reply to post by Dreine
THERE ARE NO "WHITE" PEOPLE.
I'm getting sick of this. THERE ARE NO "WHITE" PEOPLE. The caps are for anger.
White people in the US are not even congruent. We stretch from light- or olive-skinned Latin types whose grandparents immigrated from Portugal or
Italy to Northern Germanic types with dark or light features, to even those pesky Swedes, Finns and Norwegians with their "Asian" tendencies, to the
Slavs with their definite Asian tendencies (how far did the Golden Horde get exactly?). There is no "White" race. There is only a continuum that
starts in Portugal and Ireland (at two points on one extreme end), melds south into North Africa, Southeast into the Arabian Peninsula and the Indian
Subcontinent (yes, they are our relatives by ethnic and cultural comparison) and up and over into the Steppes of Russia where our furthest supposed
"White" people have burial tombs in Western China.
CONTINUUM. This is where black/white thinking has gotten this country. Left/Right, Right/Wrong, Good/Evil and now Black/White. Except no one fits
neatly into these categories. A continuum is normal, not neatly packaged categories. There is no such thing as "race"...it's a fictitious idea
masquerading as some sort of norm. There is
only ethnicity.
Black is an ethnic continuum in the US. If you go to West Africa (where the ancestors of American Black people come from...well, the ancestors of them
that didn't come from Scotch-Irish background), you will find Igbo, Yoruba, Kri, Ewe, and all these other tribes. And they are all slightly
different. If you go to East Africa you will see a vast difference in not only physiognomy (body/facial features) and skin tone, but language, culture
and beliefs. If you go south on the VAST continent of Africa you will find even more differences in the Zulu.
Black people in the US are a group. We call them "Black" because of the saliency of the skin color as opposed to "White" (Again - the neat little
boxes). Black people are a continuum because they are not homogeneous. Some have more European blood, some have less. Some have a line that is higher
in genes from Angola, others from Nigeria or Benin. It's all mixed up. But, as a whole, they have a similar cultural background and speak in a set of
similar dialects that come from a shared history on this continent.
This is why we call them "Black". Not because every dark-skinned person from California to Mozambique is some sort of synecdoche (ie, they are all
representative of the whole) NO...they are all individuals and then they belong to bigger groups based on culture/language or nationality or religion
- sometimes more then one. But there is no absolute "GROUP" anymore than there is an absolute "GROUP" for white people. If you - yes, you, the
person incredulously half-skimming my rant - would take a step back for a minute and see that the world doesn't revolve around your incorrect
assessments, then maybe you would learn something.
Are all of you halfwit self-apologetic, narcissist bigots really this averse to learning about things? Have you heard of anthropology, archeology,
linguistics or genetics. These are empirical facts that can be proven, not some stupid assumption-laden diatribe based on your mental perceptions. No,
you'd rather sit on your assumptions. Then, when the Black lady at the convenience store treats you rude, you don't attribute it to her social
class, it's because she's "Black". But you didn't bother to befriend half a dozen other Black people in the given area who could have easily
shown you more depth to character than the interactions you had with 7-11 lady (or gov't employee lady).
No, you'd rather hear them say "ax" and assume it's a sign of the "Negro's" lack of intelligence, not a dialectal variant that one time even
existed in your Scotch-Irish great-great-great grand-daddies speech. You also don't bother to listen to White people from the South who speak the
same way (and - gasp - still hold prejudices against Black people).
Do yourselves a favor: get off your superiority-complex soap box, step out of your little holier-than-thou bubbles, and learn something before you
spout off hate and (in my opinion) stoke fires that SHOULD NOT be stoked, especially due to ignorance!! I don't know, go take a trip to Brazil,
Dominican Republic, Guyana, Mexico, India or Venezuela and then tell me your little misconceptions about Race haven't changed.