called "The History of White People" and that it's by a black author, and make assumptions.

We've all seen the word "Caucasian," usually when we're filling out forms, but most of us have no idea where it came from. What is a Caucasian, exactly?

It comes from Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, who applied it to a large swatch of humanity on the 11th of April, 1795, with the publications of the third edition of his dissertation, in Latin, about the varieties of mankind. He used the word "Caucasian" because he wanted to underscore the beauty of white-skinned people. He thought they were the most beautiful. He located these people in Europe, east into Russia, south into India and southwest into North Africa. The Caucasus is a border area between Europe and Asia and it's an area freighted with mythological baggage -- Jason and the Argonauts, Mount Ararat.

The Human Genome Project found that there's no genetic basis for racial difference. Is this the end of race?

This is nothing new. As long as there's been a discussion about race, there's been a disagreement about how many there were and how to make the distinction -- shade, color, height, where the hole in your skull is for your spine to go in, shape of the hand. There have been all these different criteria and nobody ever agreed. Even somebody like Blumenbach called them varieties. Varieties shade imperceptibly into one another. Different experts differed on how many varieties there are. Some people said two -- beautiful and ugly. Blumenbach said six.

But just as there's been the discovery that race is a concept with no scientific meaning, there's also been a cultural movement to rerace knowledge. When the genome was completed in 2000, the headlines were, "Race is meaningless," "We're all the same," and then three to four years later there came, "I am a race-profiling doctor." There was heart medicine marketed to black people. What's really interesting about finding race in the genome in terms of diseases is that diseases that have been discovered so far with a strong genomic cause are among white people, not black people.

Why do Americans have this persistent desire to create racial difference out of nothing?

Our culture was founded in 1789 right about the same moment that Blumenbach was inventing Caucasians -- this moment of racialization. Some people say race is in our national DNA so that we just can't get away from it. I don't know if we ever will.

As you write in the book, there were four great expansions of what America considers whiteness. What were they?

The first three are expansions of whiteness, because the assumption was that to be American you first had to be white. The first occurred in the Jacksonian era, in the first half of the 19th century, when citizenship criteria were changed from wealth to race. That's when adult males of any income were allowed to vote, as long as they were considered white. Things changed in the 20th century, when different groups came in as immigrants and people of Irish background were incorporated into the notion of American whiteness. The third great enlargement took place in the mid-20th century, starting with the New Deal in the 1930s and WWII. Politics and the mobilization of Americans to fight the Great Depression and to fight the Second World War opened up American-ness to people who had been considered alien races and their children and grandchildren.

We're currently in the midst of the fourth great expansion, which is an expansion of the idea of the American -- that an American doesn't necessarily need to be white to be considered American. "American" now includes Hispanics, for example, and people who identify themselves as multiracial. Because of this sort of great enlargement, we can no longer sum up the American as one person or the white man as one person.

What do you think is behind this latest change -- "American" no longer meaning "white"?

The two big reasons are immigration and the opening of the American economy after the Civil Rights Act. A huge proportion of Americans are now immigrants, and immigrants don't necessarily think in black-and-white terms. Less than half of immigrants identified themselves as white in the 2000. Now sometimes people who are white are identified by race. And in writing about the tea parties, for example, journalists will now often note that the crowd is mostly white, whereas before I don't think that would have been pointed out; [it would have been assumed].

How do you think the election of Barack Obama plays into this?

Whenever you tinker with one part of the equation, it affects the rest of it. I think to the extent that we realize that Obama has a white mother and a white family,  this alerted us to the existence of people with parents from different backgrounds. People have been migrating and fornicating forever, so there's no such thing as a pure person, and I think Obama's background just puts that front and center in our attention.

It's conspicuous that many of the scientists who were trying to determine the "most superior" white race were obsessed with figuring out which race was best-looking.

Physical beauty and race were thought to be something physical and permanent that can be passed down generation to generation, but if you look at magazines from the 1960s or the 1920s, you see that ideas of beauty change. What I find so fascinating is that if you look carefully at the faces of many models today, they would not have passed as beautiful in the middle of the 20th century. Now we look more at bodies. We like bodies to be very thin -- like thinness is beauty.

Every few years there also seems to be a new fashionable ethnicity for runway models -- one year it'll be Russians, the next it's Brazilians.

It's called fashion for a reason. Popular culture is a many-splendored thing. I was in New York recently, where I saw a great big billboard of Kimora Lee Simmons, who is a brown person who is an embodiment of beauty. Then if you look at a fashion magazine, you'll see a parade of white people selling things. You can find it all.

In the 1960s you couldn't find that kind of array [of people], partly because there weren't so many outlets, but also because these markets were not seen as big. As brown-skinned people got more money to buy things, what they wanted to see began appearing in advertising. It's all bound up with advertising and marketing and purchasing.

One of the biggest whiteness-themed pop culture sensations of the past few years was the blog Stuff White People Like. Many people thought it was racist. What did you think?

I was a professor at Princeton for a long time -- and I did my Ph.D. at Harvard -- and I circulated among wealthy people. So much of what is considered "what white people like" is what middle-class people like. I live in New Jersey and we have middle-class people of every background and we all like those same things. It's very common, particularly in the 20th century, to make the equation that white means middle-class. It's a lazy equation, and as time goes by it becomes lazier and lazier

• Thomas Rogers is Salon's Deputy Arts Editor. More Thomas Rogers

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